Architect of Dreams: The Theatrical vision of Joseph Urban

FOREWORD
THEATER 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
Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History
Chairman, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery

vii

PREFACE
COLLECTIONS 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 turnof-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
ix

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
Rare Book and Manuscript Library
x

ARCHITECT OF DREAMS
THE THEATRICAL VISION OF JOSEPH URBAN
ARNOLD ARONSON
The 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
1

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; fiftyone 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; twentysix 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:

Fig. 1 International Magazine Building, New York, 1929 (cat. 17a)

His greatest misfortune, as well as his greatest glory, is the fact

that his contributions to his art were so fundamental that they are
taken for granted... He revolutionized the scene designer's position
in the American theatrical world. He was the first to make clear that
the designing of stage sets is an art, and that the man who designs
them is an artist or should be.4
SYMBOLISM AND DREAMS

Urban 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 nineteenthcentury 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 littleknown 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 symbolistinflected 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 dwellingplaces are relived as daydreams that
these dwellingplaces 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 Mara-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.
GESAMTKUNSTWERK
The 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 midnineteenth 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 ofThe 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:
The new art of the theater is more than a matter of scenery; it
concerns the entire production. The scenery is vain unless it fits the
play or the playing or unless they fit it. The new art is a fusion of
the pictorial with the dramatic. It demands not only new designers
of scenery, but new stage managers who understand how to train
actors in speech, gesture and movement, harmonizing with the
scenery.8

Fig. 2 Esterhazy Castle, St. Abraham, Hungary, exterior, 1899,

watercolor.
Collection Gerhard Trumler

Fig. 3 Mara-Lago, Palm Beach, 1926, photograph, 8 x 10 in.

Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Fig. 4 Contes d'Hoffmann, 1912 (cat. 29b)

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 Largescale 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

Fig. 5 Goltz Villa, Vienna, plan and view of interior, 1902 (cat. 5a)
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 jobbedin
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.

Fig. 6 Goltz Villa, game and music rooms, 1902 (cat. 5b)
Architecture should be adapted to the climate, temperament,
needs and the national characteristics of a people. A good architect
should know his country from one end to the other, know its people
and understand their ideals. Only then can he hope to build
intelligently. Architecture should be as much a part of the time and
of the place as the current news. It is about time that we outgrew
ancient cultural styles and intermediate mushroom growths. To
have a Colonial or a Renaissance house nestled in the heart of New
York is as absurd as doing modern day jobs with Colonial or
Renaissance tools.13
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
6

anecdote about the designer Eduard WimmerWisgrill 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.
56). 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 offcenter
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

Fig. 7 Apple Blossoms, 1919 (cat. 56)

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 archas-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

Fig. 8 Kaiser Bridge, Vienna, 1898, watercolor, 11 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.

Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
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

Fig. 9 Esterhazy Castle, interior, 1899 (cat. 3)

8

Fig. 10 Rathauskeller, Vienna, large dining room, 1899 (cat. 4c)

arches of the ceiling created an illusion of infinite vistas (fig. 10).

(Again, while the repeated Arches were a necessary byproduct 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 highbacked 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

Fig. 11 Rathauskeller, StraussLanner Room (cat. 4a)

9

Fig. 12 Esterhazy Castle, fireplace, 1899, watercolor,93/4 x 63/8 in.

Rare Book And Manuscript Library, Columbia University
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.

Fig. 13 Wiener Werkstatte shop, New York, 1922, photograph, 10x8

in.
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
10

Fig. 14 Ziegfeld Theatre, New York, facade, 192627 (cat. 9a)

THEATRICAL ARCHITECTURE
The 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 fireescape 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

11

Fig. 15 Reinhardt Theatre (proposed), New York, facade, 1928 (cat.

14a)
this surface was to be a pyramid of six fire escapes outlined in gold
metalwork with white panels that would contain advertising signs,
while the center of the faade would be bisected by a tower of gold
grillwork containing the emergency stairs and which was topped
with a delicate, perforated lategothic 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

Fig. 16 Bedell Store, New York, facade, 1928 (cat. 12a)

12

Fig. 17 Metropolitan Opera House (proposed), New York, facade,

192627 (cat. 8a)

Fig. 18 Metropolitan Opera House, proscenium, 192627 (cat. 8d)

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 Vogelgesang, 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. 1718). It is
the

13

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 mid1920s.
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 mid1960s 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 STAGECRAFT
In 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 "largesized
colored cutouts such as ornament Christmas extravaganzas .. .
[and] landscapes and elaborately paneled rooms after the manner

of bad midcentury 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
sunflecked 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 operahouse 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 scne or inszenierung in

14

Fig. 19 Louise, 1912 (cat. 30)

15

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 nineteenthcentury 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

Fig. 20 Schwanda, der Dudelsakpfeifer, entrance to city, 1931 (cat.

45)
[Show larger image]
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

16

Fig. 21 Jonny spieltauf, set model, 1929 (cat. 44)

introduced into his various architectural projects, the portals had
the effect of reemphasizing 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 Schwandaat 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).

Fig. 22 Flying High, set model, 1930 (cat. 69)

17

Fig. 23 Don Giovanni, Giovanni's garden, 1913 (cat. 33)

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
18

Fig. 24 La Vestale, 1925, watercolor, 8% x 13 in.

Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
[Show larger image]
designer either with avantgarde 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 singingplayers
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 twodimensional scenery and the threedimensional

plasticity of the actor. He abandoned illusionistic decor for the

sculptural space of the stage and took advantage

19

Fig. 25 Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, inside Saint Katherine's

Church, 1908 (cat. 24)
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 trompel'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
Craiglike 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

Fig. 26 Parsifal, Klingsor's magic castle, 1914 (cat. 36)

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
20

Fig. 27 Parsifal, sacred grove, 1920 (cat. 41 a)

[Show larger image]

Fig. 28 Adolphe Appia, Parsifal, sacred grove, 1896. Collection

Suisse du Theatre, Bern

Fig. 29 St. Elizabeth, woods, 1918 (cat. 39)

[show larger image]
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 curtainraiser 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 woodblock 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,

21

Fig. 30 Robert Edmond Jones, The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife,
revised sketch, 1915.
Whereabouts Unknown
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. Werkstattelike decor also
informs many of Urban's Broadway interiors. It is instructive to
compare the Madama Butterfly to his fundamentally similar
elevation for the Werkstatteinspired bedroom in the Redlich Villa in
Vienna (fig. 32) with its surface carved into rectangular blocks
offset by geometric

Fig. 31 Madama Butterfly, inside Butterfly's house (detail), 1912

(cat. 310)

Fig. 32 Redlich Villa, Elsa Redlich's bedroom, 1907 (cat. 6)

22

Fig. 33 Djamileh, elevation and ground plan, Haroun's palace, 1913

(cat. 32)
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 blackand-white checkerboard patterns of the stage left
window unit of Butterfly are surrounded by a palette drawn from
the blueviolet 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 NOUVEAU
Joseph 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 eightmonth stay in Egypt when he was
nineteen.

Fig. 34 Fairytale illustration, n.d. (cat. 23)

[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 BurneJones 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

24

Fig. 35 Otello, Desdemona's garden, 1914 (cat. 35)

Fig. 36 Parsifal, Klingsor's garden, 1920 (cat. 41b)

[Show larger image]
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 semidry brush and
spattered it. For his skies, for example, he used several shades of
blue spattered over each other, then further spattered the canvas

25

Fig. 37 The Garden of Paradise, queen's bower, 1914 (cat. 47)

[Show larger image]
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

26

Fig. 38 Ziegfeld Theatre, mural for balcony ceiling, 192627 (cat.

9c)
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 turnof-thecentury naturalists and literalists, and was seemingly anathema to
the JonesSimonson 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

Fig. 39 St. Regis Hotel, New York, murals for roof garden dining
room, 192728 (cat 10)
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 brotherin-law Heinrich Lefler, as in the underwater castle
image in Chronika der drei Schwestern (Chronicle of the Three
Sisters)

27

Fig. 40 Bedell Store, elevator doors and interior of cars, 1928 (cat.
12b)
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 Beardsleylike tableau curtain of "Tinturel's Vision" for the
Met's Parsifal (fig. 42) or the Ertelike 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

Fig. 41 Chronika der drei Schwestem, 1899 (cat. 2)

28

Fig. 42 Parsifal, tableau curtain showing "Tinturel's Vision," 1920,

watercolor, 12 x 16 3/8 in.
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
[Show larger image]
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 thoughtout 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

Fig. 43 Lohengrin, curtain, 190911 (cat. 25)

29

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

Fig. 44 Atlantic Beach Club, Long Island, terraced apartments,

1929-31 (cat. 20)
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 (192931) 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

30

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, emotioncharged
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:
1. Color to be used in an entirely new way.
2. Color used to coordinate and bring together all these vastly
different buildings.
3. Color to unify and give vitality.
4. Color to give brightness and life to material not beautiful in
itself.
5. Color to give the spirit of carnival and gaiety to supply
atmosphere lacking in our daily life.
6. Color that should transport you from your everyday life when
you enter the fairgrounds.44
He created a palette of twentyfour colors, all of the "brightest
intensity": 1 green, 2 bluegreens, 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.

