The Life and Art of Boris Aronson - Yiddish Book Center

y C.S. O’CarrollAA LARGER S COn December 12, 1927, the Anderson Galleries o nPark Avenue opened a startling one-man show u n l i k eanything else on the New York art scene. Featuring25 miniature, spotlight-illuminated stage sets and100 painted renditions of thea-trical costumedesigns, the exhibit showcased the distinctivec reative vision of Boris Aronson, a young Russianbo rn painter, sculptor, author, dire c t o r, and stagedesigner who had arrived in the United States justfour years earlier armed, in his words, with“ p a i n t b rushes, crowded emotions, little money,and less English.”One of the plays fe a tu red in the Aron s on ex h i bi tincluded scenes set in Heaven and Hell. Another requiredan array of sets that combined the interior of a subway carwith the dreams of a passenger who falls asleep on hiscom mute home from work . Pu bl i c i ty for the ex h i bi tcelebrated the “whimsical fantasy and colorful symbolism”the artist had employed to tackle these and other u nu su a lde s i gn ch a ll en ge s .TThe art of the theatrical de s i gn er is notori o u s lyephemeral, so it was remarkable enough that any set orcostume design should enjoy a life beyond the run of theplay for which it was created. What made the AndersonGalleries exhibit truly extraordinary was the fact that thisparticular designer had been plying his trade far from theglamour and prestige of the Broadway mainstream. EightTony Awards lay in Boris Aronson’s future, but at that earlypoint in his career, his innovative work had found a homeonly within the small, specialized world of Yiddish theatre.He had designed the debut productions at Unzer Teater(Our Theatre) in the Bronx and the Yiddish Art Theatre onthe Lower East Side. At the Schildkraut Theatre and theIrving Place Theatre, he had worked not only as a set andcostume designer, but also as a director.During those first few years of his American career, mostof New York’s Engl i s h - s peaking theatre patrons hadremained unaware of Aronson’s work. However, his boldapproach to stage design, influenced by some of Europe’smost audacious avant-garde art movements, had excitedadmiration among the city’s leading art and culture journalists.Reviewing a 1926 Yiddish Art Theatre production ofAvrom Goldfadn’s The Tenth Commandment, the influentialTheatre Arts Monthly critic John Mason Brown hadhailed Aronson’s “vigor and originality” and declared hiss ets and co s tumes “the bravest ex peri m ents in scen i cdesign” anywhere in New York that season.Brown, along with New York Times drama critic Broo k sAt k i n s on and Yiddish Art Th e a tre fo u n der Ma u ri ceSchwartz, was among the sponsors of Aronson’s 1927exhibit. With luminaries of that caliber as its backers, thiswas an art event calculated to put the city and the theatreworld on notice that a potent new talent had made itsentrance.The exhibit of Aronson’s Yiddish theatre designs coincidedwith his work on a production at the Civic RepertoryTheatre, his first commission for the English-speakingstage. His first Broadway show was still five years in thefuture. In the long career that lay ahead of him – he liveduntil 1980 and designed his final sets in 1976 – he was destinedto work with some of the greatest playwrights, performers,directors, composers, and choreographers of the20th century and to create the scenic designs for some ofBroadw ay ’s most mem ora ble produ cti on s , i n clu d i n gFiddler on the Roof, which opened in 1964 and did not closeuntil 1972 – a run of more than 3,200 performances. A fewperceptive critics had seen greatness in Boris Aronson onthe basis of his early work for the Yiddish stage, and hewould go on to prove them right decade after decade.86 wɪɴteʀ S P R I N G20052 0 0 5

L ET he Life andArt of Boris AronsonAronson, one of ten children of the Grand Rabbi of Kiev,was born in czarist Russia’s Pale of Settlement sometimebet ween 1898 and 1900. His bi rt h p l ace was a smallUkrainian town 80 miles outside of Kiev; he was about tenyears old when his father moved the family to the big city,opening up new vistas of cultural stimulation for the artisticallyinclined boy. Boris was particularly enthralled by theflamboyant painted peacock ado rning the curtain thathung in front of the stage at the Kiev Opera House.Aron s on’s wi dow, the Czech - born Lisa (Ja l owe t z )Aronson, who became his design assistant in 1943, marriedhim two years later, and worked with him on more than 20Broadway shows, recalls that her husband didn’t talk a greatdeal about his boyhood in Russia, but said enough to conveythat he was “the black sheep in the family,” more concernedwith artistic pursuits than with