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FOREWORDTHEATER is by its very nature an ephemeral art. As a musical score requires performers for its realization, so a theatrical script requires the energies of many artists – actors and directors, scenic and costume designers, carpenters, painters, and tailors – to create the illusion of a life beyond the reality of the audience. That illusion ends with the final curtain, when the dramatis personae remove their masks and take their bows, revealing themselves as the actors they are. Going backstage and viewing the sets up close, discovering the carpentered trusses that support the facades of painted castles or dungeons, gardens or forests, we may experience a similar disillusion. But just as we admire the art of the actor, the professional's ability to become an other, so too we admire the art of the scenographer, the craft that must necessarily support the imagination if we are to believe in that other, staged world. Joseph Urban was a designer and builder of such alternative worlds, for the opera stages of Boston and New York and for the Ziegfeld Follies. Columbia is the fortunate repository of the archives that document this very active theatrical imagination. The many hundred models, watercolors, drawings, and plans that constitute the Joseph Urban Collection permit a more direct access to an era of American stage life than any photo graphic record might. In these works we encounter the poetic projections of an architectural imagination, setting the stage for that "heightened sense of life" that Urban felt was the essential theatrical experience. As the models and watercolors in this exhibition demonstrate, Urban's was a world of color. Architect of Dreams: The Theatrical Vision of Joseph Urban offers an occasion to reimagine that world and to appreciate the art of a man who brought a transformative vision to Broadway. The exhibition also offers an opportunity to make available to a largerpublic another important treasure of the collections of the Columbia University Libraries. Architect of Dreams was inspired by the commitment of Jean Ashton, the director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, to restore the glory of the Urban archival material and was made possible by the initial research of Gwynedd Cannan, now Curator of the Performing Arts Collections, who was assisted by Boni Joi Genser. The full realization of the project depended upon the enthusiastic engagement of Arnold Aronson, Professor of Theater Arts, who brought to the project his own scholarship in theater history – as well as his graduate student in the School of the Arts, Matthew Smith, whose catalogue essay addresses Urban's contribution to American film design. Like every exhibition in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery, Architect of Dreams and its accompanying catalogue became reality through the efforts of Sarah Elliston Weiner, the director of the gallery, and her staff: Jeanette Silverthorne, assistant director; Brooke Sperry, administrative assistant; and the essential Lawrence Soucy, technical coordinator. The support of the Austrian Cultural Institute, New York, for this project is gratefully acknowledged. For her particular interest and assistance, I want to express a special note of gratitude to Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards, the chair of the Wallach Art Gallery Committee of the Advisory Council of the Department of Art History and Archaeology. Finally, on behalf of all my colleagues, I again thank Miriam and Ira D. Wallach, who continue to share our enthusiasm for the enterprise that they helped to launch. David Rosand PREFACECOLLECTIONS relating to the development and history of the theater have been actively gathered at Columbia since the first decade of the twentieth century. James Brander Matthews, who had been appointed to the English faculty at the university in 1891 and was reportedly the first professor of drama in the United States, encouraged his students to involve themselves directly in the life of the stage. A successful playwright himself who would become a widely published critic, Matthews believed that the artifacts of theatrical history had a lively role to play in the education of budding playwrights and producers. He searched the world tirelessly for masks, puppets, photographs, posters, programs, and stage models to add to the dramatic museum that he founded in 1911 to house his growing collections. To teach Shakespeare, Renaissance morality plays, and ancient drama, he commissioned the creation of large plaster replicas of ancient stages; to introduce his students to the commercial stage of their own period, he solicited maquettes and working models from Broadway designers. An inveterate clubman with a wide acquaintance in the booming New York world of popular entertainment, he successfully exploited his social and professional connections to bring an increasingly diverse array of new materials to the Morningside campus. After Matthews' death in 1929, the collections of the Dramatic Museum continued to grow, thanks to a small endowment, but the materials added were much more likely to be archival in nature: drawings, papers, scenic designs, architectural renderings. Mary Urban's gift of the complete archive of her late husband, Joseph Urban, came to Columbia in 1958, during this later period. The Urban papers represented at once a culmination of Matthews' ambition to capture a sense of the working theater in its fullest dimension and a rich addition to the more traditional research collections of the university. The nearly three hundred set models, bursting out of their brown paper wrappings, still tied with ribbon marked with the name of Urban's failed Wiener Werkstatte store in New York, were supplemented by hundreds of letters, drawings, photograph albums, and clipping books that documented the artist's personal history, his life in America, and his many careers. The collection was a scholar's dream, promising not only new information about theatrical design and production but a wealth of unique detail about turn–of-the-century Viennese art and architecture, American opera history, popular entertainment, interior design, and the motion picture business. Sadly, the Urban collection arrived
at time when the fortunes of the Dramatic Museum were
on the decline and modern conservation techniques were
in their infancy. All that could be done for many decades
was to see that it was safely housed and minimally accessible
to scholars who knew that it was on the campus. When
the museum was formally closed in 1971, the Urban collection
was transferred to the Columbia University Libraries
where it was stored in the stacks, still in the artist's
original containers, just as it had come from the workshop.
Librarians were happy to provide what access they could
to the papers, but the fragile condition of much of the
art work and in particular of the models, which had been
constructed from acidic paper and other ephemeral materials,
limited use. Loans to exhibitions and the publication
of a number of books referring to the collection were instrumental in keeping Urban's accomplishments from being forgotten. Thanks to the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and to the Preservation and Access Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the story has a happy end. Funds supplied by these agencies enabled the Rare Book and Manuscript Library to hire a project curator for the Joseph Urban archives, charged with the duty of processing, rehousing, and creating a research guide for paper collections. The approximately seven hundred drawings and watercolors in the archives were matted and boxed. The scrapbooks were microfilmed, and critical conservation work completed. An online finding aid, fully searchable, was mounted on the World Wide Web in 1 999. A consultant was retained to design storage boxes for the stage models that would allow them to be accessible for research while still offering adequate structural support. In the summer of 2000, a pilot project to rehouse the models was undertaken. Now, in the fall of the same year, plans are underway to create an image database of all the visual materials in the Joseph Urban archives, and initiatives are in progress to raise money for the physical restoration of the remaining models. Jean Ashton, Director ARCHITECT OF DREAMSTHE THEATRICAL VISION OF JOSEPH URBANARNOLD ARONSONThe content of a dream is the representation of a fulfilled wish .... Adults ... have also grasped the uselessness of wishing, and after long practice know how to postpone their desire until they can find satisfaction by the long and roundabout path of altering the external world. Sigmund Freud1 The set should be a pure ornamental fiction which completes the illusion through the analogies of color and lines with the play .... The spectator will ... give himself fully to the will of the poet, and will see, in accordance with his soul, terrible and charming shapes and dream worlds which nobody but he will inhabit. And theater will be what it should be: a pretext for a dream. Pierre Quillard2 ALL STAGE DESIGN and all architecture, it might be argued, are the realizations of dreams: ideas that begin as images in the mind and are transformed by artists and artisans into tangible manifestations that are made visible to the eye and, in the case of architecture and interior design, made tactile and corporeal. Yet these metaphoric dreams, when realized, do not necessarily possess the qualities we mean when we describe something as "dreamlike." Buildings and rooms have practical functions that root us in the here and now; stage designs often work best when they do not call attention to themselves or when they serve as simulacra for the recognizable, quotidian world. But Joseph Urban – architect, scenographer, illustrator, designer – rarely limited himself to mere functionality. His works – whether department stores, hotels, castles, bridges, restaurants, theaters, art pavilions, book illustrations, or the lavish and often haunting settings for operas, musicals, pageants, and the Ziegfeld Follies – almost always seemed to be the consummation of fantastical visions and flights of fancy intended to take the spectator or occupant on a journey through the imaginary recesses of the soul. As the title of this exhibition and