Fig. 45 The New School for Social Research, New York, dance studio,

1930 (cat. 19c)

31

ZIEGFELD FOLLIES
Despite 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:

Fig. 46 Century of Progress International Exposition, Chicago, 1933,

watercolor, 13 x 33 in. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia
University
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 twentyone 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,
32

Fig. 47 The Ziegfeld Follies of 1915, bath scene (cat. 49c)

[Show larger image]

Fig. 48 The Ziegfeld Follies of 1915, zeppelin over London (cat. 49b)
[Show larger image]

Fig. 49 Macbeth, outside the castle, 1916 (cat. 53)

[Show larger image]
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 twentiethcentury 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 Jugendstillike 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
soonto-be-famous Ziegfeld staircase that would showcase the
chorus of Ziegfeld girls. The staircase became

33

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 outof-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

CONCLUSION
Urban 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 wartorn 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 socalled 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 Werkstatteinspired aestheticism was not in
keeping with seriousness of the "art theater." The cutting edge was
to be found in the socalled Little or Art Theaters of the

34

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, quasiexpressionist 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 upperclass 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 196465 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 twentiethcentury
design and architecture. Perhaps the twentyfirst 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.

35

NOTES
1. Sigmund Freud, On Dreams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965;
orig. pub. 1901) 97,99.
2. Quoted in Frantisek Deak, Symbolist Theater: The Formation
of an AvantGarde (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1993) 145.
3. Quoted in Randolph Carter and Robert Reed Cole, Joseph
Urban: Architecture., Theatre, Opera, Film(New York:
Abbeville Press, 1992) 183.
4. Deems Taylor, "The Scenic Art of Joseph Urban: His Protean
Work in the Theater," Architecture 69 (May 1934): 290.
5. Quoted in Hans Bisanz, "The Visual Arts in Vienna from 1890
to 1920," Vienna 18901920, Robert Waissenberger, ed.
(New York: Tabard Press, 1984) 116.
6. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1964) 6.
7. H.T. Parker. "The Opera Outdoes Itself ... 'The Tales of
Hoffmann' Produced as Never Before in America,"Boston
Evening Transcript (26 November 1912).
8. From the Sunday Leader. Typed manuscript in the Joseph
Urban Collection (box 34, file 5), Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Columbia University (hereafter JUC).
9. Jane Kallir, Viennese Design and the Wiener Werkstatte (New
York: Galerie St. Etienne/George Braziller, 1986) 22
10.See Carl Schorske's "Introduction" to Kallir's Viennese
Design, especially page 8; for a far more extensive
investigation, see his book Finde-Siecle Vienna: Politics and
Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981).
11.Kallir, Viennese Design, 49.
12.Frank Cadie, "Excels Because He Does Not
Specialize," Brooklyn Eagle Magazine (30 March 1930).
13.Ibid.
14.Kallir (Viennese Design, 22) cites the factual refutation of this

story but notes that it has persisted because of its

plausibility.
15.Joseph Urban, "Wedding Theater Beauty to
Ballyhoo," American Architect (20 September 1928): 361.
16.Ibid.
17.Joseph Urban, Theatres (New York: Theatre Arts Press, 1929).
18.Ibid.
19.Shepard Vogelgesang, "Architecture and Trade
Marks," Architectural Forum (1929): 900.
20.Urban, Theatres.
21.Ibid.
22.Kenneth Macgowan, "The New StageCraft in
America," Century Magazine 65 (January 1914): 418.
23.Ibid., 416.
24.Ibid.
25.Ibid., 418.
26.Typescript, JUC (box 34, file 5).
27.Macgowan, "New StageCraft in America," 418.
28.H.T. Parker, "Opera Outdoes Itself."
29.Ibid.
30.Manuscript, JUC (box 34, file 5). See also Otto Teegen,
"Joseph Urban's Philosophy of Color," Architecture69 (May
1934): 257.
31.John Corbin, "The Urban Scenery and Some Other
Matters," New York Times (30 September 1917): III.8.
32.Maurice Denis, "From Gauguin and van Gogh to Neo
Classicism," in Art and Theory 19001990, Charles Harrison
and Paul Wood, eds. (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers,
1993)51.

33.Taylor, "Scenic Art of Joseph Urban," 276.

34.Ibid. 279.
35.Macgowan, "New StageCraft in America," 421.
36.See, for example, Hiram Kelly Moderwell, The Theatre of To
day (New York: John Lane, 1914) 103.
36

37.Quoted in Peter Selz, "Introduction," Art Nouveau: Art and

Design at the Turn of the Century, Selz and Mildred
Constantine, eds. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959)
10.
38.Ibid. 39. Urban, Theatres. All subsequent quotes relating to
the theaters are from the same source. 40. Quoted in
Teegen, "Joseph Urban's Philosophy of Color," 262, 265.
39.Ibid., 261.
40.Quoted in Carter and Cole, Joseph Urban, 204.
41.Ibid. Though generally well received, Urban's architectural
design was particularly criticized by the architect Philip
Johnson for the way in which it mimicked the International
Style while failing to have form rigorously adhere to function
the design remained far too decorative for Johnson's taste.
42.JUC (box 34, file 5).
43.Ibid.
44.Louis DeFoe, "A New Experiment with the Fairy
Play," Greenbook Magazine (February 19 15): 277.
45.Oliver M. Sayler, "Urban of the Opera, the Follies, and the
Films" Shadowland (typescript, JUC [box 34, file 3]).
46.See Richard and Paulette Ziegfeld, The Ziegfeld Touch: The
Life and Times of Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1993) 73.
47.Review of Ziegfeld Follies, in Dramatic Mirror (23 June 1917).

48.Sayler, "Urban of the Opera."

49."Our Scenic Art Leads the World," Sunday World (18 January
1920).
50.Ibid.
51.Arthur Strawn, "Joseph Urban," Outlook and Independent 555
(18 June 1930): 275.

37

ASSIMILATION & ECLECTICISM

THE ARCHITECTURE OF JOSEPH URBAN
DEREK E. OSTERGARD
JOSEPH 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 nineteenthcentury 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 nonGerman subjects of the empire, many of
whom moved to Vienna to seek economic and social opportunities
while protecting their own hardearned 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
38

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 (18411918), Josef

Maria Olbrich (18671908), 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.
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the artistic and
design community in Vienna was basically defined by a growing rift
between the academic and the avantgarde, a situation found in
many other major European cultural centers. In Vienna, designers
and architects joined painters in their revolt when the younger,
more avantgarde Austrian artists seceded in May of 1897 from the
conservative and discriminatory artists' association known as the
Knstlerhaus, which had dominated the field of painting in Vienna
through the exhibitions held in its halls. The new, rival group
thereafter known as the Secessionists held its first exhibition in
March of 1898 and then conducted its second in November of 1898
in the startling, purposebuilt structure designed by Josef Maria
Olbrich (fig. 50). Olbrich, only five years older than Urban, was
already a leading figure in the progressive design world of Central
Europe, second only to his mentor, Otto Wagner. 4 Olbrich's
formation of an innovative language of design in the final years of
the 1890s would effectively clear the ground around him of all
serious competition, with the exception of one contemporary, Josef
Hoffmann.5
The slightly younger Hoffmann had won praise at the end of the
1890s for his own Jugendstil design with its sweeping curvilinear
vocabulary imbued with symbolic meaning. Following his success
with it at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, he quickly
abandoned this manner of work, abruptly and adroitly shifting his
design vocabulary to one that was markedly symmetrical and
geometric, and initially free of ornamental elements. He would
widely disseminate this revolutionary vocabulary through his
inauguration of the Wiener Werkstatte, which executed a wide
range of modernist decorative arts for an elitist audience until
1932.

Fig. 50 Josef Maria Olbrich, Secession Exhibition Hall, Vienna, 1897.

Photograph: Giorgio Pezzato

39

URBAN: THE EARLY YEARS

Joseph Urban must be seen in the context of his slightly older
contemporaries. Like Hoffmann, Urban was not only forced to labor
in the shadow of the exceptionally gifted Otto Wagner, but he was
also at a disadvantage because he had not trained in Wagner's
atelier. Having been born into one of the principal centers of
modernism at the end of the nineteenth century, Urban was
additionally hampered in that the field of endeavor for progressive
architects and designers was already excessively crowded with
talent by the time he began his practice. 6
Between the turn of the century and his departure for Boston in
1912, Urban seems to have received relatively few commissions,
especially when one compares his career during this period with
those of Olbrich and Hoffmann. Nonetheless, Urban's early work,
although for a limited clientele, was highly visible in that he worked

for a prominent Hungarian family, the Esterhazys, and he was

commissioned by the imperial family to produce two largescale
temporary installations for important court functions.
The first of these, a bridge connecting the Knstlerhaus and the
Musikverein (fig. 8), was perhaps the most original work of his
Viennese years. This powerful geometric endeavor of 1898,
although temporary, was remarkable for the way it linked two
massive, academic, historicist buildings with a form, ornament, and
materials that did nothing to unite it aesthetically with the two
extant structures. Certainly, the decorative vocabulary used for this
passageway by the young Urban was indebted to the highly
individual ornamental language that had been so brilliantly
developed by Olbrich during the two previous years and which was
well known to Urban by that time.
Throughout Urban's career, he would reveal an ability to garner
highprofile clients. An early indication was the several
commissions from Count Karl Esterhazy at the turn of the century
(figs. 2, 9, 12). In addition

Fig. 51 Hagenbund exhibition hall, Vienna, remodeled by Urban,

1901 , watercolor, 11 1/2 x 5 1/2 in.
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

To his interior designs which were executed for private clients,

Urban also designed several other important public commissions,
including the StraussLanner Room (fig. 11) in the Rathauskeller in
Vienna's City Hall on the Ringstrasse. Another important
commission was the redesign of a market hall into the exhibition
space for the Hagenbund (fig. 51), an artists' organization that
sought to rival the Secessionist group. This building was completed
in 1901; but with its four, squat towers, stuccoed surface, and
ornamental decorations, it could not measure up to the
consummate Secession building designed almost four years earlier
by Olbrich.
40

Fig. 52 Austrian Pavilion, Saint Louis World's Fair, 1904, photograph,

8x10 in.
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
Urban's early international triumphs included the design of award
winning exhibitions for the Austrian installation at the 1900 Paris
Exposition and at the Bavarian International Exposition of 1902. He
achieved a major success with his design for the interiors of the
Austrian Pavilion at the Saint Louis World's Fair in 1904 (fig. 52),
(where fairgoers could also see the German Pavilion, installed under
the direction of Josef Maria Olbrich). These interiors were deeply
indebted to the stringent, geometric design vocabulary developed
by Hoffmann circa 18991900.7
Urban's last prominent Viennese commission was his Kaiserpavilion
of 1908 (fig. 53) which Franz Josef II used as a viewing platform

during the ceremonies in celebration of his sixty years as emperor.

