The Tender Detail

Ornament and Sentimentality in the Architecture of Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright

Daniel E. Snyder

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350099630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

The Tender Detail tells a story about the repression of sentimentality through architectural ornament. The protagonists are Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, two of the most important architects and designers of ornament in American history. Interweaving close readings of their architecture and writings with wide-ranging discussions about sexuality, gender, and philosophy, the book explores how both men worked to solve the problem of late nineteenth-century ornamentation. It suggests that their solutions, while widely different, were both intimately rooted in the tender emotions of sentimentality. Viewing ornament in this way reveals much, not only about Sullivan and Wright's artistic intentions, but also about the role of affect, the value of beauty, and the agency and ontology of objects. Illuminated by personal stories from their respective autobiographies, which add a level of human interest unusual in an academic work, The Tender Detail is a readable, scholarly study which sheds fresh light on Sullivan and Wright's relationship, their work, and on the nature of ornament itself.

1

Introduction: Frank Lloyd Wright—Sentimentalizing over the Dead

Wright sat in silence. It was a Sunday night in Chicago’s Oak Park. He was twenty years old.¹ He and his mother, two sisters, and their landlady had gathered for supper. His mother gave him inquiring looks; she knew something was wrong. What she didn’t know was that he was angry at her. Earlier that day, he had learned that she had colluded with his best friend Cecil Corwin in an effort to forestall his growing affections for a young girl, his first love, Catherine (Kitty) Lee Tobin.² Corwin had broached the subject. The girl was too young. She was “a child.” Wright was “a child.” Neither had any experience dating. It was all happening too fast. As the arguments mounted it hit him.

“Look here, old man Cecil. Have you been talking to Mother about this thing?”

“No … She talked to me about it.”

“What did she say?”

“You may ask her.”

Wright was indignant. He seethed about it the whole way home. And now, after dinner, upstairs in his room his mother came up to find out what was wrong.

“What is it, my son?”

He didn’t hesitate.

“Mother! Why go around to Cecil about Kitty and me?”

She didn’t even look surprised. She smiled. “Why, indeed!”

Affronted, he burst out, “What’s all the anxiety and fuss over a perfectly natural thing all about anyway? It’s making Nature monstrous. Where is the sense in it?”

As she countered, his anger increased.

“I don’t get it at all. I’ve never seen you like this. It doesn’t seem like you, Mother. You have always said, ‘If you have to choose between the good and the true, choose truth!’ And—God—Mother! What in this matter is Truth?”

She ignored his point.

“Don’t swear, my son.”

The cooler she got, the more profane he got.

Rising to a fevered pitch he went off on the necessity of swearing. “‘Damned’ is a wonderful, necessary word!”

She got up and left.³

Wright couldn’t let it go. He interpreted their interference as the imposition of some “foolish regulations,” that he qualified as “‘social’” (in quotes), that for some reason “‘they’” (in more quotes) insisted on believing.⁴ In contrast, his love expressed a “truth” which transcended the mere “good” of their “regulations.”⁵ After all, in his mind he and Kitty were happy—in love.

As he obsessed over their arguments he concluded that the difference between his sincere affections and their interference came from two different ways of understanding “Nature.”⁶ He wrote, “I began to see that in spite of all the talk about Nature that ‘natural’ was the last thing in this world they would let you be if they could prevent it. What did they mean when ‘they’ used the word ‘nature’? Just some sentimental feeling about animals, grass and trees, the out-of-doors?”⁷ He construed “‘natural’” (still more quotes) to be something “internal” to things, like some essence. He compared it to “the nature of boys and girls” or the “nature of wood, glass and iron.” In contrast, “sentimental” was some “measly, external way.” He proudly held that when he read or used the word “nature,” he “meant that interior way. Not in an external way.” He railed: “Fools! They have no sentiment for nature. What they mean by ‘nature’ is just a sentimentalizing of the rudimentary animal. That’s why they suffer all this confusion of ideas and make all these senseless rules—foolish regulations and unwise laws.” Distinguishing between his love for Tobin as an “interior” “sentiment” understood as “truth” and their “regulations” as “external” conceptions understood as the “good,” he designated the difference between their respective ways of understanding: his was “‘natural;’” theirs was “sentimental.”⁸

