A Legacy of Silence, Vision and Art: Robert Wilson Dies at 83

Every summer morning, Robert Wilson walked into the Big Studio at 9:30 a.m., his clipboard in hand, without saying a word.

He took his seat in a particular chair, the buzz of idle chatter among dozens of people dropping to a murmur, then a hushed whisper, before all went quiet.

And there they would stay, until the director said otherwise. Only then would their daily meeting begin.

“I think it’s probably the first time in my life that I was ever in a space of 80 people where we all sat in silence for 10 minutes,” recalled Watermill Center Managing Director Elise Herget.

For those artists and staff members new to Wilson’s International Summer Program at The Watermill Center — an incubator and residency for the avant-garde, from the visual to the performing arts — it was an introduction of sorts. For everyone else in the room, it was a tradition.

And regardless of whether the initiates glanced around the room nervously, or the veterans simply settled in with their eyes closed, they were all there for one reason: Wilson.

“He could change the entire chemistry of a room and command everyone’s senses in minutes,” Guild Hall Executive Director Andrea Grover said. “It could be 100 people. It could be 20 people. But he had this ability to have everyone just freeze — and start to notice everything in the room.”

Internationally known as a radical artist and daring director who challenged classical theater and opera standards, both on the stage and from within his laboratory — where he lived and worked alongside fellow creatives in Water Mill — Wilson died at his home on Thursday, July 31, following a brief illness, according to a press release from The Watermill Center.

He was 83 and is survived by his sister, Suzanne, and his niece, Lori.

Over the last week, thousands of tributes have poured in from friends, collaborators and admirers in every corner of the globe. Some of them visited The Watermill Center that very same day for the organization’s annual summer benefit, which drew visitors to the 10-acre campus for an evening of contemporary performance and experimental installations.

“I think he was ready to go when he went,” explained longtime friend and art historian Lauren DiGiulio. “I take comfort in that he was ready, and he was at Watermill, surrounded by his art collection, in a beautiful space, and with people from all over the world that he knew, that loved him and that were important to him, too. I really take comfort in the fact that he was able to do that the way that he wanted to.”

A Visionary Comes to Life

Born on October 4, 1941, in Waco, Texas, Wilson first studied business administration at the University of Texas before dropping out and finding his way to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he became interested in architecture and interior design — the foundation of his legacy as a leader in avant-garde theater and the visual arts.

He studied painting with George McNeil in Paris and later worked with architect Paolo Solari in Arizona. He was drawn to the work of choreographers George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, among others, when he moved to New York City.

By 1968, he had gathered a collective of artists and called them The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds — named after his childhood dance teacher, who taught him how to slow down and focus his thoughts in order to overcome a stammer — and together they worked and performed in a loft building at 147 Spring Street in Lower Manhattan.

As a creative, he was known for his keen eye, whether he was director, architect, set or lighting designer. He was a master of time, a connector and community builder, and surrounded himself with collaborators and future partners. He was, according to longtime friend and former Watermill Center Managing Director Jorn Weisbrodt, “the most important American director of the last 50 years.”

“His way of doing theater is so different from American theater, which is so language-driven and audience-driven,” he explained. “Wilson always said, to all his actors, ‘You have to hate the audience, and then they’re going to love you.’ It’s just a really different attitude toward theater.

“I love his approach much more because it gives you freedom to make up your own mind and not feel you’re being told what to think.”

Wilson, who would go on to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, developed his first signature works in the 1970s, including “Deafman Glance,” “A Letter for Queen Victoria” and “Einstein on the Beach,” a seminal opera written with Philip Glass.

Its revival in 2012 was Herget’s first experience with Wilson’s work in person. Up until this point, she had only read about him in her art history college textbooks.

“My job was to meet people in the lobby and hand out their tickets, and then I was given a ticket every night to go see the show,” she said. “I saw it every single night through that run, which was probably five times. I feel very privileged. I was transfixed.”

Wilson’s artistic collaborators now include writers and musicians ranging from Heiner Müller, Tom Waits, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, William Burroughs, Lou Reed and Lady Gaga. He has also left his imprint on masterworks such as Beckett’s Krapp’s “Last Tape,” Brecht/Weill’s “Threepenny Opera,” Debussy’s “Pelléas et Melisande,” Homer’s “Odyssey,” Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” and several of Shakespeare’s plays.

“He reinvented theater,” explained Corinne Erni, the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman chief curator of art and education at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. “He really created new narratives that nobody had done before, and the way he presented it was different. They’re like tableaus. They were like living artwork, like moving artwork.”

His drawings, paintings and sculptures have been presented around the world in hundreds of solo and group showings, and his works are held in private collections and museums across the globe.

“He was this Renaissance man and so his influence is everywhere,” explained longtime friend Elka Rifkin, the first managing director of The Watermill Center, “but his legacy of the work that he did for opera houses and for theaters is very different than the legacy he leaves at Watermill, because it isn’t finished — because it will never be completely finished — as far as he was concerned.”

