Tag: The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright

The wedding anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright and Olgivanna

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Reading Time: 4 minutes

Frank Lloyd Wright standing with daughters Svetlana and Iovanna, while his wife, Olgivanna, looks at the photographer. Wright’s sister, Maginel, sits behind them with the dog. Judging from Iovanna’s age, I think this was taken in the summer of 1930-32. The group is seated at Taliesin’s Tea Circle steps. I can’t find an early photo of just the Wrights, so I thought I’d put one in here with mostly their nuclear family.

Being in the Wright world means that you know a smorgasbord of things, along with certain dates:

and

August 25.

This was the day in 1928 that Frank Lloyd Wright and Olgivanna Lazovich Milanoff got married (here’s the link to the wedding announcement).

So, today

I’m going to include quotes from Olgivanna or Frank Lloyd Wright about their wedding, or each other.

Here is Olgivanna’s writing in The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright: From Crna Cora to Taliesin; from Black Mountain to Shining Brow.

This was the book compiled and edited by Maxine Fawcett-Yeske, Ph.D. and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, D.H.L

Wedding

At last we awoke on the sunny morning of the long-awaited day of our wedding…. The ceremony was held on the lovely patio under a blue sunny sky. Frank was dressed in white… and I had a purple afternoon gown sprinkled with a gold pattern and a wreath of lavender flowers around my head. When the minister asked the question, “in sickness and in health?”

Frank answered very quietly, “Yes, I have and I will.”

…. then a memorable telegram came from Darwin D. Martin, “Taliesin open for your return.” The joy that went through us lifted us up…. It was Taliesin we saw, the hills, the meadows, the cows chewing benignly in the sun. We embraced each other; the children bounced around us. A cycle of our life was closing, and we were about to enter another… – re-establishing our life at Taliesin, after years of wandering.

The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright (ORO Editions, 2017), 101, 102.

And here’s

some of the nice things that Wright wrote about Olgivanna in the 1943 edition of his autobiography.

The version of the 1943 autobiography that you can get via Amazon is through a small bookseller because I think it hasn’t been printed in awhile. But if you want to see it RIGHT NOW, you can read it online at Archive.org, the Internet Archive.

Wright and Olgivanna met in late November 1924 by chance at a ballet matinee,1 and spoke during and afterward:

… I must have met her—somewhere? But no, no one like her—that I could remember–…. She spoke in a low musical voice…. [p. 510] No longer quite so strange, the emissary of Fate, mercy on my soul, from the other side of the known world, bowed her head to my invitation to tea at the nearby Congress. She accepted with perfect ease without artificial hesitation.

I was in love with her.

It was all as simple as that….

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 509.

And he writes heart-catchingly

a few pages later:

Just to be with her uplifts my heart and strengthens my spirit when the going gets hard or when the going is good.

….  I found that the girl who was qualified by years of hard, patient trying to understand, inspired by ideas similar to my own, was qualified to be an imaginative vivid inspiration and a real mate.

Whatever she undertook, she never shirked.

And strangely enough—or is it so strange—she, whose parents were Montenegrin dignitaries, had pictures of her Montenegrin forebears that looked just like my Welsh forebears….

She is brave and has the heart of a lioness.

No, I think we mated as planned behind the stars—just right. I don’t even wish I were younger because we both seem to add up to just about the right age for us, and I admire maturity much more than youth.

Frank Lloyd Wright, 512, 513.

 

 

Posted August 24, 2024.
The photo at the top of this page was on the cover of the book, Frank Lloyd Wright Remembered, ed. Patrick J. Meehan. The photo is from the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust.

Notes:

1. Yes, I know that if you get “the Fellowship book” (The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, by Friedland & Zellman), you read how Olgivanna met Wright as part of a plan by Gurdjieffians (followers of George Gurdjieff) in the U.S. But while

YES

the book has over a hundred pages of Endnotes, I concluded after my first read that you’ve got to read every note to check on what they’re writing.

Because,

while they’re almost obsessed with proving that Olgivanna was pushed in front of Wright so fans of Gurdjieff in the U.S. could recreate his philosophical community, the easy conclusions they come up with in the text don’t always match the Endnotes. Did Olgivanna meet Wright at the ballet in 1924 because Jerome Blum (a friend who Wright wrote about in his autobiography) arranged for the meeting? Well, Endnote 95 on page 618 (of the 1st edition of The Fellowship book) says, “There is no evidence of any relationship among Olgivanna, Jerome Blum, and Waldo Frank, other than through Gurdjieff connections.” And that’s just one of the places where the book’s text is different from an Endnote.

Photograph by Kevin Dodda of Taliesin in snow.

How did Frank Lloyd Wright feel about Christmas?

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

Someone asked me that question in early December. Yet, I’ve tried to answer it, with no clear success, for years. After all, Wisconsin can be charmingly Christmas-Themed, with a dusting of snow and a chill in the air.* In addition, in his autobiography, Wright described Taliesin in winter as being a “frosted palace roofed and walled with snow”. But, he didn’t seem especially fond of Christmas, particularly in the first years after he built his Wisconsin home in 1911.

Wright talking about Christmas

In 1924, when Wright had a new love in his life, his future wife, Olgivanna, he wrote her a letter saying that Christmas reminded him of his children he had left in Oak Park, IL in 1909. His letter to her is in The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, 234.

However, less than a decade after they met, the Wrights began the Taliesin Fellowship, and eventually Wright would leave Wisconsin in the winter, spending that time with his family and apprentices at Taliesin West in Arizona. Thus, Christmas became an activity enjoyed by the group in the desert. To read about their Christmases, read The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright.

Wright’s Christmas-card moments

He did have plenty of these in the 1890s/early 1900s with the family in Oak Park. They were described aplenty in the book written by Wright’s second son, John. In John’s book, My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright (first published in 1946 under the amusing title, My Father, Who is on Earth), he wrote about growing up in Oak Park, and later working with his father. These memories also include how he felt about his dad as a father; the day of Taliesin’s 1914 fire; and the day his dad fired him! It’s unique and you should pick it up.

John wrote memories involving Christmas while growing up. One of these is of a Christmas Eve night when he was perhaps 5 or 6.

I’ll leave you with John’s description of watching his father put the presents out, then his father “caught” him and carried him back to bed:

…. He unboxed toys on a big white sheet under the tree, sat on the floor and played with each one before placing it. When he played with the mechanical donkey that jumped up and down I almost dashed in. When he pulled out a monkey that climbed a string, I giggled so loud the jig was up! Out rushed Papa, swooped me up in his arms, whisked me backed to bed, told me I had been dreaming. I still like to think it was a dream—and good old St. Nick, a reality. And not too long ago, Dad said, “I still believe in Santa Claus.”
John Lloyd Wright, My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright (Dover Publications, Inc., New York; 1992), 40.

First published, 12/23/2020
The winter photograph taken at Taliesin at the top of this post is by Kevin Dodds and was reproduced with permission.

* overlooking the fact that, one time after 1992 (the year I came to live in this state), it reached -25F (-32C) degrees on Christmas day.