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Creator
Oenslager, Donald, 1902-1975
Call number
*T-Mss 1976-007
Physical description
4.5 linear feet (8 boxes)
Language
English
Preferred Citation

Donald Oenslager Collection of Edward Gordon Craig, *T-Mss 1976-007. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Repository
Billy Rose Theatre Division
Access to materials
Request an in-person research appointment.Restrictions apply

The Donald Oenslager Collection of Edward Gordon Craig is an artificial collection containing correspondence and artwork created by the noted theatrical designer and graphic artist, Edward Gordon Craig. Although born and raised in England, Craig moved to the continent in 1904 where he continued to work; the impact of his radical innovations in stage design were international in scope. Craig’s colleague, Donald Oenslager, an American stage designer and longtime faculty member of the Yale School of Drama, whose own work had been profoundly influenced by Craig, amassed the selection of letters and prints that form this collection.

Biographical/historical information

Donald Mitchell Oenslager, an American stage designer and professor, was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on 7 March 1902. Oenslager began his career in the theater as an actor, working at the Greenwich Village Theatre and the Provincetown Playhouse during the early 1920s. He became interested in theater design after studying in Europe and his first project as a designer was in 1925 for a ballet, Sooner or Later. Oenslager was active as a designer through the 1960s, working on many notable Broadway productions, including Of Mice and Men (1937) and A Majority of One (1959), for which he received a Tony Award. He also served as a faculty member of the Yale School of Drama, teaching design from 1925 until his death in 1975 and publishing many works, including, Scenery Then and Now(1936) and Notes on Scene Painting (1952). Profoundly influenced by the European stage designers, Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, Oenslager brought a new emphasis on symbolism over realism to American theater design. Throughout his life, Oenslager built up an extensive collection of materials on both Craig and Appia. Following his death on 11 June 1975, Oenslager’s widow, Mary, gave portions of the Craig material to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Division, while other parts of the collection went to Yale University.

Edward Gordon Craig, the object of Oenslager's collecting efforts and study, was an actor, artist, theater designer and director. Craig was born in Stevenage, England on 16 January 1872, the second of two children produced from the liaison between the actress Ellen Terry and the architect Edward William Godwin. He was baptized Edward Henry Gordon at the age of sixteen (taking the names of his godparents, Henry Irving and Lady Gordon) and added the surname Craig at the age of twenty-one. Exposed to the theater from an early age, Craig had made his stage debut by the age of six. After completing his studies in 1889, Craig became a member of Henry Irving's company at the Lyceum Theatre.

Although Craig received strong critical praise for his acting, he soon retreated from this promising career. In 1893, Craig married May Gibson, an actress, and moved from London to Uxbridge, where he met the artists James Ferrier Pryde and William Nicholson. From them he learned various techniques of printmaking and developed an enthusiasm for wood engraving in particular. His new interest in graphic design was soon coupled with the chance to direct a production of Alfred de Musset's On ne badine pas avec l'amour(1893), for which he also created the designs. In 1898, Craig started a magazine, The Page, which was filled almost entirely with his own work. By the end of 1899 he had engraved nearly 200 blocks and published a book, Gordon Craig's Book of Penny Toys.

During this period, Craig continued to develop as a stage designer and director. He worked with the musician, Martin Shaw, on a production of Dido and Aeneas in 1900 that was groundbreaking in its approach to stage design. The limitations of the space (the Hampstead Conservatoire) enabled Craig to depart from the elaborate, realist traditions of Victorian stagecraft. Craig’s innovations in lighting and design were admired by critics and radical artists, but often proved impractical to mount in the conservative climate of the English commercial theater. In 1904, Craig moved to Berlin for greater opportunities and designed a production of Venice Preserv’d for the Lessing Theatre in 1905. In that same year he produced a significant essay, The Art of the Theatre, which he later reworked as On the Art of the Theatre (1911). Perhaps most importantly, it was in Germany that he met the American dancer, Isadora Duncan. Although their affair was relatively brief in duration, Duncan was to be a major influence on Craig. The two shared a belief in a theater in which all of the arts were united. They collaborated on a book and had two children during the short time that they were together, but the affair was over by 1907 and Craig moved to Florence with his former lover, Elena Fortuna Meo, and established his own theatrical publication, The Mask (1908-1929). It was his association with Duncan, however, that earned Craig an invitation from Konstantin Stanislavsky to design a production of Hamlet for the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912. Following that success, Craig returned to Florence and opened his own School for the Art of the Theatre at the Arena Goldoni, which operated until the outbreak of the First World War.

