Skip to Content

Dining Loggia Arrangement Screen, Zimmerman House, Wright, 1950

Showing 1 of 1


  FILTER RESULTS

Dining Loggia Arrangement Screen, Zimmerman House, Wright, 1950

2013
linen
30 in. x 93 1/2 in. (76.2 cm x 237.49 cm)
Henry Melville Fuller Fund, 2013.26.1.a-c

Rebecca Chamberlain
American, born 1970

Description

Dining Loggia Arrangement Screen, Zimmerman House, Wright, 1950 by Rebecca Chamberlain is a monochromatic triptych composed of three views of a Midcentury Modern American domestic interior. Although it portrays a home that was much loved over four decades of occupancy, the triptych is unpopulated and almost eerily serene. The images are drawn in faint ballpoint pen and overpainted in lithography ink on vintage tracing cloth. The sepia tone of the ink reflects the black and white photographs that inspired the paintings. In some areas of the work, the tones reach a climax between light and dark, seeming almost overexposed, or “blown out.” This effect accentuates qualities in the photographs that form the basis of Chamberlain’s paintings. The left panel of the triptych is a view of the dining loggia, as if the viewer is standing and looking toward the hallway of the master bedroom of the home. The central image offers a view from the dining loggia to the private garden. The image on the right reverses the view on the left, looking from the master bedroom into the loggia. All three images revolve around the wall of windows in the dining loggia, emphasizing the relationship between interior and exterior that was central to the Wright design and of interest to the artist.


Context and Analysis

As the title of the work indicates, all three images in the triptych portray the Isadore J. and Lucille Zimmerman House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. This private residence for a married couple was completed in 1950, near the end of the architect’s career.1 Wright designed “Usonian” houses such as the Zimmerman House, using a standard dimension based on squares, rectangles, or triangles. Wright believed his architecture clarified nature, and his Usonian homes allowed for a direct relationship between the occupant inside and the natural world framed by his careful arrangement of windows.


Chamberlain’s vacant interiors in this triptych feel ghostly. The spaces seem pristine, almost sterile, as if suspended in time. The lack of inhabitants reinforces the current status of the Zimmerman House as a museum site that we may wander into but in which we are never fully at home. The custom wooden framing of the triptych echoes the framing of the Zimmerman house windows.


Chamberlain is drawn to modern architecture as subject matter. She uses vintage photographs to inform her final, painted compositions. Here, she has worked from photographs taken by the respected Japanese publisher and photographer Yukio Futagawa (1932–2013). Futagawa photographed the Zimmerman house twice: in 1975, and again in 1991 for a multivolume book on the domestic designs of Wright.2 After considering the range of photographic images available, including her own and those found in the Zimmerman archives (perhaps taken by the former occupants), the artist made her selection. She placed a vellum tracing sheet over the images to capture the basic architectural lines and then transferred the outline to a vintage tracing cloth from the early 1900s, using a proportion wheel. The artist then filled out the detail of the organic contents of the interior, such as plants and ceramics. The process is similar to that of creating architectural blueprints, and gestures toward Wright’s use of repeated and scaled-up geometric forms. In both Wright’s designs and Chamberlain’s paintings, the grid serves as a module for the placement of everything else in the home.


Connections

The Zimmermans lived in their Wright-designed home for thirty-six years, leaving it to the Currier Museum in 1988. It is the only Wright home open to the public in New England. Chamberlain created the triptych as one of a series of twelve paintings based on the Zimmerman House during an artist residency at the Currier Museum of Art in 2012. The series was later exhibited at the Dodge Gallery in New York City in March 2013. The Currier then acquired the triptych, along with the tripartite maquette (Currier, 2013.26.2a , 2013.26.2b , 2013.26.2c ) the artist used as a scale model for the work.


Written by Michelle Millar Fisher

Notes
1 The Zimmermans had read about Wright’s work before approaching him to design their home in 1949. They wrote to Wright and asked for a house that would toe the line between the “cult of ‘Scientism’ [and] coldly efficient” modern architecture and their wish not to add another traditional house, what they termed “a new antique to the city’s architecture.” See Levine et al. 2004, 11.

2 Futagawa was the founder of Global Architecture magazine. The Zimmerman house was also shot by the renowned photographer of modern architecture Ezra Stoller in 1952.


Bibliography

Chamberlain, Rebecca. Website. http://www.rebecca-chamberlain.com (accessed August 2013).

Dodge Gallery. Press release. Homatorium I: Rebecca Chamberlain. March 2013.

Levine, Neil, Kurt J. Sundstrom, and Hetty Startup. A Work of Art for Kindred Spirits: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Zimmerman House. Manchester, NH: Currier Museum of Art, 2004.


Provenance
Artist
Dodge Gallery, New York, NY
Purchased by Currier Museum of Art, 2013


Your current search criteria is: Object is "Dining Loggia Arrangement Screen, Zimmerman House, Wright, 1950".