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If I had to nominate someone for the most important yet least known modern artist, it would be Adolphe Appia. If you’ve watched the Blade Runner sequel or any of the recent Dune movies, you’ve witnessed obvious examples of the Swiss scenographer’s influence: monumental sets, dramatic lighting, and sparse decoration — but Appia was working over a century ago, when the aesthetic norms were quite different.
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During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, theatrical productions were commonly staged with flat, realistically painted backdrops. Even Richard Wagner, whose groundbreaking vision of theater as a “total art” called for complete immersion in dramatic spectacle, was still beholden to these contemporary conventions about how to stage his operas. It was Appia who recognized the sculptural properties light could yield in a theatrical context — an innovation aided by the invention of electric lighting. By giving light and space a symbolic role, he unified dramaturgy and scenography and introduced an unprecedented sophistication to the art of set design. Without his theories, it’s likely we wouldn’t have the widely acclaimed Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet or the historic Bayreuth Festival centennial production of Wagner’s Ring. Edward Gordon Craig, who designed the Hamlet set, was a close colleague of Appia, and its construction bears many of the latter’s stylistic fingerprints.
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Appia’s work arguably prefigured the practice of Regietheater, in which the director takes on a creative role beyond reproducing the writer’s intentions. An example of this might be taking liberties with a theatrical work’s setting for artistic ends, like underscoring its subtext. It’s common today to see productions of Greek tragedies and Shakespeare’s plays that modernize their settings, but interpreting the text in this way was highly controversial in Appia’s time. His three-dimensional sets, while in some ways more believable than flat backdrops, were quite stylized and sharply contrasted with the nineteenth century tradition of pictorial naturalism. Their characteristically modernist emphasis on psychology also yielded a starkness that foreshadows the minimalism later embraced by postwar German directors to distance German art (and opera in particular) from its nationalistic origins. Subsequent generations of theater practitioners who inherited this objective were frequently denounced as heretical by a staunchly conservative artistic establishment.
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Appia's innovations appear to substantiate a historical narrative about stylistic change often used to describe the development of Western art — artists, regardless of medium, tend to employ first flat compositions then deep ones. In other words, we witness a transition from planimetric space to volumetric space. In visual art, the catalyst for this transition was the discovery of one-point perspective by painters during the Renaissance, and in cinema (which is illusionistic by default), it was the consistent use of depth staging by directors like Jean Renoir and Orson Welles in the thirties and forties — an innovation only possible with the invention of more powerful lighting, which allowed cameras to achieve greater depth of field. Appia’s designs suggest that this narrative applies not only to painting and cinema, but to theater as well, which is often taken for granted as a three-dimensional medium.
The dearth of scholarly attention to Appia’s work and his lapse into obscurity was compounded by the fact that insight into his personal life had been limited by heirs withholding his correspondences from researchers for decades, a decision likely influenced by his attraction to men, which he confided in a letter to a close friend. The isolation he experienced was apparently a source of great frustration and disillusionment, and he became reclusive as he grew older. It’s a real shame he isn’t more widely known, because his writings suggest he was ahead of his time in more ways than one.