Again, Urban was indebted to an earlier work of Otto Wagner's, his
wellknown Hofpavillion, the rail station built at Schonbrunn palace
in 189697.8 The considerable cost overruns of Urban's temporary
structure, and the charges that he had favored his own friends in
the construction of this project, unfortunately compromised his
career in Vienna before the First World War. 9
19121933: THE UNITED STATES
Although Urban moved to the United States in 1912, he spent his
first decade there primarily working as a theatrical designer; his
profile as an architect in the United States would not emerge until
the early 1920s. Essentially, the field of modernist architecture in
the United States was, at the end of the First World War, in a brief
period of relative stagnation. Apart from the important earlier work
of Frank Lloyd Wright, design in the United States and its overall
global influence was focused in phenomena such as the process of
standardization and mechanization seen in the great automobile
factories of Detroit. These issues were also scientifically proposed
in the highly influential publications of Frederick Winslow Taylor
(18561915), which were read by many European architects and
engineers. A further contribution to international modernism by the
American design community was revealed in the maturation of that
engineering phenomenon most fully associated with American
urbanism, the skyscraper.

Fig. 53 Kaiserpavilion, Vienna, 1908, photograph, 8 x 10 in.

Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
41

Fig. 54 Bath and Tennis Club, Palm Beach, 1926, etching, 12 1/4 x
15 1/4 in.
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
Initially, and perhaps most importantly, in the United States Urban
benefited from a situation completely opposite to what he had
experienced in Vienna: in the United States there were too few
progressive architects for the amount of work that was being
commissioned. The field of indigenous, progressive designers was
relatively uncrowded in the 1920s, and the number of European
modernists who would emigrate to the United States would remain
relatively small until the early 1930s. 10 With little competition in
Manhattan, Urban was able to purvey his work to the wealthiest
group of Americans, many of whom would have seen his designs at
the Metropolitan Opera and for the Ziegfeld Follies.
An examination of the architectural work of Joseph Urban in the
1920s reveals his deep understanding of clientarchitect relations
and the prevailing eclecticist tastes in the design community. At the
same time, it undermines the general perception among many of
these clients and some critics that he was part of the architectural
avantgarde. In little more than a decade, Urban would work for
such prominent Americans as William Randolph Hearst, Otto Kahn,
Marjorie Merriweather Post, and Anthony

Fig. 55 Paramount Theatre, Palm Beach, 1926, watercolor, 15x20

in.
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
Drexel Biddle, Jr. In addition to his remarkable talent for social
interaction an essential quality in serving the various needs of
such clientele Urban utilized a wealth of aesthetic expressions.
Ranging from accomplished historicism to designs based on
progressive contemporaneous European work, these projects were
united by Urban's impressive understanding of the aesthetic
components of each style.
When Urban employed avantgarde idioms, however, he often was
little more than a copyist, and many of his designs lacked the
complex and technically accomplished underpinnings that defined
the groundbreaking modernist works. Nevertheless, Urban's
awareness of contemporaneous European design concepts, and his
brilliant recycling of many of their creative elements, explains his
ability to appear as an innovator in a nation relatively unfamiliar
with his prototypes. Even if not entirely original, Urban's work
paved the way for the acceptance of many advanced architectural
ideas in the United States.
42

The impressive body of work that Urban completed in Palm Beach

in the second half of the 1920s was deeply within the idiom of
revivalist work that was employed throughout the United States
during the first half of the twentieth century. He designed private
homes, shopping centers, private clubs, large commercial
structures, and churches, commissions created for an affluent

market. The internal plans, technical components, deployment and

mixing of ornament, and even the massing of these buildings was
often highly original and had little precedent elsewhere. The fact
that Urban could enter into this world of architecture and design
and produce such a remarkably accomplished oeuvre in such a
short period of time is testimony to his talents and adaptability. His
designs in Palm Beach for the Bath and Tennis Club (fig. 54), the
Paramount Theatre (fig. 55), Anthony Biddle's residence (fig. 56),
and additions to Mrs. Post's monumental seasonal home, MaraLago (fig. 3), and the Oasis Club bear

Fig. 56 Anthony Biddle residence, Palm Beach, 1927, photograph,

10x8 in.
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Fig. 57 Bedell Store, showroom, 1928 (cat. 12c)

Fig. 58 Kaufmann Department Store, Pittsburgh, counter area, 1928

(cat. 13)

43

favorable comparison to the work of his contemporaries, such as

Addison Mizner (18721933) and Marion Sims Wyeth (18891982),
working in the same village.11 The deeply private world 'of Palm
Beach in the interwar era, however, did not allow the public much
exposure to Urban's work. But in the metropolitan New York area
his work was far more visible. The International Magazine Building
in New York (fig. 1), which Urban designed in 1927 for William
Randolph Hearst, looked back in many ways to pre World War I
Vienna with its monumentality, towering columns, and oversized
decorative embellishments. The Bedell Store in New York in 1928
(fig. 57) was a more obvious example of design borrowing by
Urban. The towering, fluted lighting fixtures of the entryway of this
women's fashion store are quite similar to the interior lighting
fixtures used by Hans Poelzig in his

Fig. 59 The New School for Social Research, elevation, 1 930 (cat. 1
9a)
outstanding Berlin theater, the Grosses Schauspielhaus, completed
in 1919 and refashioned from a market hall for the renowned stage
director Max Reinhardt.12 Urban would also use a variation of these
fixtures for his renovation plans for the Kaufmann Department
Store in Pittsburgh (fig. 58).
Urban's most critically acclaimed building in New York was the New
School for Social Research, completed in 1930 (fig. 59), and it
typified his penchant for borrowing and eclecticism. His deployment
of stylistic elements of the emerging International Style produced
an elegant facade. But the result had little to do with this new
movement's strong social purpose, which led to a formal design
vocabulary and an eschewing of ornamental overlay. Urban was
more eclectic in the aesthetic concepts that he utilized for the
building's interior. Elements of the building's auditorium (fig. 60)
were seemingly borrowed from Walter Gropius's ingenious Total
Theatre designed for Erwin Piscator in 1927. Although never built,
Gropius's designs were known to many in the theater world, as
were the innovative concepts of Piscator, who advocated a closer
unity between stage and audience, a situation reflected in Urban's
eggshaped plan which closely paralleled Gropius's design. The
double staircase in the New School's library (fig. 61) is strongly
reminiscent of the double staircase used in the main rotunda of the
Stockholm Public Library, completed by Erik Gunnar Asplund in 1

927 and well known in the international architectural

community.13 As much as it was praised, the New School also had
its detractors who criticized Urban's lack of purity or originality.
By the time Urban emigrated to the United States in 1912, he was
nearly forty, an age when few individuals dare to test their
professional and social skills within entirely new environments.
Within a decade of arriving opera, film, and stage, as well as
freestanding buildings and interior designs for extant structures.
Divorced from circumstances on the Continent and from those
colleagues who might have challenged his originality
44

Urban seems to have become something of a professional sleuth,

investigating the innovations of others. By the end of the 1920s
when his office was at its peak, he was serving an enormous
clientele with many different needs.
Ultimately it may be said that apart from his facility to design in a
variety of idioms which often constituted antagonistic schools of
thought, one of the great accomplishments of Urban's life was that
he quickly came to understand the complexities of the American
marketplace which, in many ways, reflected the diversity of the
Vienna he had known in his early professional life. Those lessons
would enable him to become one of the more successful and
influential architectdesigners in the United States from the early
1920s until his death in 1933.

Fig. 60 The New School for Social Research, auditorium, 1930 (cat.
19f)

Fig. 61 The New School for Social Research, stairs in library, 1930
(cat. 19d)
Derek E. Ostergard is a historian of twentiethcentury decorative
arts and design and is the associate director and founding dean of
the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts.
NOTES
1. The most comprehensive work on Joseph Urban is Randolph
Carter and Robert Reed Cole, Joseph Urban: Architecture,
Theatre, Opera, Film (New York: Abbeville Press, 1992). This
lavishly illustrated work accords far more significance to the
architectural and design work of Urban than does the author
of this essay. The detailed chronology and abundant

illustrations have been used, with appreciation, in preparing

this essay.
2. In 1859, Austria's centurieslong participation in the
governance of the Italian peninsula ended, and when the
Austrians lost to the Prussians in 1866 at the battle of
Sadowa, their preeminence in pan-German affairs
evaporated. Between the 1840s and the 1860s, the Austrian
government was forced to capitulate to the Hungarians on
many important issues as well.
3. The grunderzeit is a period of time basically parallel to the
Gilded Age in the Unit ed States, to a portion of La Belle
Epoque in France, and to the Victorian and Edwardian eras in
Great Britain. For more information on late nineteenth and
early twentiethcentury
45

Vienna, consult the finest work on the period, Carl E. Schorske, Fin
de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1979). In
addition, another noteworthy work on Vienna at this time is Stefan
Zweig's World of Yesterday: An Autobiography of Stefan
Zweig (New York: Viking, 1943).
4. Olbrich's role in the Viennese design community would be
very brief, as he would be hired to head an important design
colony in Darmstadt, funded by Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig, a
grandson of Queen Victoria and the brother of Empress
Alexandria of Russia. Olbrich would move there in 1899, and
afterwards become known as the most influential architect
designer in the German-speaking world by the time of his
death in 1908. For further information, see J.M. Olbrich,
Architektur (Berlin: E. Wasmuth, 190114), issued in thirty
parts.
5. Hoffmann has been the subject of many books. The most
comprehensive examination of his architectural commissions
is Eduard F. Sekler's Josef Hoffmann: The Architectural
Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). For a
review of his designs for objects, see Peter Noever, ed., Josef
Hoffmann Designs (Munich: Prestel, 1992).

