Robert Wilson, visionary playwright, director and visual artist, dies at 83

Los Angeles Times

2 days ago

Robert Wilson, a leader in avant-garde theater who collaborated with Philip Glass, David Byrne and Lady Gaga over his six-decade career, has died. He was 83.
The 'Einstein on the Beach' director died Thursday at his home in Water Mill, N.Y., after a 'brief but acute illness,' according to his website.
'While facing his diagnosis with clear eyes and determination, he still felt compelled to keep working and creating right up until the very end,' the statement reads. 'His works for the stage, on paper, sculptures and video portraits, as well as the Watermill Center, will endure as Robert Wilson's artistic legacy.'
Wilson was born on Oct. 4, 1941, in Waco, Texas, to a conservative Southern Baptist family. He struggled with a speech impediment and learning disabilities as a child but was aided by his ballet teacher, Byrd Hoffman.
'She heard me stutter, and she told me, 'You should take more time to speak. You should speak slowly,' ' he told the Observer in 2015. 'She said one word over a long period of time. She said go home and try it. I did. Within six weeks, I had overcome the stuttering.'
In 1968, Wilson opened an experimental theater workshop named after his mentor: the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds. He created the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation in 1969, under which he established the Watermill Center in 1992.
In his early 20s, Wilson moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., where he studied interior design and architecture at the Pratt Institute. Later, he joined the recreation department of Goldwater Memorial Hospital, where he brought dance to catatonic polio patients with iron lungs.
'Because the patients were largely paralyzed, the work he was doing with them was more mental than physical,' wrote his former colleague Robyn Brentano in Frieze. 'With his unconventional frankness and tenderness, he drew out people's hidden qualities.'
Wilson started teaching movement classes in Summit, N.J., while he wrote his early plays. One day in 1968, he witnessed a white police officer about to strike a deaf, mute Black boy, Raymond Andrews, while walking down the street. Wilson came to Andrews' defense, appeared in court on his behalf and eventually adopted him. Together, Andrews and Wilson created 'Deafman Glance,' a seven-hour 'silent opera,' which premiered in 1970 in Iowa City, Iowa.
'The world of a deaf child opened up to us like a wordless mouth. For more than four hours, we went to inhabit this universe where, in the absence of words, of sounds, 60 people had no words except to move,' wrote French Surrealist Louis Aragon after the 1971 Paris premiere. 'I never saw anything more beautiful in the world since I was born. Never, never has any play come anywhere near this one, because it is at once life awake and the life of closed eyes, the confusion between everyday life and the life of each night, reality mingles with dream, all that's inexplicable in the life of deaf man.'
In 1973, Glass attended a showing of Wilson's 'The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin,' which ran for 12 hours from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. The two artists, united by their interest in experimenting with time and space in theater, soon teamed up to create 'Einstein on the Beach,' which premiered in 1976 in Avignon, France.
'We worked first with the time — four hours — and how we were going to divide it up,' Glass told the Guardian in 2012. 'I discovered that Bob thinks with a pencil and paper; everything emerged as drawings. I composed music to these, and then Bob began staging it.'
Wilson and Glass partnered again to create 'the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down,' which also featured music from Talking Heads frontman Byrne, for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The project, meant to span 12 hours, was ultimately never completed due to funding problems. In 1995, Wilson shared his concerns about arts funding in the U.S. with The Times.
'The government should assume leadership,' Wilson told Times contributor Jan Breslauer. 'By giving the leadership to the private sector in a capitalistic society, we're going to measure the value of art by how many products we can sell. We need to have a cultural policy [instead]. There has to be a balance between government and the private sector.
'One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing,' Wilson says. 'They are the journal and the diary of our time.'
In addition to his stage work, Wilson created drawings, sculptures, furniture and installations, which he showed at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York beginning in 1975. In 2004, Wilson produced a series of video portraits featuring Brad Pitt, Winona Ryder, Renée Fleming and Alan Cumming. He would return to the medium again in 2013 with Lady Gaga as his subject.
One of Wilson's last projects was an installation commissioned by Salone del Mobile in April 2025. Centering on Michelangelo's Rondanini Pietà at Milan's Castello Sforzesco, the project explored the Virgin Mary's pain following Christ's death with a combination of music, light and sculpture.
'I'm creating my own vision of the artist's unfinished masterpiece, torn between a feeling of reverential awe and profound admiration,' he told Wallpaper.
Wilson is survived by Andrews; his sister, Suzanne; and his niece, Lori Lambert.