Theatre in revolution: An exhibition and a catalogue

Abstract

From December 1991 to February 1993, another distinguished exhibition organized by Nancy Van Norman Baer, theatre and dance curator of The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, opened at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco before traveling to New York City, Los Angeles, and San Antonio. Theatre in Revolution: Russian Avant-garde Stage Design 1913-1935 offered a wide range of theatrical designs, including many prepared for choreographic artists, and a smattering of dance photographs. In addition, the exhibition was accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue with nine essays, two of which specifically concerned the dance. Working in collaboration with the Bakhrushin State Central Theatrical Museum in Moscow, Baer was able to display more than two hundred of the most daring experiments by artists in the years immediately preceding the official establishment of socialist realism in the Soviet Union. In so doing she gave artand dance-lovers in the West a clearer and more vivid picture of what the theatre artists of the fabled Russian avant-garde accomplished in their heyday. In New York City, where the exhibition was installed in the IBM Gallery of Science and Art, one of the first items on display was