Painting the Stage: Opera and Art

The term Gesamtkunstwerk indicates the ideal theatre where music, drama, dancing, poetry, and figurative arts coexist so as to create the perfect synthesis of these different art forms. This publication analyzes the evolution of the close bond between the arts starting from the nineteenth century, with the studies of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Paul von Joukowsky, up to the early twenty-first century and across the entire history of twentieth-century art. The volume offers a selection of performances of fundamental importance: from avant-garde experimentation, with collaborations of artists such as Matisse, Kazimir Malevich, and László Moholy-Nagy, to post-war events staged by Oskar Kokoschka, Balthus, Salvador Dalí, and André Derain, up to experimentation in America by Willem de Kooning, Marc Chagall, Louise Nevelson, David Hockney, and the grand protagonists of 1990s performances like George Tsypin, Robert Wilson, and Achim Freyer.After a series of sections dedicated to contemporary works, this book ends with interviews by some of today’s key experimental artists: from Jan Fabre to Rebecca Horn, from William Kentridge to Anselm Kiefer, from Robert Longo to Daniel Richter.