its catalogue suggests, Urban straddled two worlds: architecture
and theater. On the one hand, there was an innate theatricality
to Urban's architecture – theatrical in the sense
of being dramatic and playful, and theatrically conceived
as virtual stage settings in which real people are characters
moving through carefully designed spaces. A critic for
the New Yorker in 1928, seeking what he thought
to be an appropriately derisive term to describe Hearst's
International Magazine Building (fig. 1), condemned it
as "theatric architecture."3 On the
other hand, there is an architectural quality to Urban's
stage designs. Although he rarely created the sculptural
environments of his scenographic contemporaries such
as Adolph Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, or Robert Edmond
Jones – Urban relied much more on painted and decorative
elements – an underlying use of structural detail
and a sense of fully constructed spaces pervaded his designs. No matter how fanciful or fantastic the imagery he devised, whether onstage or in a book illustration, there was a palpable reality to the representation – as if one could physically enter into this imaginary world. But always, the worlds of architecture and theater intertwined: Joseph Urban built dreamscapes. Carl Maria Georg Joseph Urban, born in Vienna on 26 May 1872, was one of the most significant stage designers of the early twentieth century. The statistics alone are impressive: from 1904 to 1914 more than fifty productions for theaters and opera houses in Vienna and throughout Europe; thirty productions for the short–lived but influential Boston Opera Company, as designer and stage director from 1912 to 1914; fifty–one productions for the Metropolitan Opera of New York between 1917 and his death on 10 July 1933 (some of which remained in the repertory until the mid–1960s); all of Florenz Ziegfeld's productions (Follies, Midnight Frolics, and eighteen musicals) from 1915 on; twenty–six musicals and sixteen plays for other Broadway producers; plus numerous films, mostly for William Randolph Hearst's production company. All this, of course, was in addition to his continued work as an architect, interior designer, and illustrator which had begun in the early 1890s. Urban's importance lay in his virtually unprecedented use of color, his introduction to American theater of many of the techniques and principles of the New Stagecraft, and his architectural sensibility at a time when most stage designers came from a background or training in visual art. Despite his acknowledged importance and influence, he has remained surprisingly underrated, even forgotten. I will discuss possible reasons below, but perhaps it comes down to a few simple facts: He wrote no theoretical essays, nor did he set down his philosophy in a book; he was a practical man of the theater and while his ultimately more famous colleagues published portfolios of unrealized visionary designs, he turned out actual settings which inevitably had to fit the very real demands of production (even his unbuilt theaters were designed for actual projects that never came to fruition); and finally, his innovations were often in the service of popular entertainment and spectacle (or in the case of architecture, in the lavish homes of the rich and famous). Aesthetically, he was never willing – never saw a reason – to fully abandon ornament or the decorative, so his architecture was out of sync with the developing International Style, and his stage work was never as abstract as that of the most esteemed designers of the New Stagecraft. But as the composer Deems Taylor noted in a posthumous appreciation of Urban:
SYMBOLISM AND DREAMSUrban came of age in the Vienna of the 1890s, the Vienna of vibrant theater and opera, a brilliant explosion of fine and decorative arts, and, of course, of Sigmund Freud. It was a city where pleasure and intellect intersected, and where the exploration of the function of art and the structure of the mind were approached with equal passion. Like the Viennese Secessionist artists who influenced him, Urban had some affinities with the symbolist poets and painters, although his work did not derive from quite the same spiritual and aesthetic sources, nor did it necessarily have the same ends. But clearly, some aspect of symbolism struck a chord within him, perhaps (appropriately enough) subconsciously. The artist Hermann Barr may have been speaking for most of the young Viennese artists of the day when he proclaimed in 1894, "Art now wants to get away from naturalism and look for something new. What that may be, no one knows; the urge is confused and unsatisfied. .. . Only to get away, to get away at all costs from the clear light of reality into the dark, the unknown and the hidden."5 The dark, unknown, and hidden was precisely the realm of symbolism, whose driving force was the desire to explore the human psyche and uncover inner truths hidden beneath surface realities. The symbolist movement that emerged in Paris in the 1880s under the leadership of the poet Stephane Mallarme was heavily influenced by the writings of the composer Richard Wagner, particularly by the latter's quest for a mythological foundation for the creation of art which would then serve to unify society through a communal response to the art work. The symbolists also drew upon the mystical and sublime elements of the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. All nineteenth–century art, literature, and theater, in fact, seemed to have been moving ineluctably from the replication of observable phenomena to the revelation of dream worlds and subconscious landscapes. When Pierre Quillard, a now little–known symbolist playwright and poet, described a theater as "a pretext for a dream" (see epigraph), he could easily have been characterizing the creations of Joseph Urban. The symbolist painters sought to move from an art of objective images, or even the suggestive work of the impressionists, to an art of subjective reality that would affect the senses directly, without the mediation of rational thought. Whether or not Urban was directly influenced by the symbolists, he was certainly absorbing the symbolist–inflected Jugendstil art all around him. Moreover, he could not have been unaware of Freud's efforts to expose the workings of the mind through the agency of dreams. The world that Urban created on the stage – of vivid color, architectural detail, and visual fantasy – reflected these intertwined realms of art and psychology. While the creation of dreamscapes may seem an appropriate aim of theater design, it perhaps seems less understandable with architecture. Yet architecture, too, is a surprisingly apt medium for dreams. In The Poetics of Space, his study of the human response to space and its relation to the subconscious, the modern French philosopher Gaston Bachelard described the house as both a locus and generator of dreams: The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. ...The places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling–places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling–places of the past remain in us for all time....the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind.6 Urban began his career as an architect, and many of his early projects were, in fact, dwellings – but not ordinary or bourgeois homes. His very first commission, received at the amazingly young age of nineteen, before he had even finished his studies, was to create a new wing for the Abdin Palace in Cairo for the young Khedive of Egypt. Later in the decade he would create the Esterhazy Castle in St. Abraham, Hungary (fig. 2) – a pleasure palace with its white marble facade decorated with gold medallions and floral patterns and its individual rooms that were riots of color, pattern, and geometric shapes. In the 1920s, in such creations as Mar–a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida (fig. 3), he was a major influence, along with many of his fellow Austrian architects, in developing the Spanish colonial revival style – with its fantastical and eclectic mix of Spanish, Venetian, and Portuguese architectural elements – which came to define the extravagant homes, clubs, and resorts of the Florida land boom. But even his more conservative homes were carefully crafted visions that integrated the practical needs of domestic architecture with the fantasies, memories, and dreams of those who would dwell within. GESAMTKUNSTWERKThe notion of gesamtkunstwerk – the total or unified art work – was the guiding principle of Richard Wagner's approach to artistic creation. Simply put (something Wagner rarely did in his major theoretical writings of the mid–nineteenth century), all the elements