his father’s world ofstrict religious observance.According to The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson, a lavishlyillustrated 1987 volume that Lisa Aronson co-authoredwith New York Times columnist and former drama criticFrank Rich, Aronson remembered his father as a learnedman who was well versed in Russian literature, but whoknew and cared little about the visual arts. Still, the rabbipermitted his son to enroll in Kiev’s State Art School, wherethe young student quickly found himself rebelling againstthe conservatism of his instructors and looking elsewherefor inspiration.The ye a rs leading up to World War I and the Bo l s h evi kRevo luti on were a time of trem en dous arti s tic ferm ent aswell as po l i tical uph e ava l , so Aron s on was coming of a ge inan ae s t h etic cl i m a te abuzz with dari n g,ex peri m ental theori e sand styl e s . A new gen era ti on of Eu ropean painters and sculptorswas breaking dra m a ti c a lly with the past. Rej ecting su chcen tu ries-old ae s t h etic trad i ti ons as re a l i s tic repre s en t a ti onand va n i s h i n g - point pers pective , the Con s tru ctivi s t s ,Cu bi s t s , Fa uvi s t s , Futu ri s t s , Su prem a ti s t s , and other practition ers of a b s tract art were re aching for new ways to portrayhuman ex peri en ce . These revo luti on a ry artists used distortedshapes and vivi d , u n n a tu ral co l ors to ex press spiri tual andem o ti onal re a l i ties beyond the literal truth of what thingsl oo ked like . Th ey com po s ed arra n gem ents of geom etri cforms that made no attem pt to copy or repre s ent the natu r-al worl d . Th ey fra gm en ted , mu l ti p l i ed , and overl a pped figures in order to pictu re obj ects from several angles simu l t a-n eo u s ly and to convey a sense of dynamic moti on .Exc i ted by the po ten tial of these icon ocl a s tic art movemen t s , the young Boris Aron s on found himsel f f ru s tra ted bywhat he rega rded as the fusty trad i ti onalism of the State ArtS ch oo l . He was mu ch more wi lling to learn from the ava n t -ga rde artist Al ex a n d ra Ex ter, who had bef ri en ded Pa bl oPicasso while stu dying and painting abroad and hadretu rn ed to her native land to pion eer a disti n ctively Ru s s i a nhybrid of the abstract styles she had en co u n tered el s ewh erein Eu rope . Aron s on became Ex ter ’s pupil at her studio inKi ev, t h en fo ll owed her to Mo s cow to work as her assistantwh en she took a po s i ti on as a de s i gn er at the Ka m ernyTheatre.In the era of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Kamerny wasspearheading a revolt against naturalistic theatre, againstplays that aspired to the faithful imitation of everyday life.Kamerny directors favored an extravagant amalgamation ofmultiple aesthetic elements – which might include music,dance, abstract visual art, and even circus performancetechniques – designed to give audiences an experience radicallydifferent from anything available in the offstage worldof ordinary reality. Assisting Exter with her contributions tothis vibrant, experimental theatre environment, Aronsonabsorbed some of the concepts and approaches that wouldcome to define his work on the American stage.Scenery at the Kamerny did not consist of two-dimensionalpainted backdrops depicting drawing rooms, city7 P A K N T R E G E R

streets, or other real-world locations. Instead, set designersthought like sculptors or architects, crafting three-dimensionalplaying spaces where the actors could move about onmultiple levels. They arranged abstract geometric shapesand masses to construct symbolic expressions of a play’semotional essence. In keeping with the philosophy of totaltheatricality, the set and costume designer for a Kamernyplay worked intimately with the director from the earliestplanning stages of a production. The look of the play wasnot a decorative add-on, but an integral part of the show’soverall concept.An affinity for nonrepresentational stage design, a preferencefor sets that did not confine the action to a singlelevelplaying area, and a vision of the designer as a fullfledgedcollaborator with the director – all these legacies ofhis Kamerny experience were to have a profound influenceon Aronson’s subsequent career.The Soviet Union’s hospitality to abstract and experimentalart did not last long. Socialist Realism soon becamethe nation’s official aesthetic doctrine, and Stalinist purgesdealt harshly with artists whose work was deemed bourgeois,decadent, or unsuitable for government-approvedpropaganda purposes. Aronson avoided the unhappy fateof many fellow artists by fleeing the country in 1922.He settled for a short time in Berlin, where he exhibitedhis