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Judging from a 1902 sketch, Frank Lloyd Wright was not much of a speller.
The master architect scratched down "sumach," then tried "shumac." But grammar aside, the notes he left behind have thrilled scholars of his leaded-glass artwork. It's proof that the inspiration for the stained-glass window he designed for the Dana House in Springfield, Ill., was, in fact, the sumac tree.
The sumac window, and the sketch, are included in "Light Screens: The Leaded Glass of Frank Lloyd Wright." The exhibition, which runs through Jan. 5 at the Orange County Museum of Art, features 50 windows created for Wright homes between 1885 and 1923. There are also sketches, floor plans, photographs and a box of children's toys to help explain the sources behind Wright's intricately patterned art glass.
Some explanation is useful, because Wright, unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, was essentially creating abstract art with glass. "Usually, whether it's medieval or modern glass in a cathedral or a Tiffany window in a house, stained glass is a picture in glass," says exhibition curator Julie L. Sloan. "Wright was doing abstractions, and that was shockingly new."
For Sloan, decoding Wright's glasswork has become vocation, publishing specialty and presiding passion for the last 19 years.
Outfitted in pearls and a sleek black ensemble, Sloan showed up at the museum recently, fresh from a flight from her Boston-area home and eager to recite chapter and verse on the influences fueling Wright's handiwork.
First, she reviews Wright's apprenticeship with Louis Sullivan, which produced elegant but derivative windows, represented in the museum exhibition by a piece he did for the Luxfer Prism Co. in 1898.
Moving right along, the exhibition focuses on the period beginning around 1900, when Wright launched his Prairie School style of nature-inspired, low-to-the-ground architecture. The windows banish curves in favor of chevrons, rectangles and squares, and Wright introduces color for the first time. "Look at the buds of the sumac tree," Sloan says, standing in front of the Dana House window. "It was very important to him in this period that the colors are all prairie-inspired -- gold, amber, green. They go with the houses. The materials, the natural wood and the colors that he used to paint the walls were all these...