Extract from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Comments on the Jefferson Memorial
| [ca. 1938] |
Thomas Jefferson? Were that gentleman alive today he would be the first to condemn the stupid erudition mistaken in his honor. I imagine I see the sarcastic smile with which his shade must receive this fashionable design proposing to drag his mortal remains to the surface of the present ... in terms of the feudal art and thought that clung to him then, deliberately to make of him now, a fashionable effigy of reaction instead of a character appreciated by his own people as a noble spirit of progress and freedom.
Published in Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York, 1962), 426. Ellipses in Peterson.
Date Range
Date
January 1, 1938 to December 31, 1938
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Quote Category