Certain media, subjects and sizes benefit an artist more than others. And something in the creation process usually gets lost, while going from one to another. Some highlight skill while others harm it. Some encourage innovation while others enforce limits.
It is hard to be consistently extraordinary. But the Flagler Museum’s current show focuses on a man who was.
Named appropriately The Extraordinary Joseph Urban, running through April 17, the show gently introduces us to the world created by an architect, illustrator, set designer and artist who went on to design sets for the opera stages of Boston and New York and for the Ziegfeld Follies, as well as buildings throughout the world.
The exhibit is housed in three gallery rooms and consists of watercolor design drawings, illustrations, sculptures, set models and some furniture pieces designed for hotels and restaurants. We find the occasional photographs of the artist and the only surviving rendering of the demolished Oasis Club, in Palm Beach (here in the second room). It is a 1926 piece done in watercolor over pencil on board. There are also the only surviving vintage copies of Urban’s elevations of the Mar-a-Lago estate.
All in all, the show is a tiny drop of a brilliant career that officially began at age 19 with a commission to design a new wing for the Abdin Palace in Cairo. Consider that by the time he died, in 1933, Urban had designed more than 500 stage sets for more than 168 productions.
Urban (1872-1933) could not have been born in a better place at a better time. The Vienna of those years saw an artistic explosion that included, but was not limited, to artists, composers, poets and philosophers. Inner exploration, the search for the true self and the true mind were no strange practices either. It has been suggested that Urban was influenced by some radical theories that were starting to circulate then, courtesy of Dr. Sigmund Freud.
He trained as an architect and admired personalities such as Gustav Klimt and architect Adolf Loos. In fact, hints of Klimt are found in numerous small pieces here but are most undeniable in the figural wooden sculpture from 1904 standing in the second room. It is not just the touch of gold here and there on this piece that makes us think of the painter, but the shape of the hair and the posture of the half-naked woman. This reminds us of Klimt’s Salomes or Judiths.
The connection is there again, on the hairpiece of the female dressed in black in Urban’s 1909 drawing titled: Costume Designs for Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin at Stuttgart’s Hofopera. Take a close look at the golden, circular patterns. Look familiar?
Adorable illustrations that Urban created for the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale books and calendars as well as for Hans Christian Andersen books, figure in the first room. They are soft and no doubt intended for a young audience, but in them no detail is forgotten and no expression is faked.
In his drawing titled Snow White, the loving prince dressed more as a knight, places his right hand on the glass capsule containing his beloved dead princess. Rather than muscular, dressed in golden armor, he is slim, consumed by grief or love. You can see the resignation taking over him while he stares at her. The gloomy scene is framed by a leaf motif that adds to the sense of death that is already present in the image.
Even if the main subject is a thing of legends (a mermaid) as in The Little Mermaid, why should Urban surrender the towering thick structure or the wooden medieval bridge to a fantastic world, too? No. He paints them old, humid, showing the effects of a real world: cracks and erosion. Meanwhile, the mermaid is a fragile little being with flowers over her long blonde hair looking toward the distance and away from us. She could not be more magical. Realistic spaces can house imaginary things.
Coming from the first room of fairy tales, the second room appears, at first, too serious.
In a watercolor drawing from 1929 titled Elevation of the New School for Social Research Façade, everything is gray and calculated. No decorations or color here. Just the right number of windows and the right number of doors gives it a sleek/modern look. Nothing about it surprises. Not even the fonts chosen for The New School.
But as your eyes travel to the bottom of the building, there you see what Urban imagined would greet visitors and students at the entrance: books inside glass cases. Some of them are shown opened while others show off their colorful covers. A lamp, a curtain, chairs or a fruit basket are elements he uses even when he does not have to. Throughout the evolution of his buildings, he is keeping everything in mind. Buildings, after all, also have an audience, their own language and can evoke feelings, reactions. They are not created simply to store people or stuff.
In 1912, Urban moved to the United States to become the art director of the Boston Opera. Two years later we find him in New York, where his refreshing use of color and line quickly made him many stage directors’ dream in the flesh. He was the perfect combination: a wild dreamer, studied and disciplined.
The third gallery room focuses on this period of his career and includes about 34 works, excluding set models and a fragment of the 1923 film Little Old New York, whose sets carry the Urban touch. At the time, it was the highest-grossing film, selling more than 200,000 tickets (to complement the exhibit, the museum has organized a special screening of it, at 7 p.m. on March 3 in The Grand Ballroom).
One design drawing in particular is of the Klingsor’s Garden and was done in 1920 for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Wagner’s Parsifal. An explosion of flowers of colors takes over the stone structures, advancing over and between them, spreading like a good disease. To the right, a plant of lavender tones drops down like a delicate rain.
A less dramatic piece is Design Drawing of the Black Elephant scene (done for the Cohan Theatre’s production of Pom-Pom the Pickpocket). The scene is set by arches and two elephant heads made of stone that appear facing one another; their trunks rest on the ground, near treasure chests. The symmetry is broken down with colorful fabrics, banners and ribbons hanging from balconies and lamps. The steps in the middle, illuminated by what appears to be daylight, seem to be the way out. One can imagine an actor will enter the picture anytime now, running, jumping up and down.
That is pretty much how we leave the show: up and down. That is, we are overwhelmed by his superior skill (which we could never match in quality or magnitude) and yet we feel enchanted. Once the three gallery rooms are consumed, it is still very hard to distinguish exactly what was Urban’s weakness. What size? Medium? Subject? At what point do we see a slight decrease in quality?
Another distinction that this show makes impossible to make is the moment in which the artist stops and enters the architect. The two never seem to separate. There is a dramatic effect to his architectural drawings, which from time to time contain little playful details that perhaps would not have been considered by a more serious, less dreamy, architect.
At the same time, Urban’s stage designs, which are based on fictional places and fictional characters, have a touch of reality. As dreamy and fictional as they appear, there is also the suggested possibility that they exist.
This is an intimidating show, the kind that leaves one speechless because the best thing one could say would still do a lame job of describing the works. As you walk the show, keep in mind that before you is not just an artist who took on every project that came his way but one who delivered, extraordinarily, again and again and again.
THE EXTRAORDINARY JOSEPH URBAN runs through April 17 at the Flagler Museum on Palm Beach. Admission is free with a ticket to the museum. Adults: $18; $10 for youth ages 13-18; $3 for children ages 6-12; and children under 6 admitted free. For more information, call 561-655-2833 or visit www.flaglermuseum.us.