paintings and published two books, one of which was astudy of Jewish graphic art. In his native country, Aronson,temporarily using the name “Baruch Aronson,” had beenaffiliated briefly with a group of Jewish artists who lookedto traditional shtetl folk art, such as primitive woodblockprinting, and to non-representational design motifs, suchas the decorative patterns on prayer shawls and skullcaps, askeys to an explicitly Jewish style of abstract art. Now, however,Aronson used his book to argue that there was nottruly any such thing as “Jewish art,” that a people so dispersedamong many nations could not lay claim to a signatureaesthetic tradition distinct from the art of the dominantcultures around them.The other book Aronson published during his residencein Germany was about fellow artist Marc Chagall, withwhom he had fo rmed an important friendship back inRussia. Chagall was a decade older than Aronson, but thetwo had a great deal in common. Both were deeply interestedin Russian Jewish folk art, and both had exercisedtheir talents not only as painters but also as Moscow theatricaldesigners. Years later, married and living in theUnited States, Aronson would name his son Marc.The modest financial su ccess of his two books madeit po s s i ble for Aron s on to set out ac ross the At l a n ticfor New York Ci ty in 1923, a metropolis that lived in hisi m a gi n a ti on as a rom a n tic cen ter of tech n o l ogical soph i sti c a-ti on and cultu ral vi t a l i ty, “a new worl d ,” as he conceived it,wh ere an artist would be able to work “on a l a r ger, f reers c a l e .”His decision to seek his first A merican work in theYiddish theatre was driven by practical considerations. Forthose first few years in New York, he simply didn’t haveenough English to read scripts and contracts, or even toconverse with actors and directors. Nor was he sufficientlysteeped in the look and feel of his adopted country to beconfident about his ability to express the American experiencein his designs. But, in the Yiddish theatres located inthe Bronx and on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Aronsonfound a community of fellow artists and European immigrantswho shared his familiarity with the avant-garde artinnovations that were still years away from gaining accepta n ce in the com m ercial mainstream of New York’sEnglish-language theatre industry. To Broadway producersand directors of the 1920s, the young Russian’s approach tostage design was, in the words of a writer for The Nation,“an exotic and transplanted thing” that was bound to limithis appeal, notwithstanding “Aronson’s technical proficiency,his intelligence, and his ingenuity.”It was not until 1932 that Broadw ay ’s imagi n a ti on caugh tup with the exo tic intell i gen ce of Boris Aron s on . He wash i red that year to de s i gn the va u devi ll e - s tyle musical revu eWalk a Little Fa s ter, the first of his many com m i s s i ons forthe musical stage . Over the next several dec ade s , Aron s onof ten found that mu s i c a l s , opera s , and ball et s , with thei ri n h erent dep a rtu res from the literal ren d i ti on of re a l i ty, weree s pec i a lly com p a ti ble with his theatrical vi s i on .Aron s on unders tood that a Broadw ay career would frequen t ly entail com promise on his part , that he would haveto come to terms with the need for re a l i s tic repre s en t a ti onin his de s i gns for certain shows . In many of the sets hede s i gn ed after leaving the Yiddish stage for the wi derworld of E n gl i s h - l a n g u a ge theatre , the lessons he hadl e a rn ed at the Ka m erny ex pre s s ed them s elves in su bt l eto u ches ra t h er than full - bl own abstracti on . For ex a m p l e ,even wh en de s i gning a pri m a ri ly re a l i s tic set , he of tens c u l pted the three - d i m en s i onal stage space by incorpora t-ing ramps and other devi ces that en a bl ed actors and directorsto invi gora te the play with acti on on more than on el evel . Because he con ti nu ed to work as a painter wh i l ep u rsuing his career in the theatre , he maintained a stron gs ense of the con n ecti on bet ween the physical re a l i ty ofco l or and the em o ti onal re a l i ties of a play wri gh t’s scri pt .8 S P R I N G 2 0 0 5

