In February 1914 twenty-six year old Alfonso Iannelli received a telegram from the son of the great Frank Lloyd Wright. The master architect was building Midway Gardens in Chicago and desired the young sculptor's assistance in ornamenting the roof line with an assortment of vertical spindles. What Iannelli came up with was a three dimensional embodiment of his already maturing graphic language. His modernist geishas that morphed figural expressions into architectural ones were merely the next step in his stylistic journey into the deconstruction of artistic forms.

Four years earlier the producers of Los Angeles' Orpheum circuit, the top vaudeville impresarios in pre-Hollywood California, were encouraging the young stained glass installer to paint show cards for the lobby of their new downtown theater announcing the various dog acts, trick whistlers, song stylists and comedians as coming attractions. The only requirement was that he leave a small rectangular window in the corner of each one that could hold the opening and closing dates. The rest was up to him.

They must have thought they would be getting something special from their little Italian prodigy. Just how special became apparent soon after he started flooding the lobby with triangulated faces, crossword puzzle costumes and asymmetrical blocks of vivid, clashing colors. Fred Kornau, the whistler, was depicted as a scarlet slash of a bird perched on a cubist tree branch. Iannelli rotated crimson and green triangles to clothe Louis London in his Indian blanket and headdress. And the hats of Gus Edwards' Matinee Girls became a collision of trapezoids. The more obscure the idea of the vaudeville act or one act play seemed, Iannelli would sift his geometry into a psychedelic virtual reality.

American illustration had never been so distilled, so geometricized, so...European. Iannelli had seen the work of Gustav Klimt in magazines. But that wouldn't explain his innate grasp of the fundamentals of modernism he so effortlessly used. This was no mere stylist working in a shared vocabulary. This was an artist inventing his own language.

Saturated in blocks of color or pulsating checks, his posters distilled each entertainer into building blocks of hands and faces, gesture and reaction. No sense of perspective was allowed to distract the viewer from the flat, geometric essence of performance. A simplified use of line was interwoven with inventive typeface, customized for each subject in a vein similar to that of Josef Hoffmann and Viennese Modernism.

Here were graphic illustrations boldly reveling in their two dimensions, yet conveying the exuberance of music, dance and variety acts in a simple visual plane. With these posters, Iannelli felt he had "...developed a scientific method of handling this medium to express the vaudeville spirit."

If art is, essentially, language, then Iannelli was creating a new dialect with geometry as its grammar. For Meehan's Canines, he overlapped arcs of leaping hounds in orbit around a golden circle to promote a simple dog act. He stood Bertish, the Strongman hieroglyphically askance, his triangular torso surmounted by such a squared skull, that the descriptive words become superfluous. In an era when a monologist in black face could build an act around the then incongruous idea of a well-dressed Negro, Iannelli's poster for Lew Hawkins made a degrading cultural swipe into something heroic and stylish. Top-hatted, cape trimmed with zipper-like fur, this minstrel looks down at the lobby crowds through a monocled eye while elegantly removing his gloves.

Iannelli's modernism, though influenced by the European movement, was totally derived from American inspiration. The Italian immigrant had sought an "American art form" all his working life seeing the artist as an interpreter to industrial society. Ever since his parents brought him from the dusty hill town of Andretta near the turn of the new century, he made himself fit into his adopted home, turning to a near rabid patriotism in his later years. This, however, can't explain his astounding maturity in this graphic format. His work consistently elevates whatever lame act the producers assign to him with finesse and sophistication.

Where did this talent come from at the age of twenty-two and how did this relatively unschooled boy develop such a refined sense of taste? What other commercial artist starts as a virtuoso?

John Lloyd Wright rarely missed a chance to go to the theater. While working for Harrison Albright, the Los Angeles architectural firm, he frequented the Orpheum and passed by dozens of Iannelli's show cards that decorated the lobby. Having tracked down the young artist, Wright discovered that he was equally gifted at sculpture, having apprenticed to the famous Gutzon Borglum at age seventeen. Almost immediately Iannelli's first architectural commission became the corner capitals on a modernist hotel Wright was designing in San Diego.

The 1914 telegram from Wright, then working for his father, asked him to come to Chicago to assist on Midway Gardens as a sculptor for the greatest architect in America. The elder Wright would be breaking from the Prairie idiom of his famous houses to utilize a more geometry based format for this elaborate beer garden and music pavilion. This would be a perfect fit for the rising young illustrator to translate his abstracted graphics into an architectural expression.

Collaborating with Wright seemed to bring out the best of Iannelli's skills in integrating ornament into an overall design concept. A quartet of cubistic figures inside the Winter Garden comprised variations of cube, sphere, pyramid and octahedron. Dozens of concrete Sprites atop the roof line animated the spectacular three acre compound effecting a great world's fair.

Architectonic servers in the outdoor garden presented box-like beer steins foaming over with square bubbles. These Midway Gardens sculptures saw the basic flat geometry of the Orpheum posters telescoped into the third dimension, suggesting the first appearance of "Abstract Modernism" in American sculpture.

Upon returning to California, Iannelli worked with architect Irving Gill on a beach tower and continued to create the lobby posters. But Chicago's avant-garde direction became his vision of the future and after eight months he moved to Park Ridge to begin what would be a fifty year career in commercial design. Asked by Wright the following year to act as sculptor on the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Iannelli refused to collaborate with the famous ego-centrist, after having been denied public credit for his artistic role on Midway Gardens in the publicity that followed its opening. Their smug and acrimonious letters to each other eventually warmed to Wright's grudging acknowledgment of the sculptor's contribution.

Frank Lloyd Wright was America's Leonardo Da Vinci. That he saw Iannelli as a perfect match for his genius and sought his collaboration again after their personal blowup was total artistic validation.

Alfonso Iannelli died in 1965 at seventy-seven, barely recognized as a gifted commercial artist, much less as perhaps the first abstract modernist of American graphic and sculptural art. He saw the possibilities in breaking down the human figure into component shapes of color and line releasing its essential character in a single prismatic burst. This supreme modernist, acknowledged by the great architects and industrialists of his day, yet unsung in his later years, has since been rediscovered by museums and collectors. Examples of Iannelli's work have been acquired or exhibited by New York's Metropolitan and Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Musee d'Orsay in Paris, London's Victoria and Albert and many other institutions. His Vaudeville show cards take pride of place in some of America's greatest private collections.

Iannelli created some one hundred Orpheum posters between 1910 and 1915. And though his friends urged their publication, he resisted, not wanting to be known as a "poster man". It was this need to be seen as an original artist that, ironically, buried his future reputation for generations. If only he had allowed his images to multiply, the Orpheum posters he created in that five year span would have certainly been rediscovered during the boom years of the 1960s. And "Iannelli", so artfully lettered in the corners of each of these lobby sheets, would have meant gold to the later generations of collectors, ranking with A.M. Cassandre, Will Bradley or Alphonse Mucha.

It seems fitting that this Italian immigrant, so anxious to fit into his new world that he yearned to express a truly American art form, defines the paradox that drives this culture. Iannelli was composed of just the right ingredients of innate talent, a drive to define his place in art and the perspective of an outsider. Unencumbered with tradition, his sense of the new was perfectly timed with the marketing of Vaudeville. The Orpheum posters are a keystone of modernism and prefigure his later designs for illustration, architecture and packaging. Perhaps the quintessential American modernist was an Italian named Alfonso Iannelli.