6. It is interesting to note that the principal architects and

designers who worked in Vienna in the second half of the
nineteenth century and who contributed to the historicist
appearance of the city had all died by the decade of the
1890s, the decade when Urban came of age: Eduard van der
Null (18121868), August Siccard von Siccardsburg (1813
1868), Gottfried Semper (18031879), Heinrich von Ferstel
(1828- 1883), Theophil von Hansen (18131891), Friedrich
von Schmidt (18251891), and Karl von Hasenauer (1833
1894). The void left by their deaths was quickly and
brilliantly filled by Otto Wagner, whose skills as architect,
designer, author, and teacher placed him in an open field
with few challengers. This situation was particularly difficult,
however, for the group of younger architects emerging just
before the turn of the century. Some, like Josef Maria Olbrich,
took advantage of opportunities else where, while others,
like Josef Hoffmann, filled two niches in Vienna: as product
designer and as residential architect for wealthy and
progressively minded individuals living in the Austro
Hungarian empire. Wagner's own studio was famous as a
center for the cultivation of forwardthinking young
architects and designers. Apart from Olbrich and Hoffmann,
other individuals (amongst many) who trained in Wagner's
office included Leopold Bauer (18721938), Jan Kotera (18711923), and Joze Plecnik (18721957), all of whom were born
within a year of Urban. The overall domination of the design
"market" by one giant, who naturally looked out for those
individuals coming out of his office, certainly must have
made professional advancement difficult for a young
designer like Urban. For further information on the highly
active atelier of Otto Wagner, see Marco Pozzetto, Die Schule
Otto Wagners: 18941912 (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1980).
7. This vocabulary was already closely associated with
Hoffmann's career by 1903 when he began work on the
Purkersdorf Sanitarium, his magisterial gesamtkunstwerk
based on this approach to design. For information on this
pavilion and photographs of its exterior and interior, see
Sekler, Josef Hoffmann: Architectural Work.
8. For images of this station, see Harry Francis Mallgrave,
ed., Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of
Modernity (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of

Art and the Humanities, 1993) 3233.

9. This theory is advanced by Carter and Cole in Joseph Urban,
3942.
10.Some of the foreignborn designers working in the United
States during the final decade of Urban's life were Rudolf
Schindler (18871953) and Richard Neutra (18921970):
both were Austrians who chose to work in California. Other
significant European architects who would come over after
Urban's death in 1933 were Walter Gropius (18831969),
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), and Marcel Breuer
(19021981).
11.For more information on visual components of the houses of
Palm Beach, see Roberto Schezen, Palm Beach Houses (New
York: Rizzoli, 1991).
12.The interiors were well known through published illustrations
throughout the decade. For images of these fixtures, see
Julius Posener, Hans Poelzig: Reflections on His Life and
Work (New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1922)
12425.
13.For an image of this room, see Claes Caldenby and Olof
Hultin, Asplund (New York: Rizzoli, 1986)101.

46

[47]

JOSEPH URBAN
AND THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN FILM DESIGN
MATTHEW WILSON SMITH
ON 19 FEBRUARY 1920, Joseph Urban signed a contract to serve as
the art designer for William Randolph Hearst's fledgling film
venture, Cosmopolitan Productions. By hiring Urban, the newspaper

magnate was gaining one of the most highly regarded set and
lighting designers in the business, a designer equally at home in
the Metropolitan Opera and the Ziegfeld Follies. During the next
several years of his career, largely with Cosmopolitan, Urban would
serve as art designer for some thirty pictures. Although he brought
a wealth of experience to the new medium, ranging from his
training in stage design to architecture to interior design to
illustration, he repeatedly argued against subordinating film to
another art form. Indeed, at a time when film was widely
understood as a lesser cousin of the stage, Urban insisted that the
new medium was a genuine art with distinct aesthetic criteria.
Through such visionary encouragement, as well as practical
contributions to set and lighting design, Urban helped to raise
American cinema from its adolescence of the first two decades of
the century to its adulthood of the thirties and forties.
The success of Urban's contributions to American film is particularly
striking given the culture of the early silents. Before Urban came on
the scene, the design of the earliest films was a rudimentary affair:
the sets were simple, reusable flats before which a fixed camera
was placed. Innovation, when it came, progressed slowly. Toward
the end of the first decade of the century the reusable flats began
to be placed at right angles to one another in L or U shapes, with
the effect of adding depth and a greater degree of realism. This
depth in turn freed up the camera, which could now explore angles
and shadows within a threedimensional environment. Outdoor
settings and multiple rooms came to play a role in the early 1910s,
such that set windows looked out over genuine vistas and interior
doors revealed offstage chambers. Such crucial early steps
prepared the way for two magnificent leaps in the midteens:
Giovanni Pastrone's Italian extravaganza Cabiria (1914) and D. W.
Griffith's American retort, Intolerance (1916). These films offered
unprecedented spectacle: fullscale recreations of ancient Carthage
and Babylon, sets of the Temple of Moloch and the King of
Babylon's palace, chariots racing on city ramparts and the eruption
of Mount Vesuvius. Together, Cabiria and Intolerance brought a
level of visual wonder to silent film that would emphatically signal
an end to the era of the simple painted flat. Finally, toward the late
teens, studios began to rely almost entirely on artificial lighting for
their interior scenes, thus increasing the demand for technical
expertise in artistic design. This increased demand, together with
the high standards suddenly set by pictures such
as Cabiria andIntolerance, marked the beginning of art direction in

American film.
48

The history of early art direction in American film largely consists of

the contributions of four gifted designers: Wilfred Buckland, Robert
Brunton, Hugo Ballin, and Joseph Urban. Formerly the technical
director for David Belasco, Wilfred Buckland became the nation's
first real art director when he joined the Famous PlayersLasky
studio in 1914. The rich settings and dramatic lighting of
Buckland's style were received enthusiastically by a public
becoming increasingly familiar with film and thus more receptive to
innovation. "Here were faces, groups, and interiors"
wrote Photoplay on Buckland's design, "lit by a warm glow of light,
clear and yet full of the modeling of delicate shadows, and
dramatized by discriminating concentration from one general
source. At one point a touch of 'back lighting' shot across the
scene, picked up a curve of the throat, a twist of bright hair, or a
fold of lace for a glowing, glistening highlight." 1
Following in Buckland's footsteps, Robert Brunton is credited with
introducing a measure of restraint into the increasingly lavish set
designs of the late teens and early twenties. His more muted style
was largely achieved through the use of heavy shadow, which
blotted out all but the most important set features and directed
attention to the characters. Like Brunton, Ballin who was also a
trained architect, an accomplished painter, and a sometime film
director stressed scenic restraint and emphasized the characters
over the set. To an unprecedented degree, Ballin was also a full
member of the film production staff, participating in production
decisions from the outset and standing beside the director
throughout the shoot. It is with Ballin that the cinema art director
fully emerged as a fine artist, jackof-all-trades, and businessman:
a combination of roles ideally suited to the versatile Joseph Urban.
"You probably know that Mr. Urban is today the most distinguished
master of environment, light and color that we AngloSaxons have
in the theatre," Photoplay reminded its readers in an article
celebrating Urban's entrance into the cinema. 2 Urban was curtailing
his architectural and stagedesign career (with the exception of his
work for the Metropolitan Opera) at the behest of Hearst, who had
just founded Cosmopolitan Productions in New York's East Harlem.

The mission of Cosmopolitan was straightforward: to make popular

yet artistic movies with high production values, and by so doing to
offer the public an alternative to the cheap slapstick reels that had
become so ubiquitous in the industry. The movies would cost up to
two dollars, but the extra expense, Hearst hoped, would be worth
it. The public unfortunately, decided otherwise. "The whole trouble
was that W. R. was ahead of the times," remembered the
Cosmopolitan general manager George d'Utassy many years later.
"He made 'super' pictures several years too soon." 3 Although the
run of Cosmopolitan Productions as an independent business was
brief, it would produce a number of superior films and one genuine
silent film star: Marion Davies, an actress whose genuine talents
have been overshadowed by her role as Hearst's Trilbyesque
mistress. The other star of Cosmopolitan was Urban himself, who
often earned positive reviews for the studio's films even when the
plot and acting were not up to the high standard of Urban's
designs.4 Hearst fully appreciated Urban's talents and, when the
artist's contract was running out, used every inducement to get
Urban to stay.5
After spending a brief period as an observer at Cosmopolitan,
Urban plunged into his work with characteristic enthusiasm. One of
his first acts was to redesign the lighting system at the studio. In an
era before color film, Urban argued that "with proper backgrounds,
furniture that belongs to those backgrounds and decorations that
suggest color, the mind of the spectator can be made to think in
colors even when they are not shown." 6 To this end, Urban
composed blackand-white "color charts" to test the ways in which
different colors and textures appeared on blackand-white stills, as
well as the way in which such stills may or may not suggest color
and texture. Lights, he argued, should come from discrete sources
(rather than be washed over the scene with floodlamps from the
front) and could
49

be used creatively to suggest atmosphere and character. Although

some of these artistic innovations the use of "color charts," for
example were adopted, many of Urban's designs met with
resistance, and the first year that Urban spent at the studio was a
difficult one.

