Meyerhold and His Set Designers (American University Studies XX : Fine Arts)

The Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) has since his «repression» under Stalin resumed his rightful place alongside Stanislavsky as a founder of twentieth-century «director's theater.» But he has been simplistically stereotyped as a radical of the bare stage and biomechanical gymnastics for actors. Marjorie L. Hoover, who surveyed his whole forty-year career, official as well as experimental, in her Meyerhold:The Art of Conscious Theater - nominated for a National Book Award in 1975 - now concentrates in Meyerhold andHis Set Designers on his collaboration with many great artists. For with Leon Bakst and Alexander Golovin, among others, he pioneered the modern «designer's theater,» staging both drama and opera in painterly luxury before 1917, and thereafter he led a revolution in theater art together with several designers, among whom, El Lissitzky, Popova and Rodchenko.