San Marcos Addendum

Following up on the last post about the San Marcos in the Desert print, one of our erudite volunteers made the following observations regarding the context of Wright's personal history:

I suspect that the "in exile" refers only to FLLW who had been forced to leave Taliesin when the bank foreclosed on the mortgage. In a June 1928 letter written in Phoenix, Wright complained to Martin that, although Chandler had seen his drawings for San Marcos and was eager to start, he had no place to work and materials he needed were owned by the bank.

Wright was literally exiled from his beloved retreat of Taliesin, cut off from his comfortable workspace and the tools of the trade. This instance also brings to mind all the other ways in which Wright was "in exile" at various points in his life: in exile from his father, from "Lieber Meister" Louis Sullivan, from Catherine and his children, from both the academic and modernist camps of turn-of-the-century architecture, etc. Wright may have cultivated the persona of outsider, the standard-bearer of the Lloyd Jones motto of "Truth Against the World," but he certainly had plenty of circumstances to support this stance.

(thanks Anita!)