imagine making your mother an arrangement

Title Slide (2013) © Roy R. Behrens

Above Although it seems like yesterday, it has been eight years ago that I was invited to speak about writing compared with image design at a writers' festival at Luther College in Decorah IA. I chose to give a slide talk, of which this was the title slide. I have always loved this portrait photograph of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (whose father and brother were visual artists), by George Charles Bereford (public domain).

No, that's not a nose bleed. It's a perfectly purposeful devious use of his fantastic signature—WBYeats. And below, don't miss out on the chance to read his autobiography. There's nothing quite like it. And it doesn't let up for a minute.

•••

William Butler Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats: Consisting of reveries over childhood and youth, the trembling of the veil, and dramatic personae. New York: Macmillan, 1953—

My two sisters and my brother and myself had dancing lessons in a low, red-brick and tiled house that drove away dreams, long cherished, of some day living in a house made exactly like a ship’s cabin. The dining-room table, where Sinbad the sailor might have sat, was painted peacock-blue, and the woodwork was all peacock-blue and upstairs a window niche was so big and high up that there was a flight of steps to go up and down by and a table in the niche. The two sisters of the master of the house, a well-known pre-Raphaelite painter, were our teachers, and they and their old mother were dressed in peacock-blue and in dresses so simply cut that they seemed a part of every story. Once when I had been looking with delight at the old woman, my father [Irish painter John Butler Yeats] who had begun to be influenced by French art, muttered, “Imagine dressing up your old mother like that” (pp. 16-17).

…I was happy when partly through my father’s planning some Whistlers were brought over and exhibited, and did not agree when my father said: “Imagine making your old mother an arrangement in gray!” (p. 50).

•••

Maurice Browne, Too Late to Lament: An autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956, pp. 138-139—

One day [in Chicago] a Skyscraper [member of an elite arts society club] called to see me; his chains of office clanked about his neck. I bowed deeply. He regarded me with disfavor: “You are a friend of Nicholas Vachel Lindsay [the American poet]?” I pleaded guilty; the Skyscrapers mocked Lindsay for the way he read his rhymes and despised him because he traded them for bread, hawking his pamphlets from door to door through the farmlands of the Middle West.…

“Do you know Lindsay’s address?” the clubman asked. I did, “may I have it?” I replied that I had not Mr. Lindsay’s authority to disclose his present whereabouts but would forward a letter. “The matter is rather urgent; could you reach him by telephone?” I could but didn’t. The clubman hummed and hawed, then plunged like Doris Keane [a well-known American stage actress] but the splash was louder: “We are giving a luncheon in honor of Mr. William Butler Yeats tomorrow and would like you and your friend to be our guests.” I trust that I concealed my amazement and was courteous in conveying my regret that despite my admiration for Mr. Yeats I would be unable to attend; I could not of course answer for Mr. Lindsay. The clubman grew urgent: “Do you think that he will come?” My silence was duly interpreted: “But we must get him; we have to.” The conversation was growing interesting; I waited. “The fact is,”and this time the diver took a bellyflop which resounded through Chicago—“we announced that Yeats was coming, and now he says he won’t unless we get Lindsay.”

When the clubman had departed…I went into the hotel next door where Lindsay was staying and we laughed ourselves sick. But Lindsay had never met Yeats, and the latter’s demand moved him deeply; so he decided to attend the luncheon and insisted on my coming with him to hold his hand.

[In the concluding half-hour of the luncheon] as though no one else were present Yeats talked directly to Lindsay, and to Lindsay alone. He spoke of the poet’s task, the poet’s reward, the poet’s joy; poet to poet, equal to equal. Then he [Yeats] walked down the room, shook hands, turned again to his hosts, thanked them once more in a sentence, bowed, left. The mandarins were too flabberghasted to show their chagrin; besides, Yeats was a great poet; they themselves had said so.… [pp. 138-139].

[At the end of 1931, two years after the Wall Street Crash, distraught by poor health and financial concerns, Vachel Lindsay took his own life, at age 52, by drinking a bottle of lye.]

sights, sounds—and smells—of stockyard blood

Above A Busy Day on Dearborn and Randolph Streets, Chicago. Vintage postcard.

•••

Maurice Browne, Too Late to Lament: An Autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956, p. 127—

Chicago in the second decade of this [the 20th] century was a mentally disturbing and therefore, to a young man, a mentally exciting place. Metropolis of an inland empire, its god was the dollar and municipal corruption his handiwork. “No decent man will touch politics” was a phrase heard daily and self-defensively from the lips of every “decent” man. Extremes of luxury and squalor contrasted even more violently than in the Dublin of my childhood or the London of my youth. On the east its huge inland sea bounded the city; when the wind blew from the west, where the stockyards lay, the smell of blood, seeping through shuttered window and bolted door, filled every room of every house. In summer pitch from the city’s pavements bubbled underfoot. In winter the streets leading to Michigan Avenue had ropes waist-high round corner buildings, for foot-passengers to pull themselves past the corner against the gale; blizzards swept the city, paralyzing traffic. And in that climate, amid Chicago’s material and moral filth, mental life fought for existence like a sapling in a jungle.