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Despite his protestations, Wright nonetheless conceded to his mother’s demands of the “good.” He compromised his version of the “truth.” Though he ultimately married Tobin, he lied about their ages. Confiding the marriage plans to his employer, Sullivan, he claimed that there was just two years’ difference.⁹ It was more like four.¹⁰ But of truth and meaning, that is a relatively minor infraction. Indeed, what did he mean by “sentimental”? Is this an example of his using the word any way he wanted, or as his biographer Brendan Gill characterized it, as an “Alice-in-Wonderland liberality” with his key words?¹¹ If words are a medium to his understanding of “truth,” and if Gill is correct, might this have been the greater infraction?

To be fair, by the end of the nineteenth century, “sentimental” was already polysemous. Having undergone a semantic shift over the previous 150 years, by 1900, it held multiple meanings, each with its own complex set of social implications. But Wright seems to compound the confusion. Even in this brief story we only get a hint of what he meant. If we are to take him seriously, and I believe we should, his semantics require a more careful interrogation.

I begin therefore with the dry assertions of the dictionary. Recognizing that they provide at best a skeletal framework, I have gathered a few other sources which begin to flesh out Wright’s meanings. It is unlikely, in some cases impossible, that he had read any of them. But as it should become clear, he grappled with the ideas they expressed. As such, each source begins to place him in a broader theoretical context. Admittedly tendentious, I chose them simply to illustrate my point: despite Gill’s criticism, Wright was careful enough with his words. Moreover, to take him seriously and contextualize his work, even within a biased selection of a few sources, is to open a world into “sentimentality.”

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) states that of persons, their dispositions, and actions, “sentimentality” is “characterized by sentiment.” As it pertains to “sentiment,” it means “arising from or determined by feeling rather than reason.” Sentiment is variously defined as “a mental feeling, an emotion,” or “what one feels with regard to something; mental attitude,” or “a thought or reflection coloured by or proceeding from emotion.” It generally applies “to those feelings which involve an intellectual element or are concerned with ideal objects.”¹² Those feelings are not the coarse emotions of hatred, anger, or revenge. Suggesting Wright’s characterization as “the good,” they are defined as the “refined,” “elevated,” and “aesthetic” emotions. Importantly for architects, in the work of art they are understood as the expression of, or appeal to, the tender emotions, “especially those of love.”

Note that both “sentiment” and “sentimentality” simultaneously link feeling and thought. Coming from the Latin sentire in mente, their root translates as “feeling in the mind” or “feeling in idea.” Etymologically, neither word comes from a simple unalloyed effusion of the emotions. Even though the dictionary recognizes that in generalized usage, “sentiment” may mean just that, at their root both words denote some conflation of the two. More than addressing their problematic separation (as if feeling and thought could be discrete from each other), sentire in mente suggests a unique category that actively engages both. As an example, one might love an individual child. If that love comes from the idea of “children” and it no longer matters which child, it becomes sentimental. In this case, the feeling is entirely contingent on abstract thought: the apprehension of the idea of children.

Additionally, the dictionary includes definitions that acknowledge the semantic shift. “Sentiment” qualifies the appeal to the tender emotions in the arts by adding that it is “now chiefly in derisive use, conveying an imputation of either insincerity or mawkishness.” “Sentimentality” includes the later definition of “addicted to indulgence in superficial emotion” and “apt to be swayed by sentiment.” Clearly degrading attributes, both words can be summarized as having two antipodal sets of connotations: commendatory and pejorative. However, in the arts they are more often construed as the latter.

In the untangling of Wright’s meaning, the dictionary unfortunately fails to straighten it out. Consider that he contrasted his “natural” understanding of nature from his mother’s “sentimental” based on an implied categorical distinction between “sentiment” and “sentimentality.” That distinction runs counter to the dictionary’s declaration that the latter is “characterized” by the former. The only definitive way to construe the two words as that different would be to assume that Wright defined “sentiment” by its commendatory definitions and “sentimentality” by its pejorative definitions. Then the two words would be different enough to justify the distinction.¹³ But if that were his interpretation it would mean that he was describing his mother as either “addicted to indulgence in superficial emotion” or too easily “swayed by sentiment.” Wouldn’t that be ironic? After all, it was he who had fallen in love while she apparently behaved rationally. Clearly a more thorough untangling is required.