Urban's frustration during his first year at Cosmopolitan is evident

from the notes that he wrote on the backs of several film stills. One
still of the Marion Davies feature The Restless Sex (1920), for
instance, shows an elegantly composed interior (fig. 62). The room
is dark, with a single light source from a high window casting long
shadows across the scene. Partially illuminated by the window, a
sculptor sits on a stool, adopting the anguished attitude of his own,
Rodinlike creation. "As lit by Urban" reads the note on the back of
the photograph.7 The second picture, however, is a case study in
the effect of poor lighting: the same scene is here lit diffusely, the
light source ambiguous, the shadows muted, the mood vague (fig.
63). "As relit by director," reads Urban's note. Similar complaints
can be found in Urban's notes to subsequent films, but the situation
probably reached a nadir with a forgotten (and by all accounts
forgettable)

Fig. 62 The Restless Sex, Oswald's studio, with lighting by Urban,

1920
work entitled Heliotrope. As usual, the problems began with the
director's insistence on doing his own lighting. On the back of a still
of a fountain in a courtyard (fig. 64), Urban wrote:
See wrong direction of light and shadows on
1. Gate to the left
2. Madonna
3. Fountain
and flatness on everything else.
As lit by director.
An accompanying photograph, with Urban's lighting, shows the

same scene to dramatically different effect (fig. 65).

But Urban's troubles with Heliotrope went beyond mere bad
lighting; his set designs, too, were altered or eliminated. The dining
room that Urban designed for the film would have been had it
been used - the first modern interior in American movies (fig. 66).
Distinctive features of the room included a Werkstatteinspired use
of strict geometric figures, with white rectangles on the ceiling and
in archways and interlocking offwhite

Fig. 63 The Restless Sex, Oswald's studio, with lighting by the

director, 1920

50

circles on the walls above the doorframes. The bar area, which
echoes Urban's design of the bar in his own dining room in
Vienna,8 is painted white with dark trim to stress the geometry of
the piece and to harmonize with the wall and ceiling. Urban's
startlingly modern interior never made the screen, however; it was
replaced by a more traditional diningroom set

Fig. 64 Heliotrope, convent garden, with lighting by the director,

1920

Fig. 65 Heliotrope, convent garden, with lighting by Urban, 1920

preferred by the director, a Cosmopolitan regular named George D.
Baker.
Urban's set for Heliotrope is also interesting in that it demonstrates
his intention, anticipated only by Ballin in American film, to design
an environment around a close reading of a character. Urban's
explanation for his modern interior is laid out in an extensive note,
written in slightly stilted English, on the back of a photograph of a
conservatory garden in the same summer home:
My idea was that the man growing rich in last few years being an
honorable businessman with modern and new ideas, a very
sympathetic figure in the picture, took naturally a modern architect
to fix the interiors in his summer home and the architect would
show as much wood as he can for interiors, in this case because he

builds for a man which loves wood.

The degree of thought put into the design of the businessman's
dining room is unusual; Urban not only looked beyond the precise
stipulations of the script in order to imagine the sort of interior that
the character might inhabit but also brought his expertise in
modern architecture into play.

Fig. 66. Heliotrope, design for dining room, 1920

51

This sort of close attention to the entire mise en scne of a

production was a distinctive feature of Urban's approach. "[Urban]
considers it his business to write the drama of scenery, to reflect
the situations and characters in the houses and homes he builds for
them," wrote the Evening Post in 1920.

Fig. 67 Enchantment, design for dining alcove of a tearoom, 1921

Fig. 68 The Young Diana, Dimitrius' study, 1922 (cat. 77b)

Pantomime, effective as it is in the expression of emotion, must
always, in Mr. Urban's mind, be supplemented by scenery. To do
this, the mind of the artist must grasp, not the dramatic struggle of
one character but of all characters, and not alone architectural
verisimilitude but atmosphere and mood. Needless to say, he must
take infinite pains with manuscript and people bringing to bear
upon them his interpretive genius.
"I want," said Mr. Urban, "to make pictures that are moving
compositions in the same sense that a great painting is an
immobile composition. At any point in a photo play, a photographic
'still' should reveal people and scenery in perfect artistic
coordination."9
While hardly a radical notion among knowledgeable theater
designers in the early twentieth century, Urban's desire to create a
"perfect artistic coordination" between people and scenery was
something of a revelation to the world of the American silents.
Like many early art designers, Urban took special pride in the
historical accuracy of his designs. This pride led to frequent battles
with Hearst, an enthusiastic collector of real and fake antiques,
which he liked to see showcased in his movies. It was a situation
that was destined to lead to conflict with the exacting Urban, and
the altercations between producer and art director on the matter
were laid to rest only when Hearst backed up a truck loaded with
his most recent purchases a virtual armory of medieval armor and
assorted bronzes accompanied by a note telling Urban to "put
them on the set." "We heard his wrath resound throughout the

whole building," recalled a former assistant many years later,

whereupon Urban packed his bags and took a ship back to Vienna
to visit his mother, not even bothering to resign. 10 The tactic
worked: Hearst eventually had to send a wire with a pay raise to
Urban's ship in order to get the designer back. Although it was the
last conflict that the designer would have with Hearst over the
issue, it was hardly the end of Urban's trials. In a subsequent
incident, during production of the Spanish costume drama The
World and His Wife, a carpenter told Urban to base his set designs
on a
52

series of vaguely Spanish picture postcards that he had found, as

well as a photograph of a house in southern Spain. It was left to
Urban to argue for his own designs against those of the carpenter,
during which Urban was compelled to explain to the director that
the carpenter's photograph was not of Spanish architecture at all
but was, rather, a French chateau built in Andalusia by a war
profiteer.
The incident was relatively trivial in itself but highlighted the fact
that Urban's talents and expertise were regularly being thwarted by
the studio. This time, Cosmopolitan Productions responded to the
problem more systematically. An associate producer named W.
Sistrom composed an internal letter to the studio, discussed
Urban's complaints (with particular reference to the incident of the
"picture postcards"), and argued for fundamental changes in film
production. "What is a director in our scheme of things has been
frequently discussed but never settled," the letter begins.
Now it has got to be settled because Urban is extremely unhappy
under present conditions and unless something is done we are
going to miss the opportunity to be THE concern that gets the
credit for the tremendously important contribution to screen
technique that Urban is going to make either now or later with us
or with someone else.11
The letter goes on to detail two different methods of film
production: the "organization method," in which a single, inhouse
individual directs the show and generally guides the whole process;
and the "director method," in which the studio hires an outside
director to do the job. The best solution, Sistrom continued, would

be a "rational combination of the good points of both methods."

Importantly, this combination would give greater weight to the art
designer, who would have his designs finished and approved by the
studio before an outside director was even hired. This change,
Sistrom concluded, should alleviate Urban's "trouble," which "arises
from the fact that he does not come in contact with the production
until it is 'set' in the director's mind."
Although the organizational changes at Cosmopolitan were
ultimately not as fundamental as Sistrom had recommended,
circumstances nevertheless shifted dramatically for Urban by early
1921. Inside of the Cup, released at the beginning of 1921, was a
cause of frustration,12 but his work thereafter started to reach the
screen unimpeded. Thus Urban was able to realize the modern style
of Heliotropein films like Enchantment (1921) and The Young
Diana (1922). Finally making a virtue of his talents, the publicity
department promised that the settings for Enchantment would be
"ultramodern in every sense of the
word,"13 and Enchantment became, indeed, the first American
movie to feature modern interior design. Of numerous remarkable
set pieces for the film, a dining alcove of a tearoom stands out in
particular (fig. 67). The design successfully contrasts the geometric
forms influenced by the Wiener Werkstatte with delicately
patterned wallpaper reminiscent of William Morris's work. As usual,
Urban's lighting is well considered: hanging fixtures (also of
Werkstatte style) illuminate the room from above, while sunlight
pours down on the scene from clerestory windows over flower
boxes. Urban's experiments in modern design continued in The
Young Diana, a movie that Photoplay called "a style show, perhaps,
but not a good motion picture" yet singled out for its "beautiful
sets."14 Like many films that Urban worked on, it retains interest
largely due to his designs, perhaps the best of which is a
sophisticated, hypermodern office with semicircular chairs fitted
into pillars and a central desk framed by art deco sculptures (fig.
68).
It would be a mistake, however, to limit Urban's influence at
Cosmopolitan and on American movie culture generally to his
stage and lighting innovations. For, in a less tangible but no less
important way, he was also bringing a sense of European high
culture to the still marginal medium of American silent films. "I sent
my whole staff to see 'Dr. Caligari,'" he remarked in the early
twenties,

