Bank Teller’s Wicket

Artist Louis Sullivan (American, 1856-1924)

Designer George Grant Elmslie (American, 1871-1952)

Manufacturer Winslow Bros. Company (American)

Date1907-1908

DimensionsH: 41 in. (104 cm); W: 23 in. (58 cm)

MediumCopper-coated cast iron

ClassificationMetalwork

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott

Object number

1982.99

Not on View

Label TextThis lyrical bank teller’s wicket (or grille) was originally one of eight installed in the National Farmer’s Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota. The wickets screened the tellers from the public. Louis Sullivan, a leading American architect, and George Elmslie, his chief draftsman, designed the bank structure as well as its inner and outer ornamentation. The building is a celebrated example of Prairie School architecture, a movement of which Frank Lloyd Wright was the most famous adherent. The swirling foliage found on the wicket was a unifying decorative motif throughout the entire bank (see illustration). Sullivan believed that ornament should be a metaphor for the inner vitality and function of a building. Elmslie had a gift for complementing Sullivan’s ideas with ornament of the utmost delicacy and grace. The wickets were removed, along with terracotta ornamentation, when the building underwent remodeling in the 1940s.Published ReferencesAdams, Henry and Kathryn C. Johnson, et al., Made in America: Ten Centuries of American Art, New York, Hudson Hills Press, 1995-96, p. 124, repr. (col.)

Greenhalgh, Paul, Art Nouveau: 1890-1914, London, V&A Publications, 2000, no. 357, repr. p. 482 (col.)

Riley, Noel, ed., The elements of design: a practical encyclopedia of the decorative arts from the Renaissance to the present, New York, Free Press, 2003, fig. 4, p. 325 (col.).

Exhibition HistoryMinneapolis Institute of Arts; Saint Louis Art Museum; Toledo Museum of Art; Kansas City, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art, Made in America: Ten Centuries of American Art, 1995-96.

National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Art Nouveau: 1890-1914, 2000-01.

Comparative ReferencesSee also Bush-Brown, Albert, Louis Sullivan, New York, George Braziller, 1960.

See also Louis H. Sullivan Architectural Ornament Collection, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Office of Cultural Arts and University Museums Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, 1981, fig. 43 (repr)