of operatic production –music, orchestration, stage design, costume, acting, singing, and even the architectural environment that shaped the audience experience – were to be unified under the vision of a single artist so as to create a single experience for the massed spectators. The impetus for Wagner's approach came not only from the belief that theater and opera were equivalent (perhaps even superior) to the other arts, but from the mundane aspects of contemporary production practice and the inherent pitfalls of the collaborative process, all of which often contrived to turn the typical dramatic spectacle of the mid–nineteenth century into a nearly incoherent pastiche. Writers customarily sold their plays to theaters which could produce them with no authorial input; composers had limited control over the performance of their music; actors chose their own costumes according to their personal tastes, budgets, and only rarely for appropriateness to the role; settings were, more often than not, composed of stock scenic units that indicated a generic castle, interior, forest, or the like as needed; rehearsals were minimal and performances, therefore, lacked cohesion; and the relation between the images onstage and the environment of the auditorium was never considered. If, as Wagner believed, the art work reflected a spiritual as well as aesthetic quest, then it was crucial that all elements of production be focused on the realization of the artist's vision. While Urban never used the term gesamtkunstwerk (at least not in any interviews or in the few articles he wrote), he was clearly a proponent of the unified art work of the stage. That approach was largely unknown in the United States in 1912 when Urban did his first work for the Boston Opera, and it clearly struck the very perceptive critic of the Boston Evening Transcript, H.T. Parker, in his review of The Tales of Hoffmann (fig. 4): "Music, drama, and setting were wholly fused into the compassing of perfect atmosphere and illusion."7 In an interview in 1913 Urban described inszenierung – the German word for the total effect of the theatrical event, equivalent to the more prevalent French term mise en scene – in terms that reflect the influence of the Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk:
While theater scholars and historians associate the idea of gesamtkunstwerk solely with Wagner and his theatrical heirs, the concept actually spread to other artistic disciplines as well. Inspired by that monumental Romantic work of urban planning, the Ringstrasse – the circular boulevard around central Vienna which was created as a unified work of civic architecture, private dwellings, and public and official space – the Viennese artists at the start of the twentieth century (particularly those of the Wiener Werkstatte) believed in "the integration of all the various design elements in a single aesthetic environment," as the art historian Jane Kallir stated.9 Large–scale public works were no longer an option by the end of the century,10 so young artists turned their energies to private homes which were designed as theatrical environments: the architectural space became a comprehensive milieu in which every element down to the smallest detail was designed, just as it would be in a theatrical setting. And just as the theater employed an ensemble of artisans from carpenters to electricians, so the architects employed an ensemble of craftsmen including painters, paperhangers, and plumbers, all working toward the realization of a single artistic vision.11 Urban, too, was a proponent of the unified approach. "If a building is to reflect the efforts of artistic planning," he declared, "it must be harmonious up to the minutest detail."12 One of the practices that frustrated Urban as he developed his architectural career in the United States was the custom of using jobbed–in contractors so that there was no unity of style nor singularity of purpose among the crafts workers. More important for Urban, however, was the need for the architecture to reflect the society and environment in which it existed.
The analogy between theater and architecture,
however, breaks down on at least one detail. In the theater,
the actors are part of the design, as it were; their
costumes and their movements are specifically integrated
into the setting. But architects have no control over
the look or specific movements of those who use their
buildings. There is an undoubtedly apocryphal anecdote about the designer Eduard Wimmer–Wisgrill who, on a visit to the Stoclet mansion in Brussels, which had been designed by Josef Hoffmann, was horrified at the way in which Madame Stoclet's Paris fashions clashed with the Werkstatte decor. Upon his return to Vienna he established a fashion workshop for the Werkstatte, presumably so that the home owners could be suitably costumed for their settings.14 Even if this were the true genesis of the costume workshop, clearly there is no way to control the total architectural environment once it is out of the architect's hands. In all of Urban's architectural projects, the interiors were completely coordinated: tables, chairs, curtains, floor tiles, wallpaper and painted decor, lighting fixtures, utensils, and appliances were all designed for the space. Urban won numerous awards for his totally designed exhibition spaces, such as those for the Kunstlerhaus exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and the Austrian pavilion at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis in 1904 (fig. 52). The space for presenting art was in itself a work of art: a fully integrated environment. That Urban saw his architectural creations as theatrical spaces, at least subconsciously, may be deduced by looking at the plan and two views of a room for the Goltz Villa (figs. 5–6). Each of the two depictions is presented as if it were a traditional box set (a stage setting of a room viewed as if one wall were removed) with the corner of the room forming an off–center apex. What is particularly revealing is that the perspective seems to be skewed if one compares the view to the plan. The viewer, however, is not standing on the section line as the plan indicates but rather is looking at the room as if it were a stage setting viewed from the auditorium. The rendering and plan of the Goltz room compares interestingly with Urban's stage sets, such as that for Apple Blossoms (fig. 7), a 1919 musical in which Fred and Adele Astaire made their debuts. The room depicted onstage is more elegant and the walls certainly taller than those in the Goltz Villa, but the ground plan – and the relation of the implied audience to the space – is remarkably similar. Of course, much of Urban's work could be described as "theatrical." The prominent place of the performing arts in Viennese society and the general aim of many of the Secessionist artists to unify all aspects of art and society inevitably led to a theatricalization of the arts. But in Urban's work, the theater became an implicit metaphor. His design for the Kaiser Bridge, for example – a structure created to join the Kunstlerhaus and the Musikverein for the celebration of Franz Josef's fiftieth anniversary as emperor – creates what amounts to a proscenium arch through which the baroque Karlskirche could be seen (fig. 8). And while the decor of the bridge consisted of a strong interplay of linear and geometric forms layered with Art Nouveau filigree, the wooden structure recalled the triumphal arches and festival stages of medieval royal entries and Renaissance pageants. It was a decidedly theatrical space. The arch–as-proscenium recurs as a separator between rooms in the Esterhazy Castle (fig. 9) – it appears to be structural but is really a decorative element that frames the space behind it in a manner almost identical to the archway of the Kaiser Bridge. The proscenium motif was picked up in the Rathauskeller, the restaurant in the basement of the Vienna town hall. The structural arches that created the ceiling inevitably evoked the comparison, but Urban emphatically accentuated the theatrical parallel in his decorative scheme. One went down a flight of stairs through an arch as if entering into a theatrical world. Once in the restaurant, the repeated arches of the ceiling created an illusion of infinite vistas (fig. 10). (Again, while the repeated Arches were a necessary by–product of the architecture, they could not help but recall the repeating proscenium motif of Wagner's Festspielhaus at Bayreuth.) The smaller private rooms off the main dining hall of the Rathauskeller were works of total design, with every surface and every piece of furniture part of the architectural scenography (fig. 11). The proscenium motif even emerges in the fireplace of the Esterhazy Castle (fig. 12). The fireplace opening was a curved blue oval, itself framed by a rectangular mantle topped by a massive, vaguely Egyptian chimney breast within which was yet another rectangular Art Nouveau relief. Two high–backed benches at right angles to the fireplace provided further framing as well as "audience" seating, funneling all attention toward the "proscenium." The arrangement of the benches was repeated in several Urban interiors, notably in the entrance foyer to the Wiener Werkstatte shop that Urban opened on Fifth Avenue to sell the works of his Austrian colleagues in order to raise money for them following World War I (fig. 13). (The shop, unfortunately, was a financial failure.) Here the benches have been replaced by Urban's modernist take on Queen Anne chairs.