The Laboratory at Watermill

It was 2002 when Rifkin first set foot on the grounds of The Watermill Center — which, at that time, was a borderline construction site. The building was being renovated, the grounds were just beginning to be landscaped, and its founder was elated.

“I put my hand out, and I said, ‘Hi, Mr. Wilson, I’m very excited to meet you,’” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Oh no, no, you call me Bob.’ So that’s how it started.”

What followed next was an unexpectedly long tour of the property, where he showed her his favorite objects that he had collected from around the world, and encouraged her to touch them. He explained his vision for the center and what he hoped it would be.

“It was a remarkable, remarkable three hours that I spent with this man,” she said. “And we got up to the top of the roof on the south wing, and we looked out at the property, I looked at him, I said, ‘Okay, I’m hooked. I’m in. What do you want?’”

Leveraging her background in the arts and education, Rifkin assisted Wilson in any way she could, from bringing in teachers and artists to planting blueberries and bamboo. In 2006, she assumed the role of managing director — which she has held off and on up until two years ago, when she turned 70 — and helped him develop what would become an international residency program.

“He truly was brilliant. He was a genius — there’s no doubt in my mind,” she said. “And difficult. Anybody who has the kind of energy and drive as he did is not always easy to work with. So there was a challenge and difficulty to Bob that we all know of, but his commitment to what he saw needed to be done never wavered, and that’s really impressive to be around and to learn from.”

On the surface, Wilson was extremely formal and austere in his demeanor, the way he worked and how he lived — his life and work intertwined, DiGiulio said. He was voracious in his pace and ability to absorb information quickly, she said, and endlessly curious.

“He was a large human, but he was also a large presence,” Rifkin said. “There’s a very quiet and still and serious side to Bob, but then there’s also a very playful and funny side to Bob, as well, and that kind of yin and yang was always interesting to me.”

Those closest to him would come to know a charming, funny and cheeky side of Wilson, his friends and former residents said. He was mischievous, with a sparkle in his eye, and loved to gossip.

“What was beautiful about him is he approached everything really with an innocence, and he had no preconceived opinions about things,” Weisbrodt said. “And therefore, he was so open and so welcoming in a way, which is unusual.”

In her career, Herget said she has never seen anyone work harder than Wilson, always with perseverance and dedication, but also with a sense of humor.

“Even in those morning meetings, somebody once handed out those clown noses — and everyone in the room, including Bob, is wearing a clown nose,” she said. “And he just was the most playful. If something was too serious, you’d have to break the ice. In a way, it was for him, too, a way to bring seriousness into the room, as well.

“I have grown to see the world in a very different way through this idea of counterpoint that he always looked for,” she continued, “in even the smallest thing — even in how he wrote somebody a letter or structured a drawing on a piece of paper.”

Wilson believed in the importance of community and, through the summer residency program, invited artists into his world — a place they forever stayed, his colleagues agreed.

“His biggest legacy that he’s left behind are the collaborators and those who crossed his path,” Herget said. “It could be anybody. It doesn’t have to be somebody who’s working in the arts either. The breadth of people that he impacted is huge.”

He created moments of connection, whether it was ambling walks through the gardens or dinners that stretched into the night, sometimes ending with residents helping him rearrange the furniture after a drink or two.

“When you were in Bob’s orbit, such as at a dinner party or at one of his performances or one of his presentations, the rest of the world disappeared,” Grover said.

A Watermill Without Wilson

The road ahead at The Watermill Center is a fluid one, explained Herget, but one steeped in Wilson’s vision and mission: to give artists time, space and freedom.

“Something that he said is, ‘We can have sculptures here for one month, six months, a year, but that’s a temporary moment in the landscape,’ and there won’t ever be something that’s permanent beyond the trees and the rocks and the platforms that he had created,’” she recalled. “So I think we have a lot of guidelines and that essence, but also freedom in it, as well, which is a beautiful thing.

“Because he had such a close group of people around him, there is a level of trust that he gave.”

As she and the staff move forward, Herget said she will miss his spontaneity, his unpredictability — an idea coming from seemingly nowhere and everywhere all at once.

“I’m sitting on one of our platforms right now and his presence is here,” she said. “I think this has become, especially this week, a place that others have been coming to just to walk around because he is so ever-present in every detail of it.

“But, obviously,” she said, “there’s a difference of being in morning meeting, in that silence, and sharing it.”

When Rifkin turns into the driveway of The Watermill Center, there is a familiarity when her tires hit the gravel, the sound that it makes as she continues up the winding road. She takes in the ferns and bamboo that she and others helped plant, the place that she helped build.

She feels like she is coming home, she said — not to her home, but to one he created for so many people, even though he is no longer there.

“There’s so much of him there, but I won’t be able to get to give him a hug, and I won’t see his smile, and I won’t get to sit in silence with him again,” she said. “But those of us who got to be in his orbit were really, really blessed by an incredibly artistic human. People like Bob don’t come along that often, so — lucky us. Lucky us.”