“ He was a painter first and forem o s t ,” Lisa Aron s onrec a ll s . “ He alw ays said that his de s i gn was influ en ced byhis painti n g.” In many cases, this meant sel ecting a palet teof co l ors that hel ped to infuse a set with the play ’s intangible mood or essen ce .Additionally, Aronson displayed a genius for adjustingrealistic sets into something more than simply copies of thelocations they represented. His design for The Diary of AnneFrank, although it could in no way be considered abstract,did not attempt to repro duce an exact replica of theAmsterdam garret in which the Frank family hid from theNazis. Working on a relatively spacious stage, he took libertieswith the layout of the actual attic to convey a sense ofclose-quarters physical confinement and to capture theemotional stress arising from each individual family member’slack of privacy.Aronson’s greatest Broadway achievements, however,were his designs for productions that valued imaginationand theatricality above ordinary realism. One landmarkplay in this vein was the 1958 verse drama J.B., poetArchibald MacLeish’s adaptation of the Book of Job, inwhich the prosperous man who loses everything is re-imaginedas a 20th-century tycoon. The play takes place under asymbolic big top, and the roles of God and Satan are enactedby a pair of circus vendors. Long an enthusiast of circusspectacle, Aronson had featured circus themes in some ofhis paintings. He was thrilled by the larger-than-life designchallenge with which this play confronted him – to find avisual style encompassing both sideshow vulgarity and biblicalgrandeur, to take a seedy traveling circus as his startingpoint and render an abstract, mythologized version thatcould serve as an arena of cosmic moral conflict.To meet the challenge, he eliminated the curtain andextended the stage out over the orchestra pit in order todraw the audience closer to the action. On the reconfiguredstage, he constructed a co mplex, multilevel performanceenvironment surmounted by an expanse of canvas thatcould collapse catastrophically to represent the destructionof J.B.’s fortune and family. Winding stairs at one side of thestage rose to a structure that jutted out high above the circus-ringarea below, resembling both the pulpit from whicha preacher addresses his congregation and the platformfrom which an acrobat swings daringly into action.Aron s on said that J . B . gave him the “s cope for freedomand imagi n a ti on” that he had been seeking in the New Yorkt h e a tre for more than three dec ade s . Ha i l ed in the press as“m a j e s ti c” and “flawl e s s ,” his set for this produ cti onm a rked a tu rning point in his Broadw ay career, the start ofa peri od in wh i ch he ach i eved his gre a test com m ercial su c-cess and won five of his ei ght Tony Aw a rd s .Aron s on had alw ays en j oyed re s pect from fell ow arti s t s ,but he had spent ye a rs watching other de s i gn ers land thebl ock bu s ter assign m ents while he labored on many ae s-t h eti c a lly exc i ting but com m erc i a lly unsu ccessful playsthat cl o s ed after short ru n s . In part this was because of arestless cre a tivi ty that of ten ran ahead of wh a tever wasc u rren t ly fashion a bl e . “ It’s amazing that Broadw ay evengave him a ch a n ce , because in a sense his work was alw aysex peri m en t a l ,” Lisa Aron s on marvel s . “ He was not con s i d-ered an easy man to work wi t h . He was alw ays trying to dos om ething fresh and new.” According to Broadw ay de s i gnerKa rl Ei gs ti , who now heads the theatre de s i gn progra mat Bra n deis Un ivers i ty, s ome produ cers and directorsten ded to rega rd Aron s on as “an eccen tric Russian madma n” whose con s t a n t ly evo lving passion for new techni ques and new materials of ten flu m m oxed the shop swh ere his sets had to be bu i l t . But after the acclaim thatgreeted his J . B . s et , Broadw ay seem ed to devel op a newl evel of a pprec i a ti on for the dynamic re sults thatAron s on’s “eccen tri c” gen ius could produ ce . The 1960sand 1970s gave his career a rousing final act , with his talentsso mu ch in demand that he tu rn ed down far morework than he was able to accept .The highlights of Aronson’s career in those decades werethe ambitious, innovative musicals on which he collaboratedwith producer/director Harold Prince – monumentalworks such as Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Zorba, Company,Follies, A Little Night Music, and Pacific Overtures. Princespoke fondly of “the peppery, combative intelligence” thedesigner brought to each new production, while Aronsonpraised Prince as “a director who knows my strong pointsand limitations . . . knows how to challenge me.”Fi d dl er, produ ced by Pri n ce , d i rected and ch oreographedby Jerome Robbins, used a script based on the storiesof Sholem Aleichem and a title inspired by the work ofAronson’s old friend Marc Chagall. Aronson’s design for theshow combined elements of Chagall’s fantastical, folkloricpainting style with realistic details meant to evoke thepoverty of the shtetl that is home to the family of Tevye thedairyman. Motivated by a line from Sholem Aleichem’swriting that described Tevye’s family as “a small circle withinthe larger community of the town,” Aronson placed hisset on two large turn-tables, one revolving off-center insidethe other, that moved the acto rs and scenery about thestage. Robbins seized on the circle motif for much of hischoreography and for striking visual moments in whichactors dispersing from a circular stage picture symbolized9 P A K N T R E G E R

