Frank Lloyd Wright

Avery and Queene Ferry Coonley, Avery Coonley Playhouse, Riverside, Illinois, 1912-1920

Thence by acquisition of the Avery Coonley Playhouse, 1920-1967

Private Collection

Christie's New York, December 10, 1994, lot 240

Wolf Family Collection No. 1104 (acquired from the above)

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT'S "KINDER-SYMPHONY"

Often hailed as Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece in stained-glass design, the windows of the Avery Coonley Playhouse (1912) have been acclaimed as his finest glass composition, one that is unique within his oeuvre. They represent a major departure in his decorative design work that his client, Avery Coonley, recognized as "certainly darling." Conceived following Wright's return from a year spent in Europe, the windows reflect the artist's revolutionary leap into his own brand of modernism. Gone are pendant chevrons and the warm, sunbaked colors of the Prairie Style that featured in his work before 1910, such as the windows of the Susan Lawrence Dana and Darwin D. Martin houses (1902-1904 and 1903-1905, respectively). They are replaced by a whimsical, jubilant palette of primary and secondary hues in lively circles and squares, evoking balloons and confetti during a parade. Interspersing the group of windows are depictions of the American flag to complete the effect.

Wright had built a large estate for industrialist Avery Coonley in 1908 in Riverside, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, comprising a house and, a few years later, a garage and gardener's cottage, all set in an expansive landscape. Coonley’s wife, Queen Ferry, was dedicated to the education of the neighborhood children (including her own) in the Froebel Kindergarten method and commissioned the Playhouse as a school. This German instructive approach used games and toys, called the “Gifts and Occupations,” to teach geometry, symmetry, aesthetics, spatial integration, and color theory. Wright’s mother and wife had both used this method to educate him and his children, so he was intimately familiar with Queene’s goals. In one of the few statements he ever made alluding to influences on his designs, Wright claimed that “all [the toys] are in my fingers to this day.” As Anthony Alofsin has shown in Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 1910-1922, A Study of Influence (1993), Wright returned from Europe convinced that education, starting with Froebel Kindergarten, was the key to imparting ethical and aesthetic values to the American public, which would elevate public understanding of organic architecture and help to reform society. Guided by this philosophy, Wright called the series of windows he designed for the playhouse a “Kinder-Symphony,” a German phrase meaning “children’s symphony,” combining allusions to both the Froebel method and celebratory parade music.

The Coonley Playhouse windows are a singular design in Wright’s long career as a window designer on many levels. For one, they represent the only time Wright depicted an event in stained-glass. While Wright never explicitly wrote that a parade was his direct and specific inspiration for his design, the visual reference to this type of event is undeniable, and confetti and balloon motifs are mentioned in correspondences between Wright and Coonley. Avery and Queene’s daughter, Elizabeth Coonley Faulkner, even recalled Wright buying a cluster of balloons from a passing peddler and letting them float in his studio in front of the windows, drawing the literal comparison. Avery Coonley himself was not so enchanted with its components. In a letter to Wright in October 1912, after he had taken home a sketch of the “baloon [sic] scheme” to show his wife, he wrote that the balloons were “charming,” but that “all were unanimous, however, that the confetti part of the idea is not successful… particularly as I have never seen the two associated.” It is notable that the confetti (the small colored squares) remained in the design. The Playhouse windows are also the only window scheme in which every window in the house is different, combining into a single composition meant to be read from one opening to the next, without beginning or end. In all of his other buildings, the windows are repeating patterns. Wright never addressed this aspect of his design in writing, leaving us to speculate on its origin, though it is a clear example of Wright’s new embrace of asymmetry and abstraction in his decorative work.

Second, the glass palette is unique – never again would Wright combine such a selection of vibrant colors, instead only using them independently in future windows. He had never seen this glass before his trip to Europe. The vibrant yellow, red, blue and green glass was made exclusively in Germany. Called flashed opak, the glass is made in two layers, a colored layered over a white layer, so that the color appears on one side only – the other side, which Wright placed on the exterior, is solid, opaque white. Characterized by a flat, brilliant quality that was unaltered by the passage of light through it, it would be his favorite colored glass until the end of his use of leaded glass in 1923. In his July 1928 installment of “In the Cause of Architecture,” published in Architectural Record, he wrote, “I have used, preferably, clear primary colors, like the German flashed-glass, to get decorative effects, believing the clear emphasis of the primitive color interferes less with the function of the window and adds a higher architectural note to the effect of light itself [Wright’s emphasis]. The kinder-symphony in the windows of the Coonley Playhouse is a case in point.”

Third, the execution of the Coonley windows was technically challenging. By this time, Wright’s windows were always manufactured with zinc, brass or copper came, which is very stiff and does not lend itself to curves easily (lead came, by contrast, traditionally used for stained-glass windows, can be bent easily by hand). Though the craftsmen responsible for the Coonley windows are unknown, we know due to the material that they would have been required to use complicated machinery to cut and bend the zinc cames. While the use of machines could increase the speed of manufacture in multiple windows of the same design, in the case of the Playhouse windows, which are all unique, it would have slowed the process considerably, adding to the cost. The challenge inherent in executing circular cames further underscores the novelty of the Playhouse windows, and helps explain why in the final decade of his use of stained-glass, Wright never repeated any variation of the circles and squares (although he did use them in textiles and graphic design). His future window compositions, most notably for Midway Gardens, Hollyhock House (1916-1921), and the Imperial Hotel (1913-1923, never executed), would be based almost solely on triangles.

The design was one of Wright’s personal favorites. At least two sample panels were made and Wright kept them at Taliesin near his drafting table. At least one of these was exhibited in the 1914 Chicago Architectural Club annual exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. On Wright’s death in 1959, the Taliesin Associated Architects even adapted the design in a metal grid with colored glass for his grave marker in Spring Green, Wisconsin – a last and most telling testament to the importance of the Playhouse windows in his remarkable career as well as in the wider Modernist movement to which they belong. 

JULIE L. SLOAN