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Wright’s distinction between “natural” and “sentimental” calls to mind Friedrich Schiller’s distinction between “naïve” and “sentimental.” “Natural” and “naïve” may be used synonymously. Schiller used them interchangeably.¹⁴ Even though he wrote over a hundred years earlier, his essay Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795) shares uncanny similarities to Wright’s story of first love. Moreover, his elaboration of the terms provides clarification to Wright’s otherwise vague meanings. Following in the romantic tradition, he stated that the poet’s subject, like Wright’s, was nature. He characterized the difference between the “naïve” and “sentimental” poet (both invariably men) with this telling distinction. “The poet … either is nature or he will seek her. The former is the naïve, the latter the sentimental poet.”¹⁵

According to Schiller, the naïve poet enjoyed such an extraordinary immediacy with nature in a unity so complete as to constitute essence. The naïve poet is nature. Citing a direct correspondence between feeling and thought, he described a manifest unity such that the poet’s thoughts, the substance of the poem itself, were “the completest possible imitation of actuality.” Attempting to further convey the degree of immediacy Schiller added: “At that stage man still functions with all his powers simultaneously as a harmonious unity and hence the whole of his nature is expressed completely in actuality.”¹⁶ To read the work of the naïve poet is to be moved by the essence of nature herself, “by sensuous truth.”¹⁷

In contrast, the sentimental poet is distanced from nature. As Schiller put it, “He will seek her.” Coming out of the eighteenth-century enlightenment, when “nature” was rationally conceptualized, analyzed, objectified, and romanticized, Schiller blamed this distancing on “civilization.”¹⁸ He characterized it as a condition where humans became ever more alienated from nature. Once realized “as experience and as the (active and perceiving) subject,” nature, for the civilized, became available only as “idea and object.”¹⁹ Having passed into this presumably higher state, the harmonious unity of the naïve poet is consequently split in two. No longer essentially within himself, that correspondence between his feeling and his thought, as it pertains to nature, is “outside of him, as an idea still to be realized.”²⁰ The sentimental poet “can now express himself only as a moral unity, i.e., as striving after unity.”²¹ While the tender feelings for nature remain, they have been redirected toward the idea of it. The substance of the work becomes “the elevation of actuality to the ideal or, amounting to the same thing, the representation of the ideal.”²²

Still consistent with an idea of sentire in mente, the example of the child still applies. Adding nuance to the dictionary’s linkage of feeling and thought, Schiller indicated that the sentimental poet “reflects upon the impression that objects make upon him, and only in that reflection is the emotion grounded which he himself experiences and which he excites in us. The object here … is referred to an idea [like ‘nature,’ or ‘children’] and his poetic power is based solely upon this referral.”²³ The tender emotions are grounded through reflection: a process of thinking.

Schiller illustrated the specific consequences of that idealization. Identifying the particularity of nature as finite, and the representation of its ideal as infinite, he indicated that “the sentimental poet is thus always involved with two conflicting representations and perceptions—with actuality as a limit and with his idea as infinitude; and the mixed feelings that he excites will always testify to this dual source.”²⁴ Unlike the naïve, where nature is immanent and finite, the sentimental arises from both the finitude of actuality and the infinitude of transcendent ideation. Recognizing that the idea as infinitude is never attainable in actuality, he characterized the two representations as “conflicting.” Never finally resolved, sentimentality somehow reconciles the poet with that impossibility.

As illustrated, Schiller effectively outlined three critical areas of conflict that the sentimental poet reconciles. Unlike the naïve poet who enjoys unification with and as nature as some essence, where nature is a living subject immanently realized in all its finitude, the civilized sentimental poet who is distanced from nature defaults to its representation as idea, object, and transcendent infinity. For Schiller, sentimentality adequately reco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Frank Lloyd Wright—Sentimentalizing over the Dead
• Part One: Louis H. Sullivan
• Part Two: Frank Lloyd Wright
• Part Three: Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint