Fifty years ago this fall a young photographer from Wisconsin began to take pictures for a book on the man who was called the spiritual father of American architecture, Louis Sullivan. The book was neither a biography nor a survey of buildings, and the pictures were not, strictly speaking, architectural photographs.Yet Sullivan’s work was revealed there as it had never been before, and Frank Lloyd Wright, for some time Sullivan’s chief draftsman, said the pictures were the best of Sullivan buildings he had seen.
That book was “The Idea of Louis Sullivan”; the photographer/editor was John Szarkowski, who less than a decade after the book’s publication in 1956 became director of the department of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, from which he shaped the world’s thinking about the medium for nearly 30 years.
The volume went into a second edition, then disappeared until Bulfinch Press reissued it — with better reproductions — late last year. Now the Art Institute of Chicago has organized an exhibition of the book’s vintage prints alongside contemporary enlargements of some of the images plus Sullivan fragments and drawings. It could be considered “the sleeper” of the summer museum season.
In his preface to the new edition, Szarkowski writes, “[O]ld men should not even comment on the work of their youth, for fear of demonstrating that they have failed utterly to understand it.” But no one understands photographs better than Szarkowski, so when in town recently to lecture on the exhibition, he agreed to share his perceptions on a collection that is now a classic.
“I was trying to do a book that would deal both with Sullivan as a kind of hero figure and with building,” Szarkowski says, “not to explain it but explore it.”
Szarkowski also wanted to do a book in which photographs and text could work together effectively. At that time there were only two American models: Wright Morris’ “The Inhabitants” and “Time in New England,” by Nancy Newhall, with photographs by Paul Strand.
“I didn’t know of any other books that seriously tried to make photographs and text work together in a way that would produce a whole that was greater than the two halves,” Szarkowski says. “So that was an important part of [my] attempt. And part of it was the idea of using text in a documentary way. It was not anything I wrote, which was little enough; in the original edition it was just a biographical sketch, a slightly critical biographical sketch. The important part was the documentary text. And, I think, in those terms, well, frankly, I think it’s really good.”
Szarkowski had become acquainted with Sullivan through “Kindergarten Chats,” a collection of 52 essays in which the architect presents his ideas in the form of brilliant, amusing, often astounding dialogues between a master and a novice. Sullivan published the essays serially in 1901, revised them in 1918 and vainly sought someone to issue them in book form until he died in 1924. The first single volume came a decade later. Szarkowski saw a reprint of 1947.
The book came to him by way of Chicago architect Arthur Carrara; the men became friends when Szarkowski was staff photographer at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Carrara had gone to the Walker to design a traveling exhibition on silverware, “Knife/Fork/Spoon.” Szarkowski took the photographs for the 1951 catalog.
“In those days Chicago architects knew every piece of Sullivan ornament,” Szarkowski says. “I don’t know if the city still is filled with amateurs of that passion. I remember there was a rumor. It might have just been an invention of the architectural amateurs, but there was a rumor that when Sullivan was pretty much on his uppers, when he needed a little money, he occasionally would go and design ornament for the companies American Terracotta or Northwest Terracotta, and sometimes the stuff would get into their catalogs. It was terrific because walking down Clark Street you thought you might run into, you know, above the second story of any garage, a piece of Louis Sullivan ornament. According to the legend it was possible.”
The first Sullivan building Szarkowski saw was not in Chicago but Owatanna, Minn. It was the National Farmer’s Bank, which specialists have called Sullivan’s final masterpiece, and Szarkowski says is “one of the great buildings in the world.” In part because of its excellent state of preservation, the bank made an indelibly positive impression. But it was different when Szarkowski saw his second Sullivan building, in Chicago.
“Probably Carrara said, `You should see the Auditorium,'” Szarkowski recalls. “And it was really quite a shock. Because if you read about Sullivan, he was this great modernist, with soaring steel and, you know, verticality. Well, you looked at the Auditorium, and what was modern about that? Not only was it not modern, but it also was dirty and in those days had signs all over it and an Army-Navy surplus store on the Wabash side. It was a wreck. It had been a bowling alley during the war and had gotten only worse after that.”
Not your ordinary fashion shots
This was perhaps the first indication that Szarkowski’s photographs of Sullivan buildings would be different from orthodox architectural photographs, which largely function like fashion shots, to get clients for the designers. Szarkowski had done architectural photography for Carrara and A. James Speyer, among others. But he thought of himself as an all-around photographer and from reading Sullivan found a disjunction between the words and the world that surrounded his buildings.
One of the first pictures Szarkowski took was of a vertical stretch of ornament at the base of the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, N.Y. The elaborate patterns occupy two-thirds of the black-and-white photograph, but encroaching upon them from either side are discordant signs of life. It’s a modern photograph that shows the environment almost questioning the modernity of Sullivan’s decorative impulse.
“I wanted to do a thing about the idea of Louis Sullivan,” Szarkowski says, “and at the same time do something that would have to do with the nature of the art of building in society. What’s its cultural meaning? What’s its standing? Almost in a legal sense.
“I have a high regard for the practice of architectural photography. But the whole idea is to reject context as thoroughly as possible. You keep out, edit out everything except the building as though it were a pod or painting. If you did [my] photographs for an architect, that would be the last time you’d work for that architect and, by and large, for architectural magazines too. The magazines, if they exist anymore, are kind of an institutional service of the architect, so they wouldn’t be interested in showing what a building was really about.”
To show what Sullivan’s buildings were about in contemporary culture. What a goal. Laughing, Szarkowski asks isn’t that the way we are when we’re 26? Of course, it’s ambitious. “The Idea of Louis Sullivan” is, after all, a young man’s book.
Did Sullivan survive as a hero after Szarkowski photographed all his major buildings?
“Oh, sure,” he says. “He still is [a hero of mine]. In some ways, I think, we lower our standards. Or we know more about how hard it is [to create] and how contingent it is, you know, and how much luck — good luck and bad luck — is involved.”
Szarkowski knows whereof he speaks, for after retiring from MOMA a decade ago he returned to taking photographs. In 1997 came “Mr. Bristol’s Barn: With Excerpts from Mr. Blinn’s Diary,” a book about a single building on his property in upstate New York. It juxtaposes documentary text with Szarkowski images in a way he had done more than 40 years earlier.
From books to walls
Now he is working on wall, as opposed to book, pictures: a series of diptychs and triptychs that are more complex than photographs usually intended for books and, so, demand an architectural structure of great visual coherence. What they are about, he only gives hints.
“I’m interested in America, history and, in a sense, politics, but not about voting so much,” Szarkowski says. “I’m interested in American culture. I think it’s very interesting and maybe scary.
“And, you know, when you’re kind of applying for Old Crock status, you’ve got to look at a few things with alarm, right? I mean, isn’t that part of the job? So I now can do that without necessarily dishonoring my grandfather’s populist party credentials.”
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“The Idea of Louis Sullivan” continues through Nov. 4 in Galleries 3 and 4 of the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.