THEATRICAL ARCHITECTUREThe term "theatrical" – a dismissive and pejorative term when used by Urban's architectural critics – referred to the fact that his designs tended toward the flamboyant, decorative, and illusionistic. In an era when, increasingly, the credo was "form follows function," Urban's architecture often masked its structures; form followed fantasy. Urban believed that public space should be designed with the same sense of total environment and aesthetic pleasure with which one created a stage setting. He was creating dramatic worlds for real people. Following the metaphor to its logical end, his architectural projects could all be seen as "theaters," an impression reinforced by his frank assertion that a building facade was a form of advertising – a marquee.15 Just as Renaissance palaces advertised the power and culture of the Medicis, he explained, so too "a beautiful building is the sandwich board of its owner."16 This philosophy was his rationale for the billowing facade of the Ziegfeld Theatre, which opened on Sixth Avenue and 54th Street in 1927 (fig. 14). The whole idea back of the Ziegfeld Theatre was the creation of an architectural design which should express in every detail the fact that here was a modern playhouse for modern musical shows. . . .The strong decorative elements of this part of the facade have nothing to do with usual architectonic proportions. They are meant as a poster for the theater.17 For theater buildings in New York, wedged into narrow spots on crowded streets, Urban felt there was a particular challenge that could be met through designing the public face of the building "around the electric light sign and incidentally the fire–escape and the marquee." The proposed Max Reinhardt Theatre (fig. 15), intended for the productions of the innovative German director but unfortunately never built, was perhaps the epitome of this philosophy. The facade was to be covered in a skin of Vitrolite, "a gleaming black glass." Cutting horizontally across this surface was to be a pyramid of six fire escapes outlined in gold metal–work with white panels that would contain advertising signs, while the center of the façade would be bisected by a tower of gold grillwork containing the emergency stairs and which was topped with a delicate, perforated late–gothic spire. The result, at least on paper, was a facade of dramatic contrasts which radiated like a gleaming beacon into the New York City night. "A decorative scheme of such force," he explained, becomes a necessity when the theater has to compete with the sheer bulk and height of surrounding skyscrapers. It is far too easy for a low fa9ade to be crushed and lost in the confusion of metropolitan building."18 The facade of the Bedell company store on 34th Street (fig. 16) of 1928 used the same gleaming black surface material. In place of the horizontal fire escapes – unnecessary for a department store – there was a massive curved grillwork over the entrance which served, in essence, as a stunning scenographic device, similar to the crowns that sat above the royal boxes in baroque theaters. Furthermore, the plate glass shop windows along the street and the show windows along an interior arcade functioned not unlike theatrical prosceniums. Significantly, the architect Shepard Vogelge–sang, who wrote about the design, compared the lighted columns of the arcade to Hans Poelzig's design for the Grosses Schauspielhaus, Reinhardt's monumental theater in Berlin.19 For sheer theatricality, however, nothing in Urban's work surpasses his schemes for a new Metropolitan Opera House (figs. 17–18). It is the embodiment of his belief that "a theater is more than a stage and auditorium. It is a place in which to experience a heightened sense of life."20 Otto Kahn, the chairman of the Metropolitan's board of directors, began planning for a new opera house in the mid–1920s. Of the several sites under consideration, one on West 57th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues seemed the most feasible. Urban sought an architecture that would be as radical as Wagner's theater at Bayreuth and yet one in which the social functions and spaces – foyers, smoking rooms, rest rooms, dining areas – were to be carefully considered. "The purpose back of the building of a new opera house today," declared Urban, "must be to find an architectural form so free that it can in turn set free every modern impulse which would tend to heighten and develop the form of grand opera, to make it not grandiose but grand, majestic, as large in spirit as in scale."21 Urban's several proposals do, in fact, possess breathtaking grandeur, theatricality, and splendor. The exterior was almost fortress like, the interior suggested a cathedral. But his plans may also be seen as excessive, even vulgar – at least one critic likened it to Albert Speer's creations for Hitler. Ultimately, it was a theatrical vision for a theatrical space. Yet, because of disagreements among board members, rivalries among architects, disputes over accommodations for patrons (Urban's plan to extend the stage the entire width of the theater would have eliminated the side boxes), and ultimately financial difficulties and the Depression, the project was never realized; the Metropolitan Opera had to wait until the mid–1960s and Lincoln Center for a new building. It is unlikely, however, that funds could ever have been raised for such a structure; nor is it clear that the opera company could have survived the debt and operating costs had it been built. But the future of New York culture, not to mention Manhattan's West Side, would have been permanently changed and it is intriguing to speculate whether Lincoln Center would then have been built. URBAN AND THE NEW STAGECRAFTIn 1911 Urban was commissioned to design three productions for the new Boston Opera Company's spring 1912 season: Pelleas et Melisande, Hansel und Gretel, and Tristan und Isolde. These productions marked a turning point in American scenographic history. Urban was subsequently appointed stage director and designer for the company, and he moved to Boston later in 1912. Scene painting in America at that time was generally a poor version of easel painting. Pictures were painted on canvas and most often were illuminated under undifferentiated white light which flattened the image, destroyed any sense of illusion, and emphasized the wrinkles and flaws in the canvas. In the words of the producer and critic Kenneth Macgowan, this scenery was typified by "large–sized colored cut–outs such as ornament Christmas extravaganzas .. .[and] landscapes and elaborately paneled rooms after the manner of bad mid–century oil-paintings in spasmodic three dimensions."22 Even the most artistically painted versions of such scenery – and there were some notable scenic studios at the time – were nonetheless a kind of semiotic code; they suggested or pointed to the particular, often generic, environment in which the audience was to imagine the play or opera unfolding but which never could be mistaken for the real thing. Urban's Pelleas, however, was a startling revelation to Boston audiences. As described by Macgowan, "it was made of strange, shadowed, and sun–flecked glimpses of wood and fountain, tower, grotto, and castle, vivid in varied color, full of the soft unworldliness of Debussy's music."23 Summing up Urban's Boston work, Macgowan declared that "his scenery, costumes, and lights have given the productions of the opera–house a distinction which they could never have obtained through their singing and acting alone."24 This is a remarkable statement. For perhaps the first time anywhere, certainly for the first time in this country, a critic was acknowledging the role of the mise en scène or inszenierung in the theatrical event, placing it on the same artistic level as the music and singing and affirming its ability to shape audience response. The new approach to scenography, known as the New Stagecraft, was a response to the increasingly crowded and overly detailed excesses of late nineteenth–century stage naturalism. In place of simulation, representation, and illusion, the New Stagecraft was typified by simplicity, suggestion, and impressionism. Unnecessary details and clutter were stripped away; locale was created through the spare use of a few emblematic elements; and the scene was made to suggest "an atmosphere of reality, not reality itself; the impression of things, not crude, literal representations."25 In 1915 for an article in Theatre Magazine, Urban was asked to define "modern" design. "Certain painters, weary of complex combinations of form and color, have sought to return to simple lines and a palette of primary colors," he replied. "Call it modern, if you must, it is in reality Middle Age and Orient mixed. It is Albrecht Durer, Memling, Watteau, Chardin . . . . A formula for modern art? It is this – I think - grace and simplicity."26 This grace and simplicity could be seen in several of his Boston productions. For Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, for instance, the usually detailed depiction of a ship was eliminated. In its place was Isolde's couch on a bare stage enclosed by towering, dimly lighted, yellow curtains. For Offenbach's Contes d'Hoffmann (fig. 4), Urban eliminated footlights, created a diffused lighting that seemed to bathe the singers' faces in a natural glow, and used raised platforms to distinguish the imaginary tales from the "real" world of the prologue and epilogue. His Montmartre set for Charpentier's (fig. 19) may strike us today as fairly conventional and painterly, yet in contrast to the