Frank Lloyd Wright’s Career as a Graphic Artist

In addition to architecture, landscape architecture and furniture design, Frank Lloyd Wright's oeuvre also included innovative graphic work. This is the first in a series of 2 short articles on this career. I hope that it will encourage you to do further reading and research in this area.

Graycliffians are aware that funds were low for Wright in the mid 1920's. In 1927 Frank Lloyd Wright and his third wife, Olgivana, were  low on funds and living in New York City with Wright's sister Maginel. Maginel was working providing covers and illustrations for magazines and had some contacts. 

Liberty magazine had published an article previously for Wright,  and now he saw an opportunity for to provide designs for its covers. 

Wright  designed a series of 12 festive covers for Liberty Magazine.  Unfortunately, Liberty Magazine turned them all down, and they were not published. They were a a radical departure from the figurative norm of the time. Figurative drawings, such as those by Norman Rockwell were popular during this decade in American magazine publishing.

The acceptance of abstraction in graphic design had yet to be accepted for magazines, despite the popularity of the Art Deco style.  It was not until the July, 1937 issue of Town & Country that Wright’s design of  "July Fourth" was finally published, for the cover of the magazine.  It was the only one of his designs to grace the cover of a magazine.

In Penny Fowler’s book,  Frank Lloyd Wright , Graphic Artist  she notes that Wright  used basic draftsman's tools, the T square, triangle, and compass to plot the Liberty abstractions on a fundamental grid. This process went back to his early Froebel training, in which "natural" forms were reduced to their underlying geometric structure and arranged on the ever present grid of the kindergarten training. ¹

Looking at the cover of Town and Country for the July 1937 issue, we will go further in this discussion..  In his book, Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, David A.Hanks notes that on the lower left corner of the graphic, it acknowledges the design by Wright.

Hanks goes on to describe The vertical repetition of the American flag, in reverse at the right and conventionally in the center, creates depth in the composition; and lines give the impression of a street within the large overall  design of a flag hanging at an angle.  You can see vertical grid patterns that create emphasis as well as variations onto red, white and blue color scheme." ²

Footnotes:

1)     Frank Lloyd Wright , Graphic Artist , Penny Fowler, Pomegranate Press, 2002;  pg. 80

2)     Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright,  David A. Hanks, Dutton, 1985, pg. 181

The first of two blog posts by Diane Schrenk