Many Masks; A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright
Pedro E. Guerrero (Cover photograph) New York: Da Capo Press, 1998. First Da Capo Press edition [stated]. Presumed First Printing. Trade paperback. 544 pages. Notes. Index. Gill was a friend of Wright's and knew several other members of the family over three generations. Brendan Gill (October 4, 1914 – December 27, 1997) was an American journalist. He wrote for The New Yorker for more than 60 years. Gill also contributed film criticism for Film Comment, wrote about design and architecture for Architectural Digest and wrote fifteen books, including a popular book about his time at the New Yorker magazine. In 1936, St. Clair McKelway, an editor at The New Yorker, hired Gill as a writer.[2] One of the publication's few writers to serve under its first four editors, he wrote more than 1,200 pieces for the magazine. These included Profiles, Talk of the Town features, and scores of reviews of Broadway and Off-Broadway theater productions. As The New Yorker's main architecture critic from 1987 to 1996, Gill was a successor to Lewis Mumford as the author of the long-running "Skyline" column before Paul Goldberger took his place. He was also a regular contributor to Architectural Digest in the 1980s and 1990s. A champion of architectural preservation and other visual arts, Gill joined Jacqueline Kennedy's coalition to preserve and restore New York's Grand Central Terminal. He also chaired the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and authored 15 books, including Here at The New Yorker and the iconoclastic Frank Lloyd Wright biography Many Masks.Outback Steakhouse is about to fill the space on Colesville where Not Your Average Joe’s had been. Java Nation recently opened on Wayne Avenue. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) is often described as the greatest of American architects. His works-among them Taliesin North, Taliesin West, Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax buildings, the Guggenheim Museum--earned him a good measure of his fame, but his flamboyant personal life earned him the rest. Here Brendan Gill, a personal friend of Wright and his family, gives us not only the fullest, fairest, and most entertaining account of Wright to date, but also strips away the many masks the architect tirelessly constructed to fascinate his admirers and mislead his detractors. Enriched by hitherto unpublished letters and 300 photographs and drawings, this definitive biography makes Wright, in all his creativity, crankiness, and zest, fairly leap from its pages. Derived from a Kirkus review: Genius, egotist, mythomaniac, sexual rebel, master of media manipulation, legendary Wright comes alive in all his cantankerous complexity in this respectful but nonetheless bracingly unintimidated biography of "America's greatest architect." Gill's evaluations of the architect's goals, achievements, and shortcomings are rendered all the more convincing by the fact that the author was a friend of Wright's during what Gill calls the "late, sunny period of his life." Born in the Midwest, a son of an ineffectual minister father and an ambitious and quite probably mentally unstable gorgon of a mother, Wright fled to Chicago at an early age. There, thanks to an easygoing attitude toward veracity, he was able to apprentice himself to the renowned Louis Sullivan. From this auspicious beginning, the young man was soon promoting himself as the country's most daringly original architect, a reputation he carefully nurtured throughout his long career. Marriage, six children, and a host of commissions followed, only to be cast away when Wright ran off with the wife of one of his Oak Park, Ill., neighbors. Scandal, whether it involved sexual brigandry or contractual hanky-panky, was to become a regular player in the Wrightian drama. Gill weaves together the strands of his well-researched narrative with breathtaking dexterity. He enlivens his writing with occasional pinpricks of his own: today's art museums, with their "blockbuster" shows and ubiquitous gift counters, are referred to as "Buffalo Bill circuses." Sensitive, yet revealingly iconoclastic, and a delight from cover to cover. Condition: Very good.
Keywords: Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bear Run, PA, Johnson Wax, Prairie Houses, Taliesin Fellowship, Guggenheim Museum, Architecture
ISBN: 0306808722
[Book #85762]
Price: $37.50