contemporary fare Macgowan saw it as "pure impressionism." Instead of the usual "impossible pretense at a city of real mortar and a sky of true azure depths," he saw "simply a picture into which fitted music and personages, all in the same new world of interpreted emotion."27 One of the innovations of the New Stagecraft was the use of "portals," a device that Urban essentially introduced to American stage design. Portals were proscenium-like frames set within the, stage behind the actual proscenium. They had the practical effect of narrowing the sometimes massive openings of many opera house stages to more manageable proportions. Since the baroque era, designers had employed "sky borders" or foliage borders – parallel strips of canvas painted (and sometimes shaped) to resemble the sky or tree limbs – to hide the fly space and, later, lighting equipment. It was an accepted convention, but as an illusion it had long lost its effectiveness. The portal functioned to restrict sight lines without pretending to be something it was not. Like the "prosceniums" that Urban introduced into his various architectural projects, the portals had the effect of re–emphasizing the theatricality of the production: they blended the architectural quality of the actual proscenium with the artifice of the setting and were thus both scenic and architectural. Most often the portals were constructed of canvas stretched on wood frames, but Urban also employed gauze. By framing a scene in graduated thicknesses of gauze, he could create an aesthetic distance or a sense of unreality. This technique is particularly notable in the rainbow-like triangular arch for Jaromir Weinberger's Schwanda at the Metropolitan Opera in 1931 (fig. 20) or, less obviously, in Ernst Krenek's Jonny spielt auf of 1929 (fig. 21), but can even be seen in the Broadway production Flying High (fig. 22). Urban also employed what could be described as mini-prosceniums within his settings, as he had within his architecture, to frame scenic vistas. Examples abound but might be noted particularly in the garden scene of the Boston production of Don Giovanni, whose Turkish arches framed an Art Nouveau garden and a brilliant Urban–blue sky (fig. 23), or in Gasparo Spontini's La Vestale at the Metropolitan Opera in 1925 (fig. 24), in which a Roman triumphal arch framed the Roman city beyond. These portals not only served as focusing devices but, by allowing the spectator only a limited view of a vista, suggested a much larger expanse and far greater detail. The scenes glimpsed through these arches were, like Shakespeare 's poetic evocations of scenery, suggestive and thereby allowed the spectator's imagination to complete the image in far greater detail than possible with the scene painter's creation. Urban was not merely the designer,
he was also the stage director for many of the operas
that he worked on – something that may surprise
us. The rising prominence of the director and increasing
specialization of the designer through the twentieth
century has encouraged a separation of these roles. Contemporary
audiences now associate the combined director– designer either with avant–garde artists, such as Robert Wilson, or the creators of spectacle, such as Franco Zeffirelli. But early in the twentieth century, Urban was exercising a significant artistic control and as such he was able to bring innovations to the staging and acting while fusing the visual and performative elements of the opera into a unified whole. The Boston critic H.T. Parker, an early advocate of the New Stagecraft, was rapturous in his praise, writing that in The Tales of Hoffmann, Urban "freed the singing–players from the outworn conventions of operatic acting, persuaded them to sink themselves into their parts and to adjust their parts to the play."28 Parker went on to prophesy that "some day, the records may say that a revolution in the setting and lighting of the American stage dates from the innovations at the Boston Opera House."29 Two of the primary sources for the New Stagecraft were the Swiss designer Adolphe Appia (ten years older than Urban) and the English designer and director Edward Gordon Craig (born the same year as Urban). Appia set out to resolve the false dichotomy between two–dimensional scenery and the three–dimensional plasticity of the actor. He abandoned illusionistic decor for the sculptural space of the stage and took advantage of the new technology of electric light to revolutionize stage illumination, literally sculpting space with light. He did not reject decor altogether, and particularly in his designs for Wagnerian opera he created a suggestive and impressionistic style of scenery that evoked mood more than specific locale. Craig similarly rejected the trompe–l'oeil stage of the nineteenth century. His signature contribution was a system of moving screens that could constantly transform the space of the stage. His designs often involved towering pillars and walls that gave his settings a sense of grandeur. Craig and Appia clearly had an impact on Urban. As early as 1908 a Craig–like massing of strong vertical, angular columns and steps can be seen in Urban's design for Wagner's Die Meistersinger at the Vienna Opera (fig. 25). But unlike the soaring, almost gravity–defying semi-gothic creations of Craig, Urban's early attempt seems earthbound and heavy. A few years later, a similar approach was used in his Boston Parsifal (fig. 26). Notably, Urban the colorist comes through even amidst the shadowy gray tones inspired by Craig and Appia. A fiery orange sky is visible through two angular gray columns. Whereas these designs show a presumed influence of Craig, his sacred forest for Parsifal at the Metropolitan Opera (fig. 27), produced in 1920, seems to be a virtual copy of Appia's 1896 rendering of the same scene (fig. 28). This Appian approach to the forest makes a telling contrast with the forest from act 5 of Liszt's St. Elizabeth from 1918 (fig. 29) The treatment of the individual trees is similar, but the massing of them and the use of color in the latter created something more akin to Urban's fairytale illustrations. Several members of the new generation
of American designers at the start of the twentieth century
studied with Appia, Craig, and others in Europe. Notable
among the young Americans were Robert Edmond Jones
and Lee Simonson. According to the now accepted history, the first example of the New Stagecraft to be produced in America was Jones's design for Anatole France's Man Who Married a Dumb Wife at New York's Wallack Theatre in 1915 (fig. 30). The play served as a curtain–raiser for the English director Harley Granville–Barker's production of George Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion. Jones's setting, done in shades of black, white, and gray – like much of the work of Appia and Craig – used simple geometric shapes, creating the impression of a wood–block print, vaguely Japanese in feeling but also medieval. Because it was done on Broadway and was unlike the standard Broadway fare, the set received significant press (both positive and negative), which helped to establish the apparently new movement and lent credence to the appealing story of a single production giving birth to a new aesthetic. The fact is that more than six months earlier, the designer Samuel J. Hume had mounted a highly touted exhibition of new European stage design at his studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was subsequently mounted in a Fifth Avenue gallery in New York City. More important, of course, were the three seasons of Urban's Boston Opera productions. His setting for act 2 of Puccini's Madama Butterfly (fig. 31), in particular, is remarkably similar to Robert Edmond Jones's supposedly groundbreaking design three years later. Urban's Madama Butterfly was composed almost entirely of rectangles surrounded by a decorative geometrical frame. The arrangement of shapes was, in essence, a blueprint for Jones's later version. Urban was strongly influenced by the Wiener Werkstatte – the Viennese arts and crafts movement with its reliance on geometric detail and decorative line – and this production and many others reflect that aesthetic. Werkstatte–like decor also informs many of Urban's Broadway interiors. It is instructive to compare the Madama Butterfly to his fundamentally similar elevation for the Werkstatte–inspired bedroom in the Redlich Villa in Vienna (fig. 32) with its surface carved into rectangular blocks offset by geometric decorative motifs. The pattern can be seen again in the 1913 design for Bizet's Djamileh (fig. 33) in Boston. One significant difference between the Urban and Jones designs is the use of color. The bold black–and-white checkerboard patterns of the stage left window unit of Butterfly are surrounded by a palette drawn from the blue–violet end of the spectrum, with exclamatory red highlights along the bottom. Jones introduced color to his setting only through the costumes. But in 1915, any theater or art done outside of New York City remained essentially invisible (and in theater, at least, the situation has not changed all that much). Urban attracted the attention of the cognoscenti, but the real recognition ultimately went to Jones because he was the first to be seen in New York. COLOR AND ART NOUVEAUJoseph Urban, first and foremost, was a colorist. All of his innovations –on the stage, in architecture, and in decoration – can be tied to his unprecedented use of color, which was virtually unmatched in the twentieth century. His appreciation of color was heightened by his eight–month stay in Egypt when he was nineteen.