Iowa Insect Series Installed

Installation view © Sergio Gomez

Above An installation view (photo by Sergio Gomez) of an exhibition of collaborative montage images, called Iowa Insect Series, currently on view at the Dorothea Thiel Gallery at South Suburban College in Chicago. More>>>

Iowa Insects | Roy Behrens and David Versluis

Iowa Insect Series © Roy Behrens and David Versluis c2012-13

South Suburban College’s Dorothea Thiel Gallery will host an exhibition of 10 large-scale digital montage images [see examples above and below] from the Iowa Insect Series, a collection of artworks created in collaboration between graphic design professors Roy R. Behrens and David M. Versluis.  The exhibit, Graphic Designers Collaborate: Attention to Detail, will be held in the Dorothea Thiel Gallery from April 1 to April 21, 2016.

The exhibit features digital montage collaborations created by Graphic Design professor Roy R. Behrens, University of Northern Iowa, and Art & Graphic Design professor David Versluis, Dordt College. Various artworks from the Iowa Insect Series have been exhibited in group shows at the Washington Pavilion Visual Art Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Nemeth Art Center in Park Rapids, Minnesota; University of Northern Iowa Gallery of Art in Cedar Falls, Iowa; and the 27th McNeese National Works on Paper Exhibition at McNeese State University Grand Gallery in Lake Charles, Louisiana. This exhibit at South Suburban College is one of the first times that the collection Iowa Insect Series will be shown together.

Iowa Insect Series © Roy Behrens and David Versluis c2012-13

“The process of creating the collaborative images began in 2012 with me sending Roy scanned images of insects from my personal collection. One image at a time, we challenged each other to respond to each image, building a digital montage, using Adobe Photoshop®,” said Versluis. “We would then pass the image back and forth, responding to each other’s move.” The images were built with about five or six back and forth exchanges between Behrens & Versluis, until the two graphic designers mutually decided that the artwork was finished.

Professor Versluis will be at the college as visiting artist in the digital arts lab and Dorothea Thiel Gallery for a 1:00 p.m. reception on Thursday April 21st. The public is welcome to visit the art exhibition and reception at no charge. The Thiel Gallery is located on the 4th floor in the Art & Design hallway, Room 4333.  SSC Galleries are open at minimum Mondays through Thursdays from 9:00 am–6:00 pm, and Fridays from 9:00 am–4:00 pm. The galleries are closed on weekends and holidays. For more information, please call (708) 596-2000, ext. 2316, or visit www.ssc.edu/art. SSC is located at 15800 South State Street, South Holland, Illinois.

Iowa Insect Series © Roy Behrens and David Versluis c2012-13

Frank Lloyd Wright Rescues Einstein

Albert Einstein (Public Domain)

Physicist Albert Einstein and architect Frank Lloyd Wright apparently met for the first time in 1931, at the house called La Miniatura, in Pasadena CA, which Wright had designed for Alice Millard, a rare-book dealer. According to an essay by Milton Cameron—

When Albert Einstein first met Frank Lloyd Wright, he mistook the architect for a musician. Leaping from his chair, Einstein announced that he was returning home to fetch his violin and would be back shortly to perform a duet. Only upon his return did he learn that Wright was not a pianist.

Frank Lloyd Wright (Public Domain)

That same year, a news article reported that when Einstein stopped in Chicago on his return from Pasadena, Wright was standing beside him when the famous physicist was mobbed by a crowd of 2000 women, who were Chicago-area peace advocates. The story is told in the following excerpts from FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT SAVES EINSTEIN FROM FRIENDLY MOB, Scientist Greeted by 2000 Chicago Pacifists at Station; Wright Draws Him Up Train Steps in Capital Times (Madison WI), March 4, 1931—

The world-famous physicist, who has been the guest of scientists in Pasadena, was all but mowed down by 2000 women, representing every peace organization in Chicago, as he stepped off the Manhattan Limited in the Pennsylvania station…

Smiling and undaunted, the gentle little man,• himself an ardent peace advocate, stepped down among the milling mob of women, shaking hands and listening wordlessly as each volunteered a hurried greeting.

Finally Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, and Dr. Carl Beck, both long-time friends,•• fearing for the limb if not the life of the distinguished scientist, drew him up the train steps and back to the observation platform, where he talked briefly in his own language.

