Tantalizingly Close to Art World Fame, Then Plunging Into Obscurity A Bio-Play on the Painter Rudolf Bauer, at 59E59 Theaters
Laura Collins-HughesSeptember 9, 2014: Near the exit to the theater on Sunday, an usher stood with a stack of booklets, free for the taking: colorful little catalogs for an exhibition by the 20th-century German abstract painter Rudolf Bauer, whose life we had just seen dramatized in Lauren Gunderson’s play Bauer. It’s a story of an artist as a broken man. With his hero Kandinsky, Bauer (1889-1953) was once at the center of Solomon R. Guggenheim’s collection, bound for immortality on the walls of that magnate’s museum. But Guggenheim died, his heirs took over, and Bauer got obscurity instead. Bauer is presented at 59E59 Theaters by the San Francisco Playhouse and its board member Rowland Weinstein, whose San Francisco gallery represents Bauer. The production coincides with New York shows of his work: at the German consulate now, at Sotheby’s later this month. All of that makes Bauer, directed by the playhouse’s artistic director, Bill English, seem more like a collision of commercial interests than like an aesthetic enterprise greenlighted on the merits. Ms. Gunderson, however, comes with some recent accolades: Her play I and You was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and won a new-play award from the American Theater Critics Association.
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