53

and then I called them all together the directors, the technical
experts and the stage hands and I gave them a short lecture
about it, telling them just what it meant to me and what vistas it
seemed to open up for the profession in which they were engaged.
You couldn't hear a restless motion in the course of the talk. No one
lighted a cigaret. And when it was over, the whole crowd went out
in twos and threes and more, earnestly discussing the problems
and questions of art, probably for the first time in their lives. 15
By introducing American directors and technicians to German
expressionism, Urban was helping to pave the way for a movement
that would reshape the long, dark shadows of Murnau into a
distinctly American style. Combined with many of his own designs
from the rejected early lighting of The Restless Sex to the moody
shadows of features like Bride's Play, Enchantment, and The Young
Diana Urban's studio lectures on Caligari suggest that he can be
seen as a link between German expressionism and American film
noir. In addition, Urban was introducing the idea, more novel in
America than in Germany, that film was a genuine art form, with
distinct aesthetic criteria. "So far," Urban wrote,
we have borrowed more or less from the stage and have
overlooked the fact that spoken words, color, perspective and
spatial relations are missing. We must develop the motion picture
as an independent artistic expression, so individual and self
sufficient that we shall not feel the need of what we cannot have.
Until this is done, all our painstaking effort is wasted by trying to
build on an imperfect foundation.16
In his lectures as well as his designs, Urban was helping to advance
the notion that American film was not only entertainment, not only
business, but an "independent artistic expression." As such, he was
at the forefront of the move in American cinema away from stage
conventions and toward the unique demands of the screen.
Urban designed his last film for Cosmopolitan in 1925, after which
he established an architectural studio in New York (paid for with

earnings from his film work) and continued designing sets for the
Metropolitan Opera and other companies. While he would return to
film with a few projects for Fox in the early thirties, his major
innovations were largely behind him; the Werkstatteinfluenced
designs that he offered for the Fox productions seem almost tame
beside the enthusiasm for art deco that had since swept the nation.
Urban's contribution to film design could be seen, however, in the
more sophisticated sense of design inherited and promoted by art
directors who came after him. Urban noted this development
himself when, looking back on the course of American film from the
standpoint of 1930, he wrote with pride that "directors have more
and more turned their attention to the proper lighting of scenes, to
an expressive location of the camera eye in the scene picture and
to the development of new beauties in the art of
photography."17 Characteristically unwilling to rest on his laurels,
however, he criticized directors for their unwillingness to take
creative risks and looked forward to the day when "the highly
individual picture" might be "dominated by one creative will." 18 As a
plea for cinematic auteurism, Urban's dream came some twenty
years too soon. Urban, as usual, was ahead of his time.
Matthew Wilson Smith is a scholar who writes on aspects of
theater, film, and popular culture. He is currently working on a
project on Bayreuth and Disneyland.

54

NOTES
All photographs reproduced courtesy Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Columbia University.
1. Photoplay (January 1921): 74.
2. Photoplay (October 1920): 32.
3. Quoted in John K. Winkler, William Randolph Hearst: A New
Appraisal (New York: Hastings House, 1955) 227.
4. A pattern of criticism lack of enthusiasm for the film as a
whole, high praise for the set and costumes emerges from
reviews for Urban's Cosmopolitan pictures. A New York

Times review of the Marion Davies costume drama When

Knighthood Was in Flower (1922) is typical: "though you may
have doubted about the authenticity of the story, you are
bound to be impressed with the authenticity of the settings.
Surely Joseph Urban, who is responsible for them, has been
true as well as magnificent. His scenes are splendid or
simple, according to the character they should have, and,
while they often impress the eye by their size and finished
composition, they never seem present merely to be
impressive. They are part of the story and ultimately
successful in enriching it" ("The Screen," New York Times, 15
September 1922).
5. Not least among the projects that Hearst hoped to convince
Urban to work on was Hearst's famous "castle" at San
Simeon. Urban, generally diplomatic with Hearst, privately
referred to the place as a "monstrosity" and a "constipated
cathedral," though he enjoyed the beauty of the surrounding
mountains. In an attempt to convince Urban to stay for the
sake of the castle as well as the movies Hearst offered the
artist various "extras," such as an architectural contract for a
new office building in San Francisco. Urban, eager to
establish an architectural firm of his own in New York,
repeatedly and politely refused. For an excellent survey of
the often complicated relations with Hearst, see Randolph
Carter and Robert Reed Cole, Joseph Urban: Architecture,
Theatre, Opera, Film (New York: Abbeville Press, 1992), 145
68.
6. Sunday Journal (3 October 1920).
7. All film stills referred to here (and their accompanying notes)
are located in the Joseph Urban Collection, Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Columbia University (hereafter JUG).
8. For a picture of the dining room in Urban's Vienna apartment,
see The Upholsterer 65 (September 1920): 70.
9. Evening Post (3 July 1920).
10.New Yorker (14 September 1940): 80.
11.Letter from W. Sistrom to an unknown recipient, undated
(1921?), JUC.

12.The back of one of Urban's still reads simply: "a sample of

how big and serious work is ruined through lighting and
photography" (JUC).
13.Quoted in Donald Albrecht, Designing Dreams: Modern
Architecture in the Movies (New York: Harper and Row with
the Museum of Modern Art, 1986) 40.
14.Quoted in Howard Mandlebaum and Eric Myers, Screen
Deco (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985)140.
15.Joseph Urban, typed manuscript with handwritten date "1921
or 1922" (JUC).
16.Ibid.
17.Urban, "The Cinema Designer Confronts Sounds," in Oliver M.
Sayler, ed., Revolt in the Arts (New York: Brentano's, 1930)
241 .
18.Ibid., 243.

55

THE JOSEPH URBAN COLLECTION

AN OVERVIEW
ON 29 SEPTEMBER 1958, the president of Columbia University,
Grayson Kirk, on behalf of the Brander Matthews Dramatic
Museum, formally accepted the gift of the Joseph Urban archive
from Urban's widow, Mary Porter Beegle Urban. She subsequently
noted that she chose Columbia because the late Brander Matthews,
who had been a professor of dramatic literature and the founder of
the museum, had admired her husband's work. Furthermore, she
had personal ties to the university, having been the director of
physical training, pageantry, drama and the dance at Barnard
College before her marriage to Urban in 1919.
Now part of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the collection is
the largest single holding of Urban's work. It covers a prolific and
eclectic career which began in finde-siecle Vienna and culminated
in New York in the twenties and thirties. When Urban died in 1933,

he had long been a household name, known not only for his
buildings and stage settings but also for his designs of exhibitions,
interiors, automobiles, furniture, store windows, roof gardens, and
ballrooms.
The Joseph Urban Collection, extending more than 135 linear feet,
includes approximately 700 watercolor drawings, as well as ground
plans, elevations, scrapbooks, and photographs. In addition, there
are 328 set models, some of which have been restored for this
exhibition. (Many of the models are extremely fragile owing to the
nature of the material used in their construction and currently await
conservation treatment.) The collection, excluding the set models,
has recently been reprocessed, rehoused, and described at item
level with the help of grants from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. When
acquired, each project was stored in an envelope or file and
arranged alphabetically within three groups Vienna, Boston, and
New York the three cities where Urban worked. Those groups have
been maintained, with materials arranged chronologically within
them. The New York material is further divided into five categories:
theater,Ziegfeld Follies, Metropolitan Opera, film, and architecture
and design.
The Vienna files contain sketches, plans, and photographs for
residences, rooms, restaurants, and monuments. There are
examples of book illustrations, interiors, and set designs that Urban
created in collaboration with his first wife's brother, the artist
Heinrich Lefler. The two together founded the Hagenbund Society, a
group of artists espousing modernist tendencies. The collection
contains catalogues for Hagenbund exhibitions from 1902 to 1910
which provide ample evidence of Urban's skill as an exhibition
designer.
Urban immigrated to America in 1912 and found employment as
the scene designer for the Boston Opera Company (fig. 70). He was
provided with a studio and permitted to bring over his scene
painters from Austria. With their evocation of mood through
creative use of color, Urban's designs for the Boston Opera were a
sensation. His efforts are represented in the collection by
watercolor drawings, plans, photographs, and production
56

records (light plots, cast lists, set lists, prop lists, and line drops) for
productions such as Les Contes d'Hoffmann (1912), Louise (1912), I
Gioelli delta Madonna (1913), and Die Meistersinger von
Nurnberg (1914).
The Boston Opera Company went bankrupt in 1914, and Urban
soon began designing sets in New York. The collection is especially
rich in his theater and opera works, and the material clearly reveals
his pattern of working. He would study a play or libretto, discuss it
with the director and producer, and then paint in watercolor a scale
drawing of a scene. His artisans would create the ground plan from
the sketches, and a set model would be built and painted. Urban
would check the model and make changes, if needed. Then the
scene painters would place a large canvas on the floor and work on
it horizontally, rather than vertically as was usually the case (fig.
69). Reference material, scripts, watercolor drawings, pencil
sketches, technical drawings, photographs, and programs
document this procedure.
Productions represented in the collection include the Ziegfeld
Follies and the Midnight Frolics, as well as Ziegfeld's hit
shows Sally (1921), Show Boat (1927), Whoopee (1928), and Flying
High (1930). Some notable nonZiegfeld productions are The
Garden of Paradise (1914), which brought Urban to Ziegfeld's
attention; Caliban of the Yellow Sands (1916), a pageant held in
Lewisohn Stadium at New York's City College to celebrate the three
hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's death; and Nju(1917),
Urban's attempt, with the director Richard Ordinski and the critic
Kenneth Macgowan, to present drama without commercial
compromise. Also included are all the designs Urban executed for
the Metropolitan Opera Company from 1917 through 1933, among
them Faust (1917), Cost fan tutte(1922), Falstaff(1925), Jonny
spielt auf (1929), and Elektra (1932).
When William Randolph Hearst engaged him in 1919 as art director
for his movie studio, Cosmopolitan Productions, Urban became one
of the first artists to design for the new medium of film. Urban was
to work for