•  I'm not sure I understand. Einstein is described here as a "gentle little man," yet a quick online search finds that he was apparently 5 foot 9 inches. Wright, on the other hand, claimed to be 5 foot 8.5 inches, but people often speculate that he may have been even shorter, thereby accounting for the lower ceiling heights in some of his buildings. Yet, in this account, it is the diminutive Wright who hoists the larger Einstein onto the railroad platform.

•• If Einstein and Wright had met for the first time at that same meeting in Pasadena, how could they have been "long-time friends"?

See also: Roy R. Behrens, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie (2016).

 

Turner Kopecky | Futura Typeface Poster

Futura Typeface Poster © Turner Kopecky (2015)

Above Poster by Turner Kopecky, graphic design student, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa (2015), in commemoration of Paul Renner and his design of the typeface Futura.

***

Morris Horowitz [pseudonym], a peddler and Russian-Jewish immigrant, recalling what he witnessed in Chicago in 1871 on the night of the Great Chicago Fire, as quoted in Ann Banks, ed., First-Person America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, pp. 32-33—

No one slept that night. People gathered on the streets and all kinds of reasons were given for the fire. I stood near a minister talking to a group of men. He said the fire was sent by God as a warning that the people were wicked. He said there were too many saloons in Chicago, too many houses of prostitution. A woman who heard this said that a fire started in a barn was a direct warning from God since Jesus was also born in a barn. I talked to a man who lived next door to Mrs. O'Leary, and he told me that the fire started in Mrs. O'Leary's barn. She went out to milk the cow while it was beginning to get dark. The cow kicked the lamp over and that's how the fire started. There were all kinds of songs made up about the fire. Years after, people were still singing songs about it…

Frank Lloyd Wright Poster | Désiree Dahl

Frank Lloyd Wright Poster © Désiree Dahl 2014

Cedar Rock, originally known as the Lowell Walter Residence, was designed in 1950 by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. An exemplar of his Usonian style, it is located near Quasqueton IA, and has been designated as Cedar Rock State Park. For the past ten years, the Friends of Cedar Rock organization has held an annual seminar—called An Afternoon with Frank Lloyd Wright—in which speakers talk about Wright's life, beliefs and achievements.

To celebrate the tradition of that seminar, in the fall of 2014, graphic design students in the Department of Art at the University of Northern Iowa, were asked to design a series of posters that focus on Wright and his accomplishments, not limited to Cedar Rock. The poster above was designed by Désiree Dahl in a course in Digital Image Design (2014).

•••

As Viennese-born architect Richard Neutra explains in his autobiography, Life and Shape (NYC: Appleton Century Crofts, 1962), long before he immigrated to the US he was well-acquainted with the architecture of Frank  Lloyd Wright and that of Wright's mentor, Louis Henri Sullivan. When Neutra moved to Chicago (in the early 1920s), he recalls (pp. 181-182)—

I went to see all Sullivan's buildings, and found them extraordinary. Here in the middle of North American, I thought, was work which could be compared with what Otto Wagner had been doing in the Vienna of Central Europe. And that was the very highest accolade I was capable of giving to anything built. Sullivan was living in this town [Chicago], I found out, and I wanted by all means to see him.

But by this time, Sullivan was nearing the end of his life. In poor health and drinking heavily, he and his wife had separated, and he was living alone in a hotel room. When Neutra told other architects that he wanted to meet Sullivan—

…they all laughed at me. Sullivan? they asked,—isn't he that old drunkard? He's a pauper now, and is being supported by his friends; each pitches in five dollars a month.…he's living in a run-down tenement or "hotel" on Warner Avenue, around Thirty-Fifth Street or so.

Finally, when Neutra located Sullivan—

He was very broken, while I tried by best to cheer him up. But he kept dwelling on his despondency and lack of following. The loneliness of genius is something horrible to behold.

Soon after they met, Sullivan died, and Neutra was one of the few who attended the funeral. There, he was surprised to see Sullivan's former student, Frank Lloyd Wright, "who had come all the way from California, where he was working, to attend the funeral," even though he and Sullivan had not spoken to one another for many years.

•••

See also: Roy R. Behrens, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie (2016).   

Frank Lloyd Wright Poster | Kelly Cunningham

Wright poster © Kelly Cunningham 2014

Cedar Rock, originally known as the Lowell Walter Residence, was designed in 1950 by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. An exemplar of his Usonian style, it is located near Quasqueton IA, and has been designated as Cedar Rock State Park. For the past ten years, the Friends of Cedar Rock organization has held an annual seminar—called An Afternoon with Frank Lloyd Wright—in which speakers talk about Wright's life, beliefs and achievements.

To celebrate the tradition of that seminar, in the fall of 2014, graphic design students in the Department of Art at the University of Northern Iowa, were asked to design a series of posters that focus on Wright and his accomplishments, not limited to Cedar Rock. The poster above was designed by Kelly Cunningham in a course in Digital Image Design (2014).

