Cellophane Glamour
摘要
Cellophane Glamour Judith Brown (bio) These new materials are expressive of our own age. They speak in the vernacular of the twentieth century. Theirs is the language of invention, of synthesis. Industrial chemistry today rivals alchemy! Base materials are transmuted into marvels of new beauty. —Paul Frankl, Form and Reform (1930)1 Under Cellophane Skies As the curtains opened on the avant-garde opera event of 1934, Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts, the audience faced a vast sign of the production's cutting edge modernity: 1500 square feet of sky-blue cellophane was draped from the sides and ceiling of the stage, creating a semi-transparent cyclorama, glittering under bright white lights. The stark artificiality of the stage design proclaimed its relationship to the modern world and its unsurpassed hold on the new: "The cellophane set, brilliantly lit to evoke a sky hung with rock crystal, defied comparison to anything the audience had ever seen."2 The set and costume designer was Florine Stettheimer, a New York painter whose close friends included Marcel Duchamp and Carl Van Vechten, and whose paintings were characterized by their light-infused surfaces and whimsical approach to their subjects (her style was sometimes called "primitive moderne"3). Stettheimer had never ventured into the world of stage or costume design before Four Saints (and wouldn't again), but her efforts were met with critical acclaim for her spectacular vision: "some thought that [her] costumes outdid the Ziegfeld Follies, and one quipped that the sets were 'Botticellophane.'"4 Plastic, [End Page 605] that most twentieth-century of materials, here transformed the stage into a powerful blend of art, glamour, and the latest technology. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Decipher. Photographs of stage sets for Four Saints in Three Acts. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. We've lost, in the intervening de