Pencil on paper
Not on view
For the 1976 Byrd Hoffman Foundation/Festival d'Avignon production (premiere Avignon, France). Music by Philip Glass. Choreography by Andrew de Groat and Lucinda Childs. Directed by Robert Wilson
This drawing was made in preparation for Wilson's opera Einstein on the Beach. The four-and-a-half-hour-long piece consists of scenes loosely relating to Albert Einstein's personal life and scientific achievements. Wilson's high-contrast drawing foregrounds luminosity as a central preoccupation of the production, both as a metaphor for knowledge and as the potential, blinding result of Einstein's theories. The spaceship rendered here was the idea of the production's composer, Philip Glass, who said, "My music sounds to me like the motor of a spaceship, so I said I wanted a spaceship in the opera."
Stage Pictures: Drawing for Performance, March 11–August 24, 2009.
Gallery label from Making Music Modern: Design for Ear and Eye , November 15, 2014–January 17, 2016.
This drawing was made in preparation for Wilson's opera Einstein on the Beach. The four-and-a-half-hour-long piece consists of scenes loosely related to Albert Einstein's personal life and scientific achievements. Wilson's high-contrast pencil drawing foregrounds luminosity as a central preoccupation of the production, both as a metaphor for knowledge and as the potentially blinding effect of Einstein's theories. The spaceship rendered here was conceived by the production's composer, Philip Glass, who said, "My music sounds to me like the motor of a spaceship, so I said I wanted a spaceship in the opera."
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