THE SHOW TO END ALL SHOWS by Peter Reed, William Kaizen ( 9780870700552 )

Item Details

Title:

THE SHOW TO END ALL SHOWS
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, 1940

Volume:

No. 8

By:

Peter Reed, William Kaizen

Format:

Paperback

List price:

£16.00

Our price:

£11.68

Discount:

27% off

You save:

£4.32

ISBN 10:

0870700553

ISBN 13:

9780870700552

Availability:

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Publisher:

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Pub. date:

29 November, 2004

Series:

Studies in Modern Art No. 8

Pages:

240

Description:

Correspondence detailing the collaboration-cum-collision between Frank Lloyd Wright and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, about the staging of a retrospective work, and the publication of a book to accompany it, is published here for the first time, including a controversial piece by Walter Curt Behrendt.

Synopsis:

In 1940, The Museum of Modern Art staged a retrospective of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, the great American architect, then in his 70s, who had experienced a professional rebirth over the previous decade after many years of relative invisibility. Wright was a full collaborator in the organization of the project, which he intended, he said, to be "the show to end all shows." To accompany the exhibition, the Museum planned a publication in the form of a "Festschrift," commissioning essays from many of the best-known architecture figures of the day--Alvar Aalto, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Richard Neutra, Mies van der Rohe, and others. Wright, however, took issue with certain parts of the book, complimentary though it was, and after an incendiary exchange of correspondence, including the architect's threat to cancel the entire exhibition, the show went forward but the book did not. In the 60-odd years since, the essays that MoMA commissioned have remained in its files, most of them lost to public view. Now, for the first time in one volume, MoMA is publishing the entire surviving group, along with a full selection of the letters and telegrams between Wright, MoMA, and others detailing MoMA's and the architect's collaboration-cum-collision. Accompanying these period documents is an extensive essay by the noted Frank Lloyd Wright scholar Kathryn Smith, who provides a full account of the exhibition, both as it was and as it was intended to be--including, for example, an unrealized plan to erect one of Wright's Usonian Houses in the MoMA garden. Smith also explores Wright's relationship to his critics, the architectural profession, and the Museum in the years leading up to the exhibition.

Illustrations:

115 illus

Publication:

Imprint:

Museum of Modern Art

Returns:

Returnable

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