The Show To End All Shows: Frank Lloyd Wright And The Museum Of Modern Art, 1940 (Studies in Modern Art 8) (No. 8) by Kathryn Smith; Peter Reed - 2004

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2004. First Edition . Flexibind. Fine/No Jacket as Issued. A crisp, clean Fine copy. 240 pp., illustrations, appendix. In 1940, The Museum of Modern Art staged a retrospective of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, the great American architect, then in his 70s, who had experienced a professional rebirth over the previous decade after many years of relative invisibility. Wright was a full collaborator in the organization of the project, which he intended, he said, to be "the show to end all shows." To accompany the exhibition, the Museum planned a publication in the form of a Festschrift, commissioning essays from many of the best-known architecture figures of the day--Alvar Aalto, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Richard Neutra, Mies van der Rohe, and others. Wright, however, took issue with certain parts of the book, complimentary though it was, and after an incendiary exchange of correspondence, including the architect's threat to cancel the entire exhibition, the show went forward but the book did not.