[MISSING
TEXT] er, Vuillard, Maillol, and
others) valorized color as a tool for emotional communication. "We
can no longer reproduce nature and life by more or
less improvised trompe 1'oeil," declared Maurice
Denis, "but on the contrary, must reproduce our
emotions and our dreams by representing them, using
forms and harmonious colors."32 The
bold, expressive use of color came to dominate a
wide range of arts across Europe at the turn of the
century. It is especially evident in the work of
two artists who had a strong influence on Viennese
developments, Edward Burne–Jones and Ferdinand
Hodler. In Vienna, the symbolist approach to color
was most pronounced in the paintings and decor of
Gustav Klimt, whose use of line, form, and color seems to anticipate or parallel Urban's scenic style. But the artist whose work most clearly correlates to Urban's in its use of color and technique is Georges Seurat. The shimmering colors that Urban achieved on the stage were created through a variation of Seurat's pointillist technique, which broke up color into its component parts and juxtaposed complementary colors in a seemingly abstract mosaic pattern that, when seen in toto, created a unified image. Urban can be seen using this technique early on, in one of his book illustrations (fig. 34) in which the "points" of color are quite pronounced. Urban painted scenery not as an illusionist imitation of nature but, as one writer put it, "as a medium for the reception of colored light."33 Urban understood that color on the stage (as opposed to on an artist's canvas) is a result of the particular combination of paint pigments and stage lighting – red pigment, for instance, becomes visible only under red light or the red part of the spectrum within "white" light. Thus, instead of covering a canvas with flat expanses of paint as had been the practice of most scene painters, Urban took a semi–dry brush and spattered it. For his skies, for example, he used several shades of blue spattered over each other, then further spattered the canvas with red, green, and silver.34 In the scene shop, under work lights, the resultant painting looked gray, but on the stage colored light employed with subtlety picked up and reflected the differing flecks – Urban could create anything from dawn to moonlight. The effect was "as suggestive of reality," claimed Macgowan, "as is any painting by Monet."35 The fragmented palette created a luminous, shimmering effect that repeatedly evoked the word "magical" from critics and observers.36 .Urban's palette was not limited to blue, nor was his technique limited to pointillage. As with his Jugendstil or Art Nouveau colleagues, he drew upon the brilliant colors and undulating forms of exotic flowers and foliage, the mysteriously patterned world seen through the microscope, and other enigmatic examples of nature; there was also a distinct influence of Japanese prints and other Asian forms. This could be seen over and over in his repeated use of dripping foliage, as in the garden viewed through the portals of Verdi's Otello at Boston in 1914 (fig. 35); the ultimately unused garden for the Met's 1920 Parsifal (fig. 36); and The Garden of Paradise designs (fig. 37); as well as the murals of the Ziegfeld Theatre (fig. 38) and the murals and ceilings of many restaurants and hotels, such as the St. Regis Hotel roof garden (fig. 39), the Central Park Casino, or the elevators of Bedell's department store (fig. 40). These designs used a dizzying array of pastels and drew heavily from the red and violet end of the spectrum. Such a palette was alien to the turn–of-the-century naturalists and literalists, and was seemingly anathema to the Jones–Simonson school of New Stagecraft with its monochrome palette. Related to Urban's use of color was his sensuous treatment of line. With precedents in the arts and crafts movement and symbolism, and with a conscious nod toward medieval art and orientalism, Art Nouveau was typified by a provocative and decorative use of line – "line determinative, line emphatic, line delicate, line expressive, line controlling and uniting" as Walter Crane, an artist influenced by William Morris, put it in 188937 – which functioned visually much as sound had in symbolist poetry. Line, as the art historian Peter Selz explained, "became melodious, agitated, undulating, flowing, flaming."38 Such adjectives well describe the sinuous lines of many of Urban's illustrations from the 1890s, most done in collaboration with his brother–in-law Heinrich Lefler, as in the underwater castle image in Chronika der drei Schwestern (Chronicle of the Three Sisters) from 1899 (fig. 41). This use of line is a crucial element in his drooping foliage patterns and murals, recurs constantly in various Follies productions, and emerges rather startlingly in the Aubrey Beardsley–like tableau curtain of "Tinturel's Vision" for the Met's Parsifal (fig. 42) or the Erte–like curtain for Lohengrin (fig. 43). With the exception of some Ballets Russes designs, such use of line was rare on the stage throughout this period except in the work of Urban. It was particularly striking when juxtaposed, as it sometimes was, against the geometric forms of the Werkstatte–inspired designs. The complete marriage of line and color, not surprisingly, found its most triumphant form in Urban's architecture; and nowhere was this more brilliantly demonstrated than in the Ziegfeld Theatre. As Urban himself characterized it, it was to be a place where "people coming out of crowded hours and through crowded streets, may find life carefree, bright and leisured."39 The interior was designed with no moldings so that everything would flow together smoothly, "like the inside of an egg," and the
decor was envisioned as a single, unifying, encompassing mural. "The carpet and seats," explained Urban, "are in tones of gold, continued up the walls to form the base of the mural decoration where heroes of old romance form the detail in flowering masses of color interspersed with gold." For Urban this was not merely decoration, however, but a carefully thought–out scheme for enhancing the experience of the spectators – focusing them on the stage during the performance and bathing them in warmth during intermissions. "The aim . . . was to create a covering that would be a warm texture surrounding the audience during the performance. In the intermission this design serves to maintain an atmosphere of colorful gaiety and furnish the diversion of following the incidents of an unobtrusive pattern." This design scheme was as much an example of architectural gesamtkunstwerk as Wagner's opera house at Bayreuth, perhaps even more so. Because it was now employed in the service of popular entertainment, however, it was never accorded the same status or respect. (Interestingly, just as Wagner hid the orchestra from view so as not to detract from the idealist vision created on the stage, Urban hid his equivalent of the orchestra: the lighting equipment. Light was crucial in bringing his creations to life and in giving movement to the architectural forms, but in both interiors and exteriors, the sources of illumination remained hidden so as not to seem like afterthoughts or to interfere with the desired effects.) By contrast, Urban's Paramount Theatre, a movie house in Palm Beach, Florida, was simple in its lines and employed a subdued palette of silver and green, "cool and comfortable" (fig. 55). The rationale was simple: the rhythms of Palm Beach were "leisured and sunny" as opposed to those of New York City. "The theatre," explained Urban, "is not an escape from the life around, but a part of it, fitting into the rhythm of the community. The architecture of the Paramount Theatre ... is accordingly simple, spacious, Southern." Urban was a forceful advocate for the use of color in architecture – to shape the mood and enhance the functions of interiors, and to transform entire cities through the application of color to exterior surfaces. Urban, in fact, saw cities as virtual stage settings, which needed color to bring them to life. "When the morning sun gilds the city and casts blue shadows," Urban wrote in 1927, even the buildings of neutral coloring are often very beautiful, but there are many hours when these effects are not seen and there are gray days. Then our buildings need positive colors to enliven them. When we look at the city at night, we see light in many tones. Some are dazzling white, others are soft and warm. A building can have the same distinctiveness in the daytime. Its color can express its personality. These colorful structures will have charm on gloomy days as well as when the sunlight tints them, and at night all degrees of the lights and shadows of artificial illumination will have their part in modifying and enhancing them.40 The Atlantic Beach Club (1929–31) on Long Island was an example of this approach (fig. 44). The walls and decks were composed of surfaces of red, yellow, blue, and white stucco which served as a background for brilliantly colored awnings and umbrellas. By the 1930s Urban was moving into bolder experiments with architectural color. The interior of the New School for Social Research's new home on West 12th Street in New York City (fig. 45), which opened in 1930, provided a particular challenge – a