•••

Richard Neutra, Life and Shape [his autobiography] . New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1962, pp. 179. Neutra, a Viennese-born architect, came to the US in 1923, and eventually moved to Chicago, where he searched for buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, whose work he had admired while living in Europe—

I looked around the western part of Chicago, and south, near the university, but nobody could tell me anything about this famous architect I was talking about. People were flabbergasted that I should have picked up the ideals of a great Chicagoan in a European library…

But where were the prairies, the woods, the lawns? Where, anyway, was Woodlawn Avenue? Once I got there, I would actually find the famous Robie House. My heart always skipped when I imagined the moment: I would ring the doorbell and ask in very broken English, "Is Mr. Robie in?" And so I finally did.

"Mr. Robie? Never heard of him." There was a Mrs. Wilson living there. She had bought the house some years back, and was probably the fifth owner. She wasn't at all enthusiastic about it—but to me it was a lovely, wonderful place.

I asked Mrs. Wilson why she had bought the house. "Oh," she answered, cold fish, "I got it very cheap. The man who owned it had to get out. No, she didn't particularly like it, and she had all kinds of petty criticisms. Nothing was working, of course; at that time the house was already some fifteen years old, and badly neglected.

See also: Roy R. Behrens, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie (2016).   

Book Review | Taliesin Diary

Cover of Taliesin Diary (2012)

Priscilla J. Henken, Taliesin Diary: A Year with Frank Lloyd Wright. New York, Norton, 2012. 272 pp., illus. 30 b&w photographs. Trade, $34.95. ISBN 978-0-393-73380-8.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens

IN 1934, AMERICAN expatriate author Gertrude Stein returned to the US for the first time since moving to Paris in 1905. Accompanied by her companion, Alice B. Toklas (whom she had secretly married in 1908), she toured the country giving talks to promote her new (and perhaps most enduring) book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

When she spoke at the University of Wisconsin, architect Frank Lloyd Wright was in the audience (she said he looked familiar, but could not remember why). Apparently, Frank and Gertrude and Alice had met earlier in Paris, at which time (as this diary notes) his impression was that Stein was “the most unattractive, uninteresting and dull person he had ever spoken to.” She dominated the conversation, he recalled, while the mute compliance of Alice gave new significance to her name—she was of course, reported Wright, “Alice be talkless.” In Madison, Wright invited the pair to return with him to Taliesin, his famous home and school nearby, en route to their next engagement. But they demurred (exchanging nudge-nudge glances) for the reason, they said, that they liked to travel by airplane. “We want to fly to Milwaukee,” they said.

This book is called Taliesin Diary because its primary text is the diary of an American Jewish woman who lived (along with her husband) with Wright and his wife Oglivanna, their family, and student apprentices for nearly a year at Taliesin near Spring Green, Wisconsin. The diarist was Priscilla Henken, a New York-born high school English teacher, who traveled to Taliesin in October 1942 with her husband, research engineer David Henken. Together, they “slaved” as apprentices in Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship until she left (apparently rather abruptly) in August 1943, to return to teaching in New York, while her husband stayed on until later.

I have read dozens of published diaries from which I have concluded that not all diaries are worth reading. But this one is fascinating, largely because it is candid (albeit often painfully so) and well written. It is especially honest about the corrosive influence of Wright’s third wife Oglivanna (they had married in 1928), who, by more than one account, was the Rasputin of Taliesin. In page after page, don’t be surprised to be taken aback by the abrupt and usually damaging ways in which Mrs. Wright (“La Dame”) jostled to assert control over the apprentices, her aging husband (he was in his seventies then, and incapable of standing up to her), and others who were living and/or on the staff at Taliesin. more>>>

See also: Roy R. Behrens, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie (2016).   

You Can Kiss My Foot

Art Deco-era poster, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

From Bruce Siberts, in Walker D. Wyman, ed., Nothing But Prairie and Sky: Life of the Dakota Range in the Early Days. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954, pp. 5-6.—

Our family were strict Methodists, attended church regular, and none of them ever got drunk, chewed or smoked tobacco, or used bad language. Only Uncle Ed, who bought cattle and hogs for the Chicago market, was different. He chewed tobacco, was suspected of drinking beer once, and had the reputation of seeing a show in Chicago called The Black Crook, in which women wore tights. As Uncle Ed and Mr. Crum, a neighbor, were the only Methodists who used tobacco, except on the sly, it was urged that they be expelled from the church. But looking over the records, it was learned that they were the best in paying money for the support of the church so they were allowed to remain in good standing. However, the minister preached a good sermon on the evils of tobacco, saying "There you sit with hell juice running out of your mouths," and on in that line for two hours. Uncle Ed said that the preacher could kiss his foot and go to hell. Only he didn't say foot.