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The Library for the Performing Arts Receives the Audio
and Visual Archive of International Performance Artist Robert Wilson
Over 1,000 Videotapes and Films and 249 Audiotapes,
Spanning More than 30 Years, to be Housed in Library
“With the addition of this new collection, the Library for the Performing Arts, which has the largest and foremost collection of theater-related moving images in the world, becomes the primary repository for audio/video documentation of Robert Wilson’s theatrical and operatic works,” remarked Dr. Paul LeClerc, President of The New York Public Library, “We are especially grateful to Robert W. Wilson, one of the Library’s greatest benefactors, whose extraordinary new gift made it possible to accept this important collection by providing for the collection’s preservation and processing.” [Funder Robert W. Wilson is unrelated to theater artist Robert Wilson.] “A number of other generous donors provided funds to preserve and process the Robert Wilson Audio/Visual Collection, including Library Trustees Barbara Goldsmith and Dorothy Cullman with her husband Lewis B. Cullman. Together, their foresight and generosity in this difficult economic climate ensures the growth and enhancement of our collections, which continues to be one of the Library’s prime objectives.” Jacqueline Z. Davis, the Barbara G. and Lawrence A. Fleischman Executive Director of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, said, “Over the years, TOFT has both videotaped and collected Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, The CIVIL warS, The Black Rider, and Danton’s Death, among others. The Library’s dance, music, theater, and recorded sound divisions have also collected artifacts of Wilson’s work, including programs, photographs, videos, recordings, clippings, and journal articles. I am delighted that with the addition of this audio/visual component, the Library will have a detailed portrayal of Robert Wilson, one of the leading avant-garde artists of our age.” The collection comprises 580 recorded performances or partial performances, 308 workshops and rehearsals; 96 documentaries and interviews; 39 editing version tapes, excerpts, and auditions; and 25 unidentified videotapes. The archive spans from 1970 to the present and includes such works as Deafman Glance, The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, The CIVIL warS, A Letter for Queen Victoria, Einstein on the Beach, The Magic Flute, Madame Butterfly, Parsifal, and Salome, among others. Integrating movement, music, texts, and other visual elements, Robert Wilson’s works come out of a non-linear tradition that breaks down the barriers between the various arts disciplines. They project a slow, dream-like quality of time and space, and have been described as creating pictures in time. As Robert Wilson himself has said, “Our responsibility as artists is to ask questions, that is to say ‘What is it’ and not ‘What it is’ for if we know what it is we are doing there is no need to do it.” His numerous collaborators have included such outstanding artists as Laurie Anderson, William Burroughs, David Byrne, Lucinda Childs, Philip Glass, Isabelle Huppert, Heiner Müller, Jessye Norman, Lou Reed, Miranda Richardson, Susan Sontag, and Tom Waits. Wilson was born in Waco, Texas in 1941 and was educated at the University of Texas in Austin where he studied business administration, and at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he studied architecture. By the late 1960s he had become a leading member of New York’s avant-garde theater, and, with his 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach, written with composer Philip Glass, he achieved international acclaim. Wilson’s work is rooted in the fine arts, and his drawings and sculptures have been shown in museums and galleries throughout the world. Major retrospectives of his drawings and sculptures have been mounted by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He has created original installations in London, Rotterdam, Milan, and New York. His numerous awards and honors include the Golden Lion for sculpture from the Venice Biennale, the German Theater Critics award for Best Production of the Year, an Obie award for direction, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for lifetime achievement, the fifth Premio Europa award from Taormina Arte, and the Harvard Excellence in Design Award. In 1986 his international epic the CIVIL warS was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in drama. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999. Patrick Hoffman, Director of the Theatre on Film and Tape
Archive (TOFT), has remarked, “It is entirely appropriate that the Robert
Wilson Audio/Visual Collection become a part of the rich theater heritage
preserved by TOFT and housed here at The New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center. Researchers
and students from around the globe will now have access to these important
documents that have changed the way we view the performing arts.” The Theatre on Film and Tape Archive (TOFT), part
of the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of The New York Public Library for
the Performing Arts, has documented almost 2,500 live theatrical productions
on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in theaters throughout the United States
since it was founded in 1970. Noteworthy productions in the archive include
the 1975 production of Equus with Anthony Hopkins, the 1974 version
of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Elizabeth Ashley and Keir Dullea,
Fiddler on the Roof with Zero Mostel, and the original casts of
Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park with
George. In addition to Robert Wilson, the roster of avant garde and
alternative theater artists whose work has been documented include Julian
Beck and Judith Malina, Ellen Stewart and La Mama ETC, Joseph Chaikin,
Franca Rama and Dario Fo, Richard Foreman, Robert LePage, Martha Clarke,
Anne Bogart, Robert Woodruff, Anne Hamburger, Mary Zimmerman, Simon McBurney,
Richard Maxwell, and Julie Taymor. The archive also includes nearly
250 video dialogues with notable theatrical talents discussing their craft.
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts houses the world's most extensive combination of circulating, reference, and rare archival collections in its field. Its divisions are the Circulating Collections, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, Music Division, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound. The materials in its collections are available free of charge, along with a wide range of special programs, including exhibitions, seminars, and performances. An essential resource for everyone with an interest in the performing arts -- whether professional or amateur -- the Library is known particularly for its prodigious collections of non-book materials such as historic recordings, videotapes, autograph manuscripts, correspondence, sheet music, stage designs, press clippings, programs, posters, and photographs. Major support for the preservation and processing of the Robert Wilson Audio/Visual Collection has been provided by Robert W. Wilson. Generous support for preservation and processing also has been provided by Barbara Goldsmith and Mr. and Mrs. William Rayner. Through a gift from the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation, additional support has been provided by the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Dianne Benson, Irving Benson, Lois Bianchi, Elaine Terner Cooper, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman, Christian Eisenbeiss, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Scaler Foundation, and Stanley T. Stairs. The New York Public Library gratefully acknowledges Dorothy
and Lewis B. Cullman for their leadership support of the Library for the
Performing Arts. ###
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