Wolfgang Roth: Art of the Theater

Editor's note: The James A. Michener Art Museum provided source material to Resource Library for the following article or essay. If you have questions or comments regarding the source material, please contact the James A. Michener Art Museum directly through either this phone number or web address:

215-340-9800
http://www.michenerartmuseum.org

Wolfgang Roth: Art of the Theater

December 2, 2006 - December 31, 2006

(above: Wolfgang Roth, Clown, Clown, color drawing in space, n.d., 74 inches high)

The James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA is holding the exhibition Wolfgang Roth: Art of the Theater from December 2, 2006 through December 31, 2006. Throughout his career Roth established an international reputation as a set designer for theaters and opera houses.

This exhibition features a selection of Roth's set designs, prints, collages, drawings, paintings, and sculptures, which are drawn from the Wolfgang Roth Collection gifted to the Michener from the artist's estate. This exhibition is curated by Constance Kimmerle, curator of collections at the James A. Michener Art Museum. In 1953, Roth and his wife settled in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he continued working as a set designer and taught stage design at New York University's School of the Arts.

Born in Berlin in 1910, Wolfgang Roth enrolled in the Berlin School of Arts and Crafts in 1926. Living in Berlin during the desperately harsh period after World War I, Roth became preoccupied with politics. In 1928 he enrolled in Berlin's Academy of Art and in his spare time designed sets for political theater groups. Roth joined the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists of Germany, where he met John Heartfield and George Grosz, early experimenters in Dada photomontage. (right: Wolfgang Roth, Porgy and Bess, ca. 1952, Stage model for Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, 20 x 12 x 12 inches)

Roth worked for the experimental theater innovators Erwin Piscator and Bertold Brecht, who embraced drama as a means of education and political change. In 1929, when Piscator hired former Bauhaus teacher Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Roth worked on Moholy-Nagy's innovative stage designs that incorporated film, projections, conveyor belts, trapdoors and a revolving stage. Following the Nazis' rise to power in 1933, Roth fled Berlin and lived in exile in Vienna and Zurich, where he designed sets for vaudeville, musical plays, operas and dramas and performed in vaudeville and the circus.

Upon his arrival in New York in 1938, Roth began designing sets for theaters and opera houses. Although he designed sets for such Broadway plays, musicals, and opera productions as Porgy and Bess (worldwide tour 1952-56) and Don Pasquale (Metropolitan Opera, New York, New York, 1955), Roth may be best known for his creation of The Littlest Circus, a dance-pantomime that traveled widely in North America (1956-63). Broadway's first children's show, The Littlest Circus was filmed for television by CBS in 1963. With a cast of seven, Roth's one-ring circus dazzled the audience as lions, acrobats, clowns, elephants, and dancers performed The circus motif would appear and reappear in Roth's paintings, collages, and lithographs throughout his life.

Text panels for the exhibition

Wolfgang Roth: Art of the Theater

Born in Berlin, Wolfgang Roth (1910-1988) enrolled in the Berlin School of Arts and Crafts in 1926:

Whether my parents liked it or not, at the age of fifteen I had had enough of the old Latin professor Cohn, enough of the Nazi math teacher Schlichter I wanted to become an artist! actually I had no idea what I wanted; I was merely impressed by certain modern posters and advertisements on the bill boards. "I want to design something like that, too," I said to my big sister

Living in Berlin during the desperately harsh period after World War I, Roth became preoccupied with politics:

I wanted to fight for a better world. We lived in a strange blend of absolute desperation and enormous zest for life. The time was actually horrible constantly lurking catastrophes, the increasing street battles between communists, socialists, and Nazis.

The Dada movement, which began in Zurich in 1916 as a revolt against conventional notions of beauty and meaning in art, became a more aggressive and politically motivated approach to the arts in Berlin. Berlin dadaists embraced and criticized the emerging mass media and machine culture around them as they experimented with collage, photomontage, and technologies of the cinema. In 1928 Roth enrolled in Berlin's Academy of Art and in his spare time designed sets for political theater groups. He joined the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists of Germany, where he met John Heartfield and George Grosz, early experimenters in Dada photomontage.

During the next five years, Roth worked for the experimental theater innovators Erwin Piscator and Bertold Brecht, who embraced drama as a means of education and political change. In 1929 when Piscator hired former Bauhaus teacher Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Roth worked on Moholy-Nagy's innovative stage designs that incorporated film, projections, conveyor belts, trapdoors and a revolving stage. He subsequently worked with Bertold Brecht's stage managers, where he learned that stage settings are "as much of a statement as the work of the author or a gesture of an actor." Following the Nazis' rise to power in 1933, Roth lived in exile in Vienna and Zurich, designing sets for vaudeville, musical plays, operas and dramas and performing in vaudeville and the circus.

Over the course of his career, Wolfgang Roth established an international reputation as a set designer. This exhibition features a selection of Roth's set designs, prints, collages, drawings, paintings, and sculptures, which are drawn from the Wolfgang Roth Collection gifted to the Michener from the artist's estate.

-- Constance Kimmerle, Curator of Collections, James A. Michener Art Museum

Wolfgang Roth: Designing for the Theater

In 1938 Roth immigrated to New York, where he established an international reputation as a set designer for theaters and opera houses. Although he designed sets for such Broadway plays, musicals, and opera productions as Porgy and Bess (worldwide tour 1952-56) and Don Pasquale (Metropolitan Opera, New York, New York, 1955), Roth may be best known for his creation of The Littlest Circus, a dance-pantomime that traveled widely in North America (1956-63). Broadway's first children's show, The Littlest Circus was filmed for television by CBS in 1963. With a cast of seven, Roth's one-ring circus dazzled the audience as lions, acrobats, clowns, elephants, and dancers performed The circus motif would appear and reappear in Roth's paintings, collages, and lithographs throughout his life.

In 1953 Wolfgang and his wife Lee left New York to settle in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he continued working as a set designer; taught stage design at New York University's School of the Arts; and created collages, prints, paintings, and sculptures, based largely on theatrical and circus themes.

Color Drawings in Space

During the 1970s Wolfgang Roth created a series of three-dimensional works that he called "color drawings in space." On the occasion of the exhibition of these works in New York during the 1980s, he explained the inspiration behind their creation:

About 12 years ago I suddenly lost the vision in my left eye and became partially blind. It happened in Europe on a professional journey Danish and Swiss friendly doctors agreed that nothing could be done about it and I had better get used to it.

I devised my own occupational therapy to overcome this disaster. I had to learn how to adjust to look at measurements, scales and distances, in the course of which I more than once almost cut my fingers off or poured the coffee next to the cup

At this time as part of my therapy I started to assemble small objects plastics, very thin metal rods, found junk, string, wire, buttons, screws and other metals so small and difficult for me to see and to grasp, it was good therapy for my eyes and my hands. And those small creations were the beginning of a new "artform" for me -- very much influenced by my theater and circus design work. But in turn they influenced my theatre design work, as many shows in those later years have proven.

Those "space drawings" -- now more and more in color -- grew and developed into something more than simple occupational therapy. Soon those "drawings" started to grow over my head. I became happily involved with those strange creatures, adding welding and steel rods, soldering and other new and untried methods and techniques to my small toolbox I find myself laughing out loud when I look at them. They tell me all sorts of tales and I only wish that others laugh at them too.

Object labels text for the exhibition

Wolfgang Roth (1910-1988)

The Dancer ca. 1975-85

Steel rods, string, wire, copper, and tin