Stage Decoration as a Fine Art
Stage Decoration as a Fine Art is one of the theatrical essays collected in Carl Van Vechten's 1917 volume Interpreters and Interpretations (later reissued as part of his writings on theater, music, and dance), which surveys the movement toward "artistic" or "new stagecraft" set design in the theaters of Europe and America during the 1910s. The essay opens by questioning whether elaborate scenery genuinely serves a play, citing recent examples of productions crippled by their own settings — a Sothern Shakespeare revival stretched past midnight by scene changes, a musical comedy sunk on opening night by a thirty-minute intermission. Van Vechten engages John Palmer's argument (from The Future of the Theatre) that lavish decoration is a crutch invoked when playwrights and actors lack the skill to sustain "poetic" drama on their own merits, whereas naturalist drama, mastered by its practitioners, needs no such upholstery. Palmer contrasts Granville Barker's richly decorated Twelfth Night with Forbes-Robertson's sparsely mounted but more powerful 1913 Hamlet as proof that genius needs no scenic aid. Van Vechten pushes back, calling this reasoning "specious": genius unadorned may outshine mediocrity in finery, but genius properly staged is only enhanced, not diminished. He supports this with counter-examples — Pavlova's dancing, though supreme, would gain from Bakst-quality surroundings such as those enjoyed by Nijinsky; Adamo Didur's Boris Godunov benefits from superb Metropolitan Opera staging borrowed from Paris, while Olive Fremstad's otherwise superior Brünnhilde is hampered by unimaginative Götterdämmerung sets. Van Vechten then diagnoses what is wrong with typical American and much European scenery: flimsy painted drops depicting rocks, palaces, and drawing-rooms with naive, photographic literalism that fails the moment a three-dimensional actor stands against a two-dimensional painted background. He traces this convention's origin partly to Italian trompe-l'oeil house facades and church decoration, and identifies two competing reform paths. One, exemplified by Carl Hagemann in Germany and echoed by David Belasco in New York, replaces painted illusion with fully built, plastic, three-dimensional sets — effective for single-scene interiors but impractical for multi-scene plays without a revolving stage (Hagemann's solution for staging Faust). The other, championed by Gordon Craig, discards representational scenery almost entirely in favor of suggestive screens, draperies, and dramatic top-lighting, aiming to stimulate imagination rather than replicate reality. The essay profiles Craig at length — his eccentric school at the Arena Goldoni in Florence, his cult of devoted student-disciples, his imperious selection process for who may study with him, and an anecdote about his (deliberately) undefined teaching methods. Van Vechten notes that though Craig originated many of the era's key staging ideas, he lacked the practical follow-through to realize them himself; instead, Stanislavsky, Reinhardt, and Bakst absorbed and adapted his innovations into workable practice, with Stanislavsky's Moscow theater arguably becoming the world leader in staging craft, standing in stark contrast to the conservative, old-fashioned Opéra-Comique in Paris. The essay then turns to a survey of the Ballets Russes designers as the era's supreme decorative artists. Léon Bakst receives the fullest treatment: his flat, non-plastic but riotously colored designs for Schéhérazade, Carnaval, Thamar, Jeux, Daphnis et Chloë, and other ballets, and his elaborate work for Ida Rubinstein's Paris productions (Salomé, Hélène de Sparte, Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien, La Pisanelle), the last describing his exhaustive, costly pursuit of exact color effects — blood-red sails against blood-red skies, gold-columned proscenium framing. Van Vechten also credits Bakst's contemporaries Alexandre Benois (Petrouchka, Le Pavillon d'Armide), Nicholas Roerich (The Rite of Spring, which he notes provoked hisses in Paris), Serge Soudeikine, and Theodore Fedorovsky as originators of a distinctly Russian school of barbaric, impressionistic color-based design, tracing its roots to the painter Vrubel. Van Vechten closes by proposing his own alternative source of inspiration for staging Shakespeare: the paintings of the early Italian masters he encountered in Florentine galleries — Uffizi feast scenes, the Marriage of Boccaccio Adimari, and Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes in the Palazzo Riccardi — whose costume color and pageant-like composition, he argues, would furnish a stage picture governed by genuine beauty rather than the self-defeating pursuit of photographic accuracy that dominates conventional scenic design.
By Carl Van Vechten · First published 1915 · Genre: Essay, Theater Criticism, Art Criticism