Fig. 69 Painting a mural for the Tiger Room at the Sherman Hotel,
Chicago, 1920, photograph. 8x10in.
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
Hearst until 1925. The collection contains scrapbooks with
photographs of scenes from all of the films, scrapbooks of reference
material, and a few watercolors. Of interest is a color key that
shows how various colors appeared when photographed in black
and white, indicating how Urban used color for depth and texture
even when it was impossible to see its hue. Urban's battles for
artistic control with the film director probably generated a letter
dated January 1920 that already, early in the history of film, shows
that filmmakers were grappling with the question of who is more
important to the creation of a film, the director or the studio.
Although the collection contains many watercolor renderings and
photographs of Urban's architectural and design projects, there are
few specifications, plans, or other background material. There are,
however, nine schemes that Urban designed for a proposed
Metropolitan Opera House (192627), which was never built. And
there is a scrapbook that
57

reveals Urban's attempt, in 1922, to help Austrian artists,

impoverished in the aftermath of World War I, by selling their crafts
in a Wiener Werkstatte store that he opened on Fifth Avenue. In
addition, the whole of Urban's career in New York, dating from 1914

to his death in 1933, is thoroughly documented in scrapbooks of

newspaper clippings. While the original scrapbooks have
deteriorated beyond use, the information has been preserved and
is available on microfilm.
Additional papers were recently discovered in Mrs. Urban's former
home and donated to Columbia University in 1996. These papers
contain material intended for a biography, letters and telegrams
from Urban in Hollywood to his wife in New York, and a few
telegrams from Florenz Ziegfeld. Biographical material contributed
by Urban's daughter Gretl, and by his biographers Randolph Carter
and Robert Cole, has also further enriched the collection.
The Urban collection is one of the most popular and heavily used
collections in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. During the past
decade it has been cited in a number of significant books. Among
them are: Robert Reed Cole and Randolph Carter, Joseph Urban:
Architecture, Theatre, Opera, Film(New York: Abbeville, 1992);
Richard E. and Paulette Ziegfeld, The Ziegfeld Touch: The Life and
Times of Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992);
William Taylor, Inventing Times Square(New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1991); John Dizikes, Opera in America (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993); Robert A. M. Stern, New York
1930 (New York: Rizzoli International, 1986); Mary C.
Henderson, The New Amsterdam: The Biography of a Broadway
Theatre (New York: Hyperion, 1997); Markus Kristan, Joseph Urban:
die wiener Jahre des Jugendstilarchitekten und Illustrators, 1872
1911 (Vienna: Bohlau, 2000). Works have been lent to numerous
exhibitions, including those at the Kunsthalle Wien (1995), the
Smithsonian Institution (1997), the Metropolitan Opera Company
(1997), the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (1999), the
Whitney Museum of American Art (1999), and the Wolfsonian
Museum in Miami Beach (2000). Students and scholars have
recently used the Joseph Urban Collection for research on topics
that include architecture, theater, set design, film design, interior
design, musical comedies, the Ziegfeld Follies, New York nightclubs,
Urban's work in Pittsburgh, Austrian architects, Urban's work in
Austria, the Wiener Werkstatte, the Reinhardt Theatre, the New
Stagecraft, William Randolph Hearst, and Florenz Ziegfeld.
Gwynedd Cannan

Fig. 70 Urban in Boston studio, 1916, photograph, 8 x 10 in.

Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

58

CHECKLIST OF THE EXHIBITION

ALL WORKS ARE FROM THE JOSEPH URBAN COLLECTION WHICH IS
PART OF THE BRANDER MATTHEWS DRAMATIC MUSEUM
COLLECTION IN THE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY AT
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
Dimensions are in inches, height before width before depth.
Productions at the Boston Opera are designated (B), at the
Metropolitan Opera (M), and for the Ziegfeld Follies (Z).

ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN

1. Kaiser Bridge, Vienna, elevation, 1898
watercolor, 11 3/8 x 8 in.
2. Chronika der drei Schwestern, underwater castle, 1899
watercolor, 11 1/8 x 9 in., fig. 41

3. Esterhazy Castle, St. Abraham, Hungary, interior, 1899

watercolor, 10 5/8 x 9 3/8 in. (irreg.), fig. 9
4. Rathauskeller, Vienna, 1899
a. StraussLanner Room, watercolor, 11 x 8 1/2 in., fig. 11
b. StraussLanner Room, reproduction of photograph, 12 x 9
1/2 in.
c. Large dining room, reproduction of photograph, 9 1/2 x 12
in., fig. 10
5. Goltz Villa, Vienna, 1902
a. Plan and view of interior, pen and ink, 9 1/2 x 7 3/8 in., fig.
5
b. Game and music rooms, watercolor, 9 1/2 x 7 3/4 in., fig.
6
6. Redlich Villa, Vienna, elevation of Else Redlich's bedroom,
1907
watercolor, 7 3/4 x 11 1/2 in., fig. 32
7. Andersen: Zwolf Marchen, retold by Hugo Salus
illustrated by Heinrich Lefler und Joseph Urban, Vienna: M.
Munk, 1911
8. Metropolitan Opera House (proposal), New York, 1926
27
a. Facade: early study, reproduction of pencil drawing, 13 1/8
x 10 1/8 in., fig. 17
b. Scheme IX, longitudinal section, watercolor, 17 3/4 x 27
1/2 in.
c. Lobby, etching, 11 x 14 7/8 in.
d. Proscenium, watercolor, 29 7/8 x 20 in., fig. 18
9. Ziegfeld Theatre, New York, 192627
a. Facade, ink and wash, 22 1/2 x 18 3/4 in., fig. 14
b. Rear auditorium including balcony, photograph, 9 1/2 x 13
5/8 in.
c. Section of mural for balcony ceiling, watercolor, 12 1/2 x
14 in., fig. 38
d. Apron and proscenium, model: painted cardboard and
other materials, 27 3/4 x 31 3/4 x 10 1/2 in.,fig. 71
10.St. Regis Hotel, New York, roof garden dining room, 1927
28

watercolor, 14 x 11 1/8 in., fig. 39

11.Temple Israel (proposal), Rockaway, interior with worship
service, 192729
watercolor, 18 3/4 x 16 3/4 in., fig. 72
12.Bedell Store, New York, 1928
a. Faade, photograph (Sigurd Fischer), 6 1/2 x 9 1/2 in., fig.
16
b. Elevator doors and interior of cars, watercolor, 6 3/4 x 9
3/8 in., fig. 40
c. Showroom, watercolor, 8 x 7 3/4 in., fig. 57
d. Millinery department, watercolor, 8 x 7 3/4 in.
13.Kaufmann Department Store (proposal), Pittsburgh,
counter area, 1928
watercolor, 9 x 8 3/8 in., fig. 58
14.Reinhardt Theatre (proposal), New York, 1928
a. Facade, watercolor, 19 5/8 x 15 in., fig. 15
b. Auditorium, watercolor, 9 1/2 x 6 3/8 in., fig. 73

61

Fig. 73 Cat. 14b

Fig. 74 Cat. 15a

62

15.William Penn Hotel, Pittsburgh, 192829

a. Mens Lounge Room, detail and plan, watercolor, 20 x 16
7/8 in., fig. 74
b. Ballroom, watercolor, 13 3/8 x 20 in.
16.Central Park Casino, New York, 1929
a. Reconstruction, exterior, watercolor, 5 1/2 x 9 3/8 in.
b. Pavilion, photograph, 7 3/5 x 9 5/8 in.
17.International Magazine Building, New York, 1929
a. Exterior, photograph (detail; Sigurd Fischer), 9 3/4 x 7 1/2
in., fig. 1
b. Lobby, photograph, 9 5/8 x 5 1/2 in.
18.Jewish Art Theatre (proposal), New York, 1929

a. Front elevation, watercolor, 16 3/8 x 16 3/8 in.

b. Proscenium, pen and ink with wash and watercolor, 8 1/8 x
13 1/4 in., fig. 75
19.The New School for Social Research, New York, 192931
a. Elevation, pen and ink with watercolor, 20 1/2 x 15 in., fig.
59
b. Main lobby, color treatment, watercolor, 14 5/8 x 14 5/8
in.
c. Dance studio, color treatment, watercolor, 14 1/4 x 26 3/4
in., fig. 45
d. Library, photograph, 7 1/2 x 9 3/4 in., fig. 61
e. Auditorium, perspective, pencil, 12 5/8 x 16 1/4 in.
f. Auditorium, photograph, 10 1/4 x 13 1/4 in., fig. 60
20.Atlantic Beach Club, Long Island, terraced apartments,
192931
watercolor, 18 1/2 x 20 1/8 in., fig. 44
21.Park Avenue Restaurant, New York, interior of club, 1931
photograph, 15 7/8 x 19 7/8 in., fig. 76

Fig. 75 Cat. 18b

Fig. 76 Cat. 21

63

22.Palace Of the Soviets, interior: large hall with

demonstration, 193132
watercolor, 29 3/8 x 25 in., fig. 77
23.Fairytale illustration, n.d.
watercolor, 4 x 5 in., fig. 34