Craig continued to live in Italy following the war, having moved to Rapallo with Elena Meo and their children in 1917, but he began to shift away from practice into theory, focusing more of his attention on his writings and wood engravings. By the late 1920s, Craig had executed what would be his final stage designs, a Danish production of Ibsen’s The Pretenders (1926) and a New York production of Macbeth (1928). He left Elena Meo again in the early 1930s and moved to France with his secretary, Daphne Woodward, and their child. Among his wood engravings, Craig’s work on the 1929 edition of Hamlet for the Cranach Press is often viewed as one of his greatest accomplishments. Following the end of World War II, Craig settled in the small town of Vence in the south of France, where he completed an autobiography, Index to the Story of My Days (1957) and was visited frequently by his admirers. Craig died in Vence on 29 August 1966.

Sources

  • Hamilton, James. “Craig, (Edward Henry) Gordon,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Accessed 20 Jan. 2005), http://www.oxforddnb.com
  • Owen, Bobbi. “Donald Oenslager.” Scenic Design on Broadway: Designers and their credits, 1915-1990. Westport, CT : Greenwood Press, 1991, 136-7.
  • Owen, Bobbi. “Gordon Craig.” Scenic Design on Broadway: Designers and their credits, 1915-1990. Westport, CT : Greenwood Press, 1991, 45.
  • Rawdon, Kathryn. Donald Oenslager Collection of Edward Gordon Craig: Gen MSS 424 (accessed 20 January 2005), http://webtext.library.yale.edu/xml2html/beinecke.OENCRAIG.con.html#a8

Scope and arrangement

The Donald Oenslager Papers and Designs, *T-Mss 1996-015, Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

The Donald Oenslager Collection of Edward Gordon Craig is an artificial collection containing correspondence and artwork created by the noted theatrical designer and graphic artist, Edward Gordon Craig. These materials were collected by Craig’s colleague, Donald Oenslager. Oenslager, an American stage designer and longtime faculty member of the Yale School of Drama, often claimed Craig to be one of the chief influences on his own work. The majority of the correspondence in the collection dates from 1945-1963 and is primarily from Craig to his friend, Ewald Junge, who often helped him to generate an income by arranging for the sale of prints, books, and other items from Craig’s personal collection and performing other personal favors. A good deal of the material in this segment of Oenslager’s collection of Edward Gordon Craig was obtained by Oenslager through Junge. Another, smaller set of correspondence in the Donald Oenslager Collection of Edward Gordon Craig is between Oenslager and Junge (as well as other collectors and dealers) and relates mainly to the acquisition of the prints included in the collection. Also forming part of this collection are two sets of index card files, which catalog individual items in Oenslager’s collection. As can be seen from these indices, Oenslager’s collection of Edward Gordon Craig was quite extensive and some of the materials described in the catalogs may have been dispersed following Oenslager’s death in 1975. Few of the prints contained in this collection are accounted for in the indices and most appear to have been acquired by Oenslager in the period just before Craig’s death in 1966. Well-represented in the collection are many early “black figure” wood engravings, as well as varying versions of the Hamlet blocks to which Craig returned repeatedly throughout his career. Also included among the prints are illustrations for an edition of Robinson Crusoe, a project that never found a publisher. Some portion of the Craig material collected by Oenslager that is not in the present collection can be found at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The current location of other Craig material that may be cited in the card indices is unknown.