large number of rooms and auditoriums in a relatively small space with each room having a specific function. Urban used large masses of bright color on plaster surfaces to establish relationships among the spaces while distinguishing them as necessary. "The color is in fact the form, the volume," observed the architect Otto Teegen. "One does not feel that certain architectural surfaces have been painted, but that these architectural planes and volumes are actually color planes and color volumes which have been composed to make a room or a library, as the case may be."41According to Urban, warm colors were located where they receive the most light, cold where there is most shadow, a change of plane is generally emphasized by a change of color, thus the walls have one set of colors, the ceiling another. By thus modeling the wall surfaces of a room the boxlike property of four walls is given an expression of contrasting filled spaces and void space; the monotony of the enclosing areas is transformed to an imaginative statement of the space enclosed and given a character by the emotional statement of color.42 It was the critic Edmund Wilson who this time criticized the building for its theatricality. "When he tries to produce a functional lecture building," complained Wilson, "he merely turns out a set of fancy Ziegfeld settings which charmingly mimic offices and factories where we keep expecting to see pretty girls in blue, yellow and cinnamon dresses to match the gaiety of the ceilings and walls."43 Building on the New School experience, Urban saved his boldest architectural color work for what was to become the last project of his life, the International 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago, for which he was appointed director of exterior color and consultant on lighting. His plan seemingly amalgamated the Nabis approach of saturated, emotion–charged colors with Bauhaus-like surfaces of geometric planes (fig. 46). He aimed to create a unified approach to color for the entire fair – color as an architectural medium, not decoration. He set out six guiding principles:
He created a palette of twenty–four colors, all of the "brightest intensity": 1 green, 2 blue–greens, 6 blues, 2 yellows, 3 reds, 4 oranges, 2 grays, white, black, silver, and gold. The plan was for approximately 20% of all surfaces to be white, 20% blue, 20% orange, 15% black, and the remaining 25% to be spread among the yellows, grays, greens, and silver.45 It is one thing, of course, to create such a bright and vibrant color scheme for a world's fair, quite another to transform a functioning city. ZIEGFELD FOLLIESDespite his numerous brilliant productions for the Metropolitan and Boston operas and despite his major architectural works, Urban became – and remains - best known for his work with Florenz Ziegfeld. Following the closing of the Boston Opera, Urban went to Paris with the company in July 1914 to direct Wagner's Tristan und Isolde – the first German opera presented there in thirty years – but the outbreak of the war stranded him in Europe. The producer George Tyler, however, managed to bring him back to New York to design a production of Edward Sheldon's Garden of Paradise, which became Urban's first Broadway show. The production itself was a failure, but Urban's sets and new aesthetic attracted attention. The nine fantastical scenes included a castle, a storm at sea, a fairy bower, and a sequence under the ocean. In a contemporary article on the production, the writer Louis DeFoe seemed to understand that the New Stagecraft had arrived:
But the scene changes were unwieldy and necessitated close to an hour's worth of intermissions, which contributed to the demise of the show. With the Follies, at least, Urban would never make that mistake again. He learned how to make scenery move as if it were music. Among the few people who saw The
Garden of Paradise was Florenz Ziegfeld, who was
looking for a designer to give the annual Follies (which
had premiered in 1907) a more sophisticated look. He
hired Urban – who had never seen the Follies – and
took him out to Indianapolis to catch up with the 1914
edition on tour. Urban's first – and accurate
- impression was that the show was little more than
a series of disconnected sketches which were equivalent,
in his words, to "advertising posters." He
was going to bring his gesamtkunstwerk approach
to Ziegfeld. "I hope most of all to unify the impression
of all these short scenes, to give the entire evening
a kind of keynote," he declared.47 The Ziegfeld
Follies of 1915, Urban's first, astounded audiences,
in part because of the lavish settings for its twenty–one
scenes, but just as important for the way in which
those scenes flowed from one to the next so that the
entire revue seemed to be a single, unified entity.
One of the techniques that Urban had to master was
the basic vaudeville device of the "in one" scene – an
interlude played in front of a downstage drop curtain
that allowed large set changes to occur behind it.
Some critics bemoaned the fact that a great opera designer
was descending into the lower depths of crass commercial
and mass entertainment,
forgetting that opera had evolved in large part from baroque intermezzi – the lavish, allegorical spectacles created by leading architects and painters of the seventeenth century using fundamentally the same staging techniques as modern revues and extravaganzas. History had merely come full circle. (One wonders about the potential effect on twentieth–century theater if Appia, Jones, or Bakst had been forced to master and absorb the ancient crafts and techniques of popular scenography.) The 1915 Follies included one of the most spectacular Ziegfeld scenes to that time – the bath scene (fig. 47), in which two smiling, golden elephants spouted water from their raised trunks into a pool of water surrounded by Jugendstil–like shrubbery. Kay Laurell as Aphrodite rose out of the pool to signal the start of a mermaid ballet. The staircase behind the pool was also the first hint of the soon–to-be-famous Ziegfeld staircase that would showcase the chorus of Ziegfeld girls. The staircase became central element in The Century Girl, produced by Ziegfeld and Charles Dillingham and designed by Urban at the Century Theatre the next year, and then appeared regularly in the Follies thereafter. The 1915 Follies was also to contain the stunning drop of a zeppelin hovering over London (seemingly, though impossibly, viewed from St. Paul's Cathedral) (fig. 48) for a skit with the comedians Bert Williams and Leon Errol. The skit was originally to be in a submarine, but after more than a dozen rewrites, which was typical of the Ziegfeld process, the setting was changed to a zeppelin, and finally the whole thing was cut during out–of-town tryouts.48 Although Urban provided the Follies with a sense of visual style and lavishness that was unsurpassed, as well as an all–important artistic unity, his designs were capable of overwhelming the whole production, even with its enormous star power. A review of the 1917 Follies praises Urban's sumptuous settings and notes that in his "Oriental setting, [he] has outdone himself in his employment of colors and seemingly massive structures," but goes on to protest that while in richness of tone and in suggestion of distance the setting is superb, it, nevertheless, obtrudes upon the players in the foreground. There is no personality definite and dominant enough to stand against it successfully, and therefore most of the fun and satire that had been contrived for the scene went for naught.49 The significance of Urban's work with Ziegfeld was in bringing artistic excellence, visual wit, and a sense of opulence to popular entertainments. Moreover – and quite astonishingly - he introduced the aesthetics of Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk and the scenic innovations of the New Stagecraft to Broadway. The New Stagecraft as presented by Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Simonson, Sam Hume, and others was spare, dark, serious, and pregnant with meaning and import; Urban presented scenographic inspiration as frothy dessert for audience consumption, perhaps never fully realizing its significance. But it laid the groundwork for Broadway musicals for the rest of the century and for the Hollywood musicals of the 1930s and the extravaganzas of Busby Berkeley. Urban created, in other words, a new scenic and visual vocabulary that permeated popular consciousness. Urban, as an outsider in American culture, saw the puritan streak that ran through the culture, particularly its attempt to separate high and low art. But he also understood that the two were not necessarily separate. I believe you can make your fun and your pleasure and your diversion artistic as well as your more serious plays. In America you have seemed to feel that you must do serious things seriously, but that you can do things meant for pastime very carelessly. That ought not to be so. You ought to take just as much care in providing your fun as you do your education.50 CONCLUSIONUrban made a very conscious decision to stay in the United States, and he became a naturalized citizen in 1917. Unabashedly pragmatic, he declared that the economic situation in the United States was far more