the evaporation of a traditional way of life.For Cabaret, set in the Berlin that Aronson had knownin the 1920s, the designer adopted an edgy, grotesque styleto express the chaotic spirit of Weimar Germany and thelooming menace of Nazism. Moving away from the stagemusical tradition in which each song and dance numberadvances the story incrementally, Cabaret situated much ofits action in a garish nightclub with a tinsel stage curtainand a marquee of huge cursive letters flashing on and off.The music and choreography created spectacles that hadless to do with conventional narrative than with satiricalsocial commentary and expression of the play’s thematicessence. One particularly effective feature of Aronson’sCabaret set was an enormous mirror that reflec ted theaudience as the theatre filled up before the performance,then lifted into the air and changed its angle to provide areflection of the action on the stage.Co m pa ny, wh i ch open ed in 1970 and pre s en ted a ra t h eru n s ym p a t h etic vi ew of u rban life and marital rel a ti on s h i p sin the New York Ci ty of its day, m ay have been the crown i n gach i evem ent of Aron s on’s career. Th e a tre historian Ju n eMa m a n a , who made Aron s on the su bj ect of h er 1997 Tu f t sUn ivers i ty doctoral dissert a ti on , wri te s , “O f a ll the showsthat he co ll a bora ted on with Pri n ce , Aron s on felt thatCo m pa ny em bod i ed his best work .” All silvery met a l , cl e a rp l a s ti c , and ri ght angles inspired by Ma n h a t t a n’s geogra phyand arch i tectu re , the Co m pa ny s et hoi s ted actors up anddown in a pair of el eva tors and placed them inside box l i kep l aying areas that ex pre s s ed what Lisa Aron s on and Fra n kRi ch de s c ri be as “the bleak mood of a l i en a ted con tem pora ryNew Yorkers , who are at on ce tra pped and ex po s ed in thei rglass en cl o su re s .” Using slide proj ecti ons against a gi a n tc ycl orama in lieu of s cene ch a n ge s , the de s i gn won Aron s onthe sixth of his ei ght Tony Aw a rds and bro u ght him some ofhis most gl owing revi ews . Raving abo ut Aron s on’s set in theNew Repu bl ic, S t a n l ey Kauffman decl a red , “ In a dec i s ivew ay, it ‘m a ke s’ the show. The ultra-hip tone of Co m pa nyrests on the work of this seven ty - ye a r-old de s i gn er.”Aronson continued to create critically acclaimed, awardwinningwork well into his eighth decade. His notableachievements in the 1970s included the deceptively simpleset for Follies, which took place on the empty stage of a theatre slated for dem o l i ti on , and the Ka bu k i - i n flu en ceddesign of Pacific Overtures, which dealt with the 19th-centurycultural collision between the young United States andthe ancient, long-isolated nation of Japan. Like so many ofhis other assign m en t s , e ach of these produ cti ons wasremarkable for the freshness of its approach, for the artist’srefusal to repeat something that had worked for him in thepast. Aronson had always insisted that he did not aspire tobe known for a characteristic style that recurred from oneshow to the next. He wanted instead to be creatively“reborn” with each new production.He won his final Tony Aw a rd for Pa ci fic Overtu re s in 1 9 7 6 ,the same year that Fi d dl er on the Roof was revived with hisori ginal set . He also de s i gn ed his final ball et that ye a r, co ll a borating with dancer / ch oreogra ph er Mikhail Ba rys h n i kov ona Wa s h i n g ton , D. C . , produ cti on of The Nu tcra cker.Ba rys h n i kov had defected from the Sovi et Un i on some ye a rse a rl i er, and he and Aron s on were able to con fer in Russian ast h ey bra i n s torm ed the look of the show.As he had thro u gh o ut his theatre career, Aron s on continu ed to paint in the final ye a rs of his life . He died inNovem ber 1980. The fo ll owing su m m er, Broadw ay welcomed yet another Fi d dl er on the Roof reviva l . O n ce aga i n ,the program credit re ad , “S cenic De s i gn by Bori sAron s on .”C. S. O’Carroll is a writer and actor who has performed ontheatre and comedy club stages in more than half the 50states and has published articles on show business topics innumerous newspapers and magazines.10 S P R I N G 2 0 0 5

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