The Donald Oenslager collection of Edward Gordon Craig is arranged in four series:

  • Series I: Correspondence
    1908 - 1967, undated
    3 boxes

    This series is comprised chiefly of letters by Edward Gordon Craig that were later collected by Donald Oenslager. Most of the Craig letters are originals, but a few of the items in this series are typed copies or photostats of the originals. A second set of materials includes Oenslager’s own correspondence with collectors, dealers, and scholars with an interest in Craig.

  • Series II. Indices
    undated
    2 boxes

    This series consists of two sets of catalog cards providing descriptions of material in the Donald Oenslager Collection of Edward Gordon Craig. The first set is comprised of 3” x 5” index cards, which were contained in a wooden file box labeled, Catalogue, Gordon Craig Collection of Donald Oenslager. The typed descriptions are fairly brief and the cards were found arranged by hand written dividers. The second set of catalog cards is comprised of 5” x 7” index cards, which were contained in a metal file box labeled, Gordon Craig Collection of Donald Oenslager. These cards were preprinted with the same heading as above and include slightly more detailed typed descriptions of the materials in the collection. There is some overlap between the materials described in the two files, but the second set of cards appears to be later in date than the first and to describe a more extensive set of materials. The cards found in Section K (Letters from Craig to Other Individuals) of the second group correspond to the Craig letters in Series I, Sub-series 1. Apparently part of an abortive project to provide an item level inventory of the collection, each item was assigned a cataloging number which is present on the card and is written in on pencil on the item. The cataloging project appears to have been terminated abruptly when the end of the 1951 Craig correspondence had been reached. An undated, handwritten note providing instructions to an unidentified project cataloger, however, indicates that letters from Craig’s secretary, as well as from correspondents to Craig, were to comprise a separate section of this inventory. In addition, slips attached to some of the catalog cards indicate some preliminary work done dating and cross-referencing material that had not yet been cataloged with the cataloged letters. The current location of many of the other Craig materials described in these indices is not known.

  • Series III. Prints
    1898 - 1947, undated
    1 box

    This series contains original prints created by Edward Gordon Craig. It consists almost exclusively of wood engravings, but also includes what may be an etching by Craig. Most of the prints appear to have been acquired by Donald Oenslager during the last few years of Craig’s life (1962-1963), including a cache of materials formerly in the collection of the puppeteer, Paul McPharlin. The source of some of the prints can be identified precisely with information provided in the correspondence and invoices from dealers contained in Series I, sub-series 2; a spreadsheet containing these attributions has been prepared. The prints have been arranged alphabetically by title, as cited in the lists (A and B) of Craig’s wood engravings printed for private circulation during the 1920s (see Series I, Box 3, Folder 16) and from other sources. When more than one date appears in the folder heading, the first date indicated is usually the date that the original wood block was carved as given in these lists, followed by any dates included on or with the print itself.

  • Series IV: Oversized prints
    1900 - 1962, undated
    2 boxes

    This series contains larger format prints. It is comprised chiefly of wood engravings by Craig, but also includes one Craig etching and a few other miscellaneous Craig pieces, including a sheet music cover. Two other items, tentatively identified as lithographs, probably are not by Craig, but by his contemporary, Mikhail Fedorovich Larionov. It is not clear if the latter are original prints or reproductions removed from a book by Oenslager. Among the notable items included in this series is a set of proofs on yellow paper for the Cranach Press edition of Hamlet.

Administrative information

Source of acquisition

The Donald Oenslager Collection of Edward Gordon Craig was donated to the Billy Rose Theatre Division in 1996 by the family of Donald Oenslager.

Processing information

Processed by Helice Koffler; Machine-readable finding aid created by Helice Koffler.

The Donald Oenslager Collection of Edward Gordon Craig originally was part of a larger accession of Oenslager materials that was received in 1996. It was decided in 2004 to process the Donald Oenslager Collection of Edward Gordon Craig separately from the rest of the Donald Oenslager Papers and Designs. The collection was processed and cataloged in January 2005.

Related Material

Billy Rose Theatre Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Using the collection

Location

Billy Rose Theatre Division
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center
40 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-7498
Third Floor

Conditions Governing Use

For permission to publish, contact the Curator, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Access restrictions

Photocopying prohibited.