Visionary, light sculptor, total artist: the American director Bob Wilson, known for his original creations at the theater and the opera, died Thursday in New York State, at the age of 83.
“We are devastated to announce the death of Robert M. Wilson, artist, director of theater and opera, architect, scenographer and lightingist, plastic artist (…)”, said the Robert Wilson Foundation for the Arts, specifying that he had “laid out peacefully” in Water Mill, in New York State, from a brief but lightning disease.
“Although he faced his diagnosis with lucidity and determination, he felt the need to continue working and to create to the end. His works for the scene, on paper, his sculptures and his video portraits, as well as the Watermill Center, will remain his artistic heritage,” added the foundation.
“Peter Pan”, “Turandot”, “Einstein on the Beach” … His staging of original works as well as works of the traditional repertoire created the event wherever they were shown, especially in France.
“Bob Wilson was a visionary artist, a master of staging, a sculptor of light” who “deeply marked his contemporaries, especially in France where he created so much,” commented the French Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati.
“The master of light has died (…) with him, disappears one of the greatest inventors of the contemporary scene. I met him at the Nancy Festival, in these flamboyant years where everything seemed possible. It was an aesthetic shock, a revelation,” added the former Minister of Culture Jack Lang.
His love story with France begins with “The Sourd’s Watch”, his first success, a “silent” spectacle of seven o’clock presented at the Nancy Festival in 1971, then in Paris. After having seen the play, the poet Louis Aragon, upset, writes: “I have never seen anything more beautiful in this world since I was born”.
– “Einstein at the beach” –
Born on October 4, 1941 in Waco, Texas, in the south of the United States, Robert Wilson, or more simply Bob Wilson, had started to set up his own plays in the family garage before moving, aged twenty years, in New York where he approached artists from the American avant-garde like Andy Warhol or Philip Glass.
“Bob and I were met in 1973, behind the scenes of his exhibition” The life and the time of Joseph Staline “, in New York. We started working together, Bob Drawing and I composing. What had started as a natural collaboration was transformed into our work” Einstein on the Beach “. From that moment, we became friends and collaborators for life” Glass.
“Bob leaves us with his brilliant vision of everything he touched,” added the American composer who had signed the music of “Einstein on the Beach”, an “species” of almost five hours riding several times since its creation.
Bob Wilson also collaborated with the choreographer Andy de Groat, Tom Waits, Isabelle Huppert, the legend of the Mikhail Barychnikov Ballet, or Lady Gaga for video portraits of her in the Louvre.
The Watermill Center he created had also organized a large exhibition in Minneapolis in tribute to George Floyd, African-American killed five years ago in this city in the North of the United States by a white policeman, an event that had given new magnitude to the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
The Robert Wilson Foundation for the Arts said Thursday that tributes will be made “shortly” to this multidisciplinary artist in “places that were particularly important in his eyes”.
Posted on July 31 at 10:50 p.m. AFP