conducive to the development of the scenic art than that of war–torn Europe, and he believed that New York was about to become the center of the design world.51 While his American colleagues looked to Europe for inspiration and artistic leadership, Urban absorbed the democratic American spirit that valorized popular culture and freely mixed so–called high and low art. At least one historian has wondered if Urban's place in history might have been greater had he remained in Europe. Urban's pragmatism included his belief that the theater could be an arbiter of taste, that like architecture, interior design, and crafts, it could shape the cultural sensibility of the spectators. "If only one person each night sees something in my stage settings which quickens his or her interest in beauty, I shall be supremely happy."52 But this Werkstatte–inspired aestheticism was not in keeping with seriousness of the "art theater." The cutting edge was to be found in the so–called Little or Art Theaters of the day, such as the Provincetown Playhouse where the plays of Eugene O'Neill were first produced. The monochromatic, sculptural, expressionist settings created by Jones, Simonson, Cleon Throckmorton, Sam Hume, Norman Bel Geddes, and others were more appropriate for the neosymbolist, quasi–expressionist plays emerging from the hands of the new American playwrights of the teens and twenties – with their probings of the psyche and the dark inner workings of the soul – than were the colorful and often decorative creations of Joseph Urban. The dark, suggestive scenographic creations of Jones and his colleagues also lent themselves to the new psychological stagings of Shakespeare and other classics being mounted by Arthur Hopkins and later by Margaret Webster and Eva Le Gallienne. Again, Urban's often colorful fantasies seemed out of place. (His rather sunny 1916 Macbeth [fig. 49], for instance, provides a vivid contrast to the somber tone of most contemporary Shakespearean productions.) As a result, the work of designers such as Jones, Simonson, and Bel Geddes was seen as art, while that of Urban was categorized as decoration. And the Follies, providing a bourgeois and upper–class clientele with spectacle and pulchritude (tasteful and sophisticated though it may have been), were either ignored or denigrated by literary and art critics. Ironically, Urban may also have been harmed by his prodigious creations in such a wide area of endeavor. In 1930 an article on the designer drew a fanciful but theoretically feasible picture of Urban's range and interaction with his audience. It is possible for a person to walk out of a house designed by Urban, to pack one's clothes in a trunk he designed, to go for a ride in an automobile of his design, to drive to a theater of his creation to see a show for which he did the sets, then to go to any one of a number of restaurants or nightclubs he decorated, and after dining to spend the night in a hotel, the furnishings and decorations of which again reflect Urban.53 As much as we might admire the range of this seemingly Renaissance individual, it made him, to some degree, suspect. Many of the leading theater practitioners at the beginning of the twentieth century were attempting to establish theater as an art, as opposed to an entertainment. Edward Gordon Craig entitled the major collection of his essays On the Art of the Theatre; Stanislavsky called his autobiography My Life in Art, and his company was the Moscow Art Theatre (just as Georg Fuchs had founded the Munich Art Theatre). A person who designed furniture, interiors, industrial products, restaurants, and nightclubs, however, was at best an artisan or a craftsman. Adolphe Appia, after all, did not design kitchenware, Robert Edmond Jones did not design luggage. (Norman Bel Geddes, it is true, actually made his mark as an industrial designer – he was largely responsible for the "streamlined" look –but had less impact as a stage designer.) Joseph Urban's legacy is still felt on Broadway in the musical theater designs of Robin Wagner (and before him, in the work of his mentor Donald Oenslager) and in the Andrew Lloyd Webber extravaganzas. Echoes of Urban, if not his direct influence, can be discerned in the rich blue tones of Robert Wilson productions, not to mention Wilson's mixing of modernist design and crafts with scenography. The theatricality of much postmodern architecture, notably that of Frank Gehry, has precedents in Urban's work. Urban's influence could be explicitly seen in the New York World's Fairs of 1939 and 1964–65 and of other similar expositions. It is seen in the developments of the new Times Square with its unabashed use of color and advertising marquees and in much contemporary theater in which art and entertainment dissolve into one another. And it exists wherever bold colors and undulating lines create a world of wonder and fantasy. Joseph Urban should hold a place as one of the most significant figures in the twentieth–century design and architecture. Perhaps the twenty–first century will correct the oversight. Arnold Aronson is a professor of theater at Columbia University and former chair of the Theatre Division. He writes frequently about scenography. . NOTES
ASSIMILATION & ECLECTICISMTHE ARCHITECTURE OF JOSEPH URBANDEREK E. OSTERGARDJOSEPH URBAN has been considered by some critics and historians to be one of the leading modernists working in the United States during the interwar period, yet an examination of his work as designer and architect reveals him to be less of a leader and more of a follower, albeit one possessing remarkable, chameleonlike gifts.1 Although these gifts are more difficult to discern in his early career, they become clearly evident following his emigration to the United States, especially in the final decade of his life, when he reached the pinnacle of his career. This extraordinary ability of Urban to satisfy his client base, oftentimes at the expense of originality, indicates, in so many respects, his true brilliance and reveals that he was the product of the complex world of his youth in late nineteenth–century Vienna. By the time of Urban's birth in 1872, Vienna, as the capital of an enormous empire that had undergone seismic shifts throughout the nineteenth century, had embraced many of these changes while denying others. The century had begun with Vienna as the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and ended with the empire irreparably compromised. In the course of that final century of its existence, through war, treaty, and general policy, Vienna saw the landmass of its empire erode in Western Europe while it sought to consolidate its position in the east, deeper into the Russian empire 's sphere of influence, a decision that would produce dangerous consequences by 1914.2 The Austrians were forced to contend with a wide array of socioeconomic and political shifts which were transforming the Continent throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and specifically, they made numerous tactical errors in both their external military operations and their internal political directives. These situations would culminate in pronounced internal administrative tensions within the government, reflected in oftentimes unfortunate ethnic consequences that occurred between the ruling elite and non–German subjects of the empire, many of whom moved to Vienna to seek economic and social opportunities while protecting their own hard–earned achievements. For Vienna this meant that, as capital of this empire, it was increasingly peopled by a wide array of ethnic and economic groups all jockeying for power and position in a variety of fields. The prevailing structure of power, however, was built upon the conservative imperial court and the reactionary Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, most of the artistic, economic, and political achievements of the era must be credited to the ascendant middle class to which Urban's family belonged and which was intent upon preserving the prerogatives it had won since the seminal revolution of 1848. The rise of various ethnic groups which emigrated to the capital city after the revolution, and the maneuvering of various economic and political factions as society moved from an overwhelmingly rural disposition to an increasingly industrial one, resulted in that remarkable phenomenon later known as the grunderzeit, or the Time of the Founders. It was during this period when imperial Vienna itself was transformed into the multistylistic metropolis whose architectural manifestations of historicism were far more complex than any in Paris, London, or Berlin.3 This was the intellectual and visual world that would define Joseph Urban and his career from its earliest years until his death in New York City in 1933. In many respects, the multistylistic tendencies of Vienna's conservative grunderzeit architects would provide him with a more adaptable professional and aesthetic template than would the work of Vienna's truly progressive architects such as Otto Wagner (1841–1918), Josef Maria Olbrich (1867–1908), and Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956). Urban's ability to work in a wide variety of architectural idioms would serve him well for more than a quarter of a century. |