Fig. 77 Cat. 22

64

OPERA
24.Die Meistersinger Von Nurnberg, act 1: Inside Saint
Katherine 's Church, 1908
watercolor, 8 1/2 x 13 1/2 in., fig. 25
25.Lohengrin, curtain, 1 90911
watercolor, 10 1/4 x 9 1/2 in., fig. 43
26.Oberon, act 2: Banquet hall of Haroun al Rachid, 19091 1
pencil, 9 3/4 x 12 5/8 in.
27.Tristan Und Isolde, sketches of footwear, 190911
watercolor, 9 1/8 x 11 3/4 in.; 10 1/4 x 12 3/4 in.
28.Godtterdammerung, act 3.2: Rhine woodland and valley,
1911

pencil 9 x 12 in.
29.Contes d'Hoffmann, 1912 (B)
a. Act 2: Olympia, costume drawings for male guests,
watercolor, 10 3/4 x 7 1/2 in.
b. Act 4: Bacchanal: Giulietta and guests, watercolor, 8 5/8 x
9 1/2 in., fig. 4
30.Louise, act 3: A little garden in Montmartre, 1912 (B)
watercolor, 6 x 12 1/8 in., fig. 19
31.Madama Butterfly, act 2: Inside Butterfly's house, 1912
(B)
watercolor, 8 3/4 x 9 in., fig. 31
32.Djamileh, elevation and ground plan, Haroun's palace, 1913
(B)
watercolor, 11 1/4 x 8 5/8 in., fig. 33
33.Don Giovanni, act 1.4: Giovanni's garden, 1913 (B)
watercolor, 7 x 9 3/4 in., fig. 23
34.Die Meistersinser von Nurnberg, act 3.5: Open meadow,
costume drawing, 1914 (B)
watercolor, 6 7/8 x 10 3/8 in.
35.Otello, act 2: Desdemona's garden, 1914 (B)
watercolor, 9 1/2 x 11 1/2 Vi in., fig. 35
36.Parsifal, act 2: Klingsor's magic castle, 1914 (B)
watercolor, 4 1/8 x 3 7/8 in., fig. 26
37.Faust, 1917(M)
a. Act 2: Fairgrounds at the town gates, watercolor, 9 1/4 x
13 1/8 in.
b. Act 5.1: Walpurgisnacht, watercolor, 8 3/4 x 14 in., fig. 78
38.Oberon, act 1: Rezia's sleeping garden, 1918 (M)
watercolor, 9 1/2 x 13 3/4 in., fig. 79
39.Saint Elizabeth, act 5: woods, 1918 (M)
watercolor, 9 1/4 x 13 3/4 in., fig. 29
40.Don Carlos, 1920 (M)
a. Act 1: Forest at Fontainebleau,
watercolor, 8 3/4 x 12 in., fig. 80
b Act. 3.2: Square in front of Valladolid Cathedral,

watercolor, 6 5/8 x 9 1/8in., fig. 29

41.Parsifal, 1920(M)
a. Act 1.1: Sacred grove,
watercolor, 12 x 17 5/8 in., fig. 27
b. b. Act 2.2: Klingsor's garden (unused),
watercolor, 7 x 12 in., fig. 36

65

Fig. 78 Cat. 37b

66

Fig. 79 Cat. 38

67

Fig. 80 Cat. 40a

68

Fig. 81 Cat. 40b

69

Fig. 82 Cat. 42

Fig. 83 Cat. 43a

42.Contes d'Hoffmann, act 2.2: Olympia, ballroom, 1924 (M)
watercolor, 10 1/2 x 13 1/2 in., fig. 52
43.Don Giovanni, 1929(M)
a. Act 1.5: Ballroom, set model: painted cardboard and other
materials, 13 1/2 x 21 x 26 in., fig. 83
b. Act 2.5: Giovanni's dining room, watercolor, 9 7/8 x 9 1/8
in., fig. 84
44.Jonny spielt auf, act 2.5: Train station, 1929 (M)
set model: painted cardboard and other materials, 23 x 25
7/8 x 19 1/8 in., fig. 21

Fig. 84 Cat. 43b

70

45.Schwanda, der Dudelsakpfeifer, act 2.2: Entrance to city,

1931 (M)
watercolor, 11 3/8 x 15 1/4 in., fig. 20
46.Die Walkure, a rocky mountain ridge, n.d.
pencil, 8 3/8 x 10 1/2in.

Fig. 85 Cat. 48b

THEATER
47.The Garden of Paradise, queen's bower, 1914
watercolor, 9 x 14 in., fig. 37
48.Behold Thy Wife, 1915
a. Act 3: Library, watercolor, 9 1/8 x 14 in.
b. Act 3: Library, set model: painted cardboard and other
materials, 13 x 18 1/4 x 7l/2 in.,fig. 85
49.The Ziegfeld Follies of 1915 (Z)
a. Flower curtain, watercolor, 8 1/4 x 13 1/8 in.
b. Zeppelin over London, watercolor, 8 x 13 in., fig. 48
c. Bath scene with golden elephants, photograph, 5 3/4 x 8
1/2 in., fig. 47
50.Caliban of the Yellow Sands, 1916
a. Ground plan for auditorium and stage, watercolor, 32 x 23
in.
b. Setebos, watercolor, 17 x 13 3/4 in., fig. 86
51.The Century Girl, bubbles, 1916 (z) watercolor, 9 1/2 x 13
5/8 in., fig. 87
52.The Ziegfeld Follies of 1916 (Z)
a. Globe Theater curtain, watercolor, 8 1/2 x 12 1/4 in.
b. Opening scene, watercolor, 9 1/4 x 14 in., fig. 88
53.Macbeth, outside the castle, 1916
watercolor, 9 3/8 x 14 in., fig. 49
54.The Ziegfeld Follies of 1917 (Z)
a. Contract letter dated 7 February 1917, typescript, 10 1/2 x
7 1/4 in.
b. Running order, typescript, 15 x 8 1/4 in.
71

Fig. 86 Cat. 50b

Fig. 87 Cat. 51

Fig. 88 Cat. 52b

72

Fig. 89 Cat. 58a

55.The Ziegfeld Follies of 1918, the Blue Devils (Z)
watercolor, 8 7/8 x 12 7/8 in.
56.Apple Blossoms, act 3: Color scheme for fancy interior,
1919
watercolor, 10 x 10 7/8 in., fig. 7
57.Caesar's Wife, check stub, 1919(Z)

ink on paper, 4 1/2 x 8 3/4 in.

58.Young Man's Fancy, 1919
a. New York street scene at night, watercolor, 9 3/4 x 13 3/4
in., fig. 89
b. Store window, photograph, with Urban's annotations, 11 x
14 in.
59.The Ziegfeld Follies Of 1921, Venetian cityscape (Z)
watercolor, 10 1/8 x 12 in., fig. 90
60.No Foolin'. 1922(X)
a. Skyscraper, watercolor, 10 1/4 x 12 1/4 in., fig. 91
b. Curtain (unused), watercolor, 10 1/4 x 12 1/2 in.
61.The Ziegfeld Follies of 1923 (Z)
a. Act 1: Finale, technical drawings, mixed materials, 9 5/8 x
13 3/4 in.
b. Exterior of a Spanish house, watercolor, 10 1/8 x 12 1/8
in., fig. 92

Fig. 90 Cat. 59
73

Fig. 91 Cat. 60a

62.Orpheum Circuit, oriental city backdrop, 1925
watercolor, 10 x 13 1/8 in., frontispiece
63.Palm Beach Girl, 1926 (z)
a. Snowbound (unused), watercolor, 10 1/2 x 13 1/2 in.
b. Palm Beach Nights curtain, watercolor, 5 1/8 x 7 1/2
in., fig. 93
64.Golden Dawn, straw curtain, 1927
watercolor, 8 1/2 x 8 5/8 in.
65.Rio Rita, 1927 (z)
a. Barge floating on the Rio Grande, watercolor, 10 1/8 x 12
1/4 in.
b. Courtyard of a Mexican mansion, watercolor, 8 1/4 x 9 1/2
in., fig. 94
c. Courtyard of a Mexican mansion, set model: painted
cardboard and other materials, 153/4 x 19'/8 x 13'/4 in., fig.
95

Fig. 92 Cat. 61b

Fig. 93 Cat. 63b

74

Fig. 94 Cat. 65b

66.The Ziegfeld Follies Of 1927, castles in the clouds (Z)
watercolor, 13 1/2 x 15 7/8 in.
67.Whoopee, adobe mission, 1928(Z)
set model: painted cardboard and other materials, 18 1/8 x
20 1/2 x 15 1/8 in., fig. 96
68.Sons O' Guns, act 2.8: Ballroom, 1929
set model: painted cardboard and other materials, 17 x 19
7/8 x 11 in., fig. 97

Fig. 95 Cat. 65c

75

Fig. 96 Cat. 67

Fig. 97 Cat. 68

Fig. 98 Cat. 70

76

Fig. 99 Cat. 71
69.Flying High, act 2.6: Flight, 1930
set model: painted cardboard and other materials, 15 1/8 x
22 1/4 x 11 3/4 in., fig. 22
70.Princess Charming, bedroom, 1930
set model: painted cardboard and other materials, 16 1/8 x
18 7/8 x 5 3/8 in., fig. 98
71.Smiles, Cafe le Berry, 1930 (Z)
set model: painted cardboard and other materials, 22 7/8 x
22 1/4 x 15 3/4 in., fig. 99

77

FILM
72.Rivoli Theatre, stage setting, 1919
watercolor, 15 3/8 x 15 7/8 in.
73.Enchantment, stairway of Hoyt house, 1921
photograph, 7 1/2 x 9 1/4 in.
74.The Woman God Changed, 1921

a. Courtroom, watercolor, 14 3/8 x 20 in.

b. Set of courtroom scene, photograph, 5 5/8 x 9 3/4 in.

Fig. 100 Cat. 76

Fig. 101 Cat. 77a

75.Bride's Play, wedding scene, 1922
photograph, 7 3/4 x 93/4 in.
76.Buried Treasure, pirate ship scene, 1922

watercolor, 10 1/8 x 11 1/2 in., fig. 100

77.The Young Diana, 1922
a. Dimitrius' laboratory, photograph, 7 3/4 x 9 3/4 in., fig.
101
b. Dimitrius' study, photograph, 7 3/8 x 91/2 in., fig. 68
78.Under the Red Robe, 1923
a. Cardinal Richelieu's reception room, photograph, 7 1/4 x 9
1/2 in.
b. Louis XIII's reception room, photograph, 7 1/4 x 9 1/2 in.

78

PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
All photographs, identified by figure number, are by
Dwight Primiano Photography, with the following exceptions:
Cosmopolitan Productions 62-68, 101
Sigurd Fischer 1, 16
F. E. Geisler 3, 56
Gerlach and Schenk 9, 10
Peter A. Juley 13
NyholmLincoln 60, 61, 76
unidentified 1, 2, 14, 47, 53, 54, 69, 70

79