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Going Deep: Alfonso Iannelli, Frank Lloyd Wright and Midway Gardens
Writing: Highlights from our newsroom
Reading: Highlights from other newsrooms
Archive: Past letters from the editor
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Hi,
There have been some bittersweet departures from the Herald in the past few weeks. Morley Musick, who’s been with us part-time since the spring, is leaving to begin a Fulbright scholarship in Cagliari. And our frequent freelancer Kelly Milan is starting a new job at NewsNation in Washington, D.C., after graduating with a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern this summer. (It also means I’m looking for reporters who’d be willing to pick up assignments — let me know if that’s you or an enterprising acquaintance.)
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Going Deep: The pesky sprites of Midway Gardens |
Last week, we published a profile by Morley of Sam Guard, the 95-year-old Hyde Parker with a storehouse of memories about the neighborhood and the world beyond it. After we published it, I found out about Sam’s connection to Alfonso Iannelli, an Italian-American sculptor and designer. Sam’s parents had commissioned the artist to make a memorial for his sister, Georgia, who died in 1924 at the age of 7 from strep throat. (The parents, as well as Ianelli himself, were eventually both buried by the memorial.) Back in 2013, a Kickstarter campaign successfully raised enough money to restore the space.
But I was interested in Iannelli, whom I hadn’t heard of before, and discovered that perhaps the most intriguing episode of his life involves Hyde Park and famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
Born in Andretta, Italy, in 1888, Iannelli emigrated to Newark with his family when he was 10. He was apprenticed to, first, a jeweler and then the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, best-known for designing Mount Rushmore. After opening a studio in New York at 18, he gradually moved west, first to Cincinnati, then to Los Angeles.
(A bibliographic aside, since I haven’t included many hyperlinks here: My main source for this newsletter is David Jameson’s comprehensive and beautiful 2013 biography, “Alfonso Iannelli: Modern by Design,” which is really worth reading, or even just paging through, if you can get your hands on a copy — Jameson is the authority on Iannelli, and very much responsible for any renewed attention toward his work in recent years. I also use Joseph Griggs’s article on Iannelli, published the year of the sculptor’s death in The Prairie School Review, a now-defunct architectural journal.)
Iannelli was brought to Chicago largely by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, John, who enjoyed the posters that the young Italian designed for vaudeville shows at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles and befriended him. In February of 1914, John sent Iannelli an ungrammatical but lucid telegram: “Could you work in Chicago on models for concert garden now under construction if I could arrange matters satisfactorily here two or three months building must be complete by June tenth.”
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The project in question was Midway Gardens, an entertainment complex of arcades, promenades and courtyards containing a music pavilion, club, tavern and cigar concessions stand. Wright’s son convinced him to employ Iannelli alongside Richard W. Bock, the sculptor who collaborated closely with the famous architect over the course of his life.
Bock and Iannelli worked with Wright to design and construct concrete and marble sculptures for the facility. The most significant pieces that emerged were the “Sprites,” a series of figures that incorporated geometric patterns and shapes — cube, sphere, pyramid, octahedron — and included “totem pole” figures placed in the gardens outside. Jameson describes it as “the basic flat geometry of the Orpheum posters expanded into the third dimension.”
The architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock points out that Wright’s vision for Midway Gardens was one in which architecture would be united with other arts, so that “sculpture and painting, not as independent entities but closely related to the essential architectural conception, should play an important part.” And John described Iannelli’s favorable relationship with Bock, Wright’s close partner on a number of projects, as enabled “under the cooperative spirit that existed in the one mind direction of Frank Lloyd Wright.”
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Iannelli himself wrote about the unity of his and Wright’s art in the language of nature: “Sculpture still may be described as the ‘flower’ of architecture, as long as we realize the flower is one with its roots and stem.” The image is one of growth and development, but also of mutual reliance — buildings needed ornamentation, just as the sculpture needed a base to build from, and neither could be complete without the other.
A bit more prosaically, Iannelli also recounted later how difficult it could be to work with Wright: “Many times I would work quite late into the night and Mr. Wright would generally appear sometime in the afternoon and would be all fresh from his trip. I would have been working from seven o’clock in the morning so I would be ready for a rest but I would keep on listening to his criticisms. One time I went away to rest and when I came back I found Mr. Wright had uncovered one of the pieces of sculpture, which was a fountain model, and had punched holes in the eyes of the figure with his cane.”
Still, he didn’t seem to expect what would happen after Midway Gardens was completed and opened to the public. In 1915, the design publication International Studio ran an article about the project in which it called Wright the “designer” of the Sprites, while Iannelli, his name misspelled, had merely “executed” it.
When news of Iannelli’s fury at the mistake reached Wright, the architect wrote him a casual note that, in the sculptor’s eyes, failed to acknowledge the real issue. Iannelli responded at agitated length. (“Please pardon my use of the typewriter,” he began his letter, “it is simply that you may be able to read more easily.”) The two proceeded to send each other increasingly snippy and passive-aggressive messages about who had “designed” the sculptures. The upshot: Wright never issued a public correction, and Iannelli turned down an offer to work with Wright on a project in Japan the next year.
In Jameson’s book, he contrasts Wright’s egocentric conception of art, one in which he saw himself as the “creator of his own universe,” with Iannelli’s search for order and truth within nature, his attraction to abstract geometries. (Not to get too carried away — he also designed a very popular coffee maker at one point.) Perhaps it was this kind of bedrock principle that helped Iannelli avoid the submissive tendencies many of Wright’s other collaborators seemed to develop, their inability to produce their own work after collaborating with him. If we agree with Jameson’s analysis, it’s interesting to see these two approaches come together at Midway Gardens, a work that might alternately be seen as an artistic discovery of natural beauty or an architect’s grand and elaborate fleshpot.
While he never achieved Wright’s fame, Iannelli went on to have a long career in Chicagoland as a sculptor and designer. As far as I know, he only worked on one other project in Hyde Park, designing St. Thomas the Apostle Church with his longtime collaborator Barry Byrne. It was never built according to their original vision, however, after disagreements with the church priest. Midway Gardens didn’t last long, changing hands a few times over the next 15 years during its descent into fiscal insolvency. It was demolished in 1929. Some of Iannelli and Wright’s Sprites, though, have survived in various private and public collections — you can see one of them if you’re ever at the Met in New York.
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We’re kicking off a new series by Patricia Morse about the history of different objects in the neighborhood — her first entry is on the David Wallach Fountain at the Point. (And do let me know if there are other ideas for columns or recurring features you’d like to see. We probably hit the local history beat a little hard sometimes, and I’m always open to suggestions — or volunteers! — in other areas.)
Corli wrote about the community created by Frontline Books, the Pan-African bookstore that might close in the coming weeks.
Aaron broke the news that the DuSable Museum is planning to become an education center.
If you’re looking for something to do this weekend, here’s our preview of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival from Caleigh Stephens.
I had a lot of fun revisiting the subject of monarch butterflies, which are now migrating south. Keep your neck craned up!
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The Reader did the long feature on Woodlawn’s Red Clay Dance Company that I’ve been wanting to read (or write) for a while.
I really enjoyed this long essay by art historian T.J. Clark on Diego Velázquez.
I’ve also gotten away from sharing the books I’m reading, but I’m in the middle of Felisberto Hernández’s Piano Stories, which is very good. I recently finished Nabokov’s Pnin and loved it, maybe (heretically) the most of any Nabokov I’ve read so far.
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