The Wright WINDOWS

Young Chang

It is said that architect Frank Lloyd Wright once thought of

windows as a part of his job that forced him to “cut holes” in his

creations.

But when he started doing what his contemporaries were doing --

creating original stained glass for residential buildings -- that

attitude changed. And in typical Wright fashion, he got artistic.

His windows, called “light screens” for their inspiration from

Japanese shoji screens and for their ability to mesh the outside with

the inside, are anything but stained glass in the cathedral sense.

They are delicate looking, embody his stages as an artist and are as

contemporary in feel as stained glass can be.

They are also hanging on walls and not as part of houses for the

Orange County Museum of Art’s exhibit titled “Light Screens: The

Leaded Glass of Frank Lloyd Wright,” opening today and running

through Jan. 5.

“They were all very modern in their day,” said Julie Sloan,

curator for the exhibit and a stained glass expert in Massachusetts.

“Before Wright, windows looked like the ones from Tiffany’s, from the

1880s. They were colorful, they were definitely representational.”

The Tiffany that Sloan speaks of is Louis Comfort Tiffany, the son

of the well-known jewelry family.

But Wright’s windows, made between 1885 and 1923, are abstract and

feature a lot of clear glass. Some are a mix of Japanese screens and

prairie motifs, a mix of Japanese screens and confetti, a mix of

Japanese screens and subtle glass pieces of green and purple to evoke

nature.

“He was one of the biggest dealers in Japanese prints and he was

deeply interested and very knowledgeable about Japanese art,” Sloan

said. “He was really quite fanatic about it, though he never admitted

that Japanese art was of any influence to him.”

The exhibit is divided into three sections. The first is titled “A

Vocabulary of Form” and chronicles the items and styles that

influenced Wright. In one glass window are German educational toys

his mother bought for him when he was little. They taught him about

lines, form and patterns.

The section also shows Wright’s early windows, made for somewhat

Victorian looking houses. He uses what are called “curvilinear

forms.”

The second section is titled “A Language of Patterns.” The windows

here show deep traces of Wright’s prairie style and his use of

“rectilinear” forms. In his prairie style, the architect used a lot

of autumnal colors, asymmetrical and chevron shapes and sloping

roofs.

“It was supposed to, in some way, echo the rolling hills of the

prairies ... and it has an influence of nature,” said Sarah Vure,

curator at the Orange County Museum of Art, of Wright’s windows from

this period. “He wanted it to feel like you were inside a prairie

house looking out of the window.”

One of the architect’s most famous is a prototype of the windows

made for the Susan Lawrence Dana House in Illinois. This piece has a

“sumac” design, resembling the pattern of a plant.

The windows in the exhibit are ones that had previously been in

homes that have been demolished or are currently in renovation.

The “Tree of Life” window, made for the Darwin D. Martin house in

New York, has three repeated designs, a lot of the chevron pattern

and a lot of different shades of yellow and green. Iridescent glass

was used to illustrate gold leaves.

“People thought it looked like trees,” Vure said.

The third section is “A New Poetics,” a collection of work which

shows Wright’s change in style.

“In 1909, Wright went to Europe and saw modern architecture by

contemporaries,” Vure said. “And he also saw modern art.”

The windows from this stage of his life are more modern, playful

and festive in its colors and confetti-like shapes. This part

includes a window from the Hollyhock House in Los Angeles.

“These windows are considered some of the most innovative of

Wright’s,” Vure said.

Sloan noted that none of the architect’s windows were meant to be

seen alone.

“He did not ever conceive of a window as being autonomous,” she

said. “It was always part of a series and always specific to the

house they were designed for.”