Background
Joseph Urban was born in Vienna, Austria, son of Joseph and Helen (Weber) Urban. His father, a supervising official in the Viennese school system, intended him for the law, but his artistic bent was too strong.
Joseph Urban was born in Vienna, Austria, son of Joseph and Helen (Weber) Urban. His father, a supervising official in the Viennese school system, intended him for the law, but his artistic bent was too strong.
He studied at the Staatsgewerbeschule and the art academy in Vienna, became a pupil of Baron Karl von Hasenauer, and was well grounded in architecture, at the same time practising illustration and studying interior decoration.
One of his earliest commissions was to decorate the Abdin Palace in Cairo. He also did the interior of the new town hall in Vienna and designed the "Tzar's Bridge" in St. Petersburg. He was prominent in the Secessionist movement and arranged its exhibition in Vienna.
In 1901 he came to America to decorate the Austrian building at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St. Louis). Returning to Vienna, he became interested in stage sets for the Hofburg Theatre, and in 1911-12, when the Boston Opera Company was started, he was invited to that city as art director.
For the Boston company he made several sets, notably one for Pelleas and Melisande, which were revelations in America of the new stage art. He was introduced to New York by his set for The Garden of Paradise (1914), and in that year he left Boston for New York to design first the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915 (which owed much of their fame to him), and then sets for the Metropolitan Opera and for James K. Hackett's productions of Macbeth and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
By this time "Urban blue" had become famous, and he was in great demand for all sorts of decorative projects. In addition to his office in New York he established a large studio and shop near his residence in Yonkers, and worked day and night on his various projects, even returning to architecture in the 1920's. He designed furniture, motor cars, modernistic interiors, stage sets, theatres, clubs, houses, and public buildings. Among his buildings and interiors are the Ziegfeld Theatre on Sixth Avenue, New York, with an interior shaped like an egg; the New School for Social Research, New York; the Tennis and Oasis clubs at Palm Beach, and certain residences there; the interior of the Central Park Casino; the St. Regis roof garden (gilt flowers on sapphire walls); and a vast design, never carried out, for a new opera house in New York.
Urban had always advocated the use of clear colors in exterior as well as interior architecture, and had popularized tints of his own. He was, accordingly, chosen to devise the color chart for the Century of Progress exposition at Chicago in 1933. A man so prodigiously fecund and versatile as Urban is often looked upon with some suspicion by his fellow craftsmen. It is perhaps true that Urban was not, as artist, an originator.
His decorative style owed much to the Secessionists and l'art nouveau of the late nineties. In stage design he was not a great pioneer like Adolphe Appia or Gordon Craig. In architecture his name cannot be written large. But all modern decorators, scene designers, and architects in America none the less owe him a debt of gratitude, because by popularizing the new styles he made their task so much the easier.
Urban's sets for the Boston Opera House, for example, were the first large-scale examples of the new stagecraft in America, and their popularity was important. Subsequently, his use of broad masses of color, his employment of broken pigmentation in scene painting to take various light effects, his pervasive beauty of costume under the play of light, in the Ziegfeld Follies, spread the gospel to thousands of people ordinarily little affected by new art movements. It is perhaps not far-fetched to say that Urban's sets for the Follies made possible the public acceptance of the architectural scheme of the Century of Progress. In architecture, the egg-shaped interior of the Ziegfeld Theatre, purely functional, may be destined to influence American theatre building in the future.
In the decorative arts, his frequent use of metal had an almost immediate influence, as did his use of large spaces of clear color. How far that influence will extend to exterior architecture remains to be seen. But, at any rate, as a popularizer of artistic innovations Urban was an important figure.
He was a large, florid, genial, witty man, with a cascade of chins and an enormous capacity for work. He often worked from 9 a. m. till 2 the next morning, designing sets (built in his studios) for five operas and ten or twelve plays and musical comedies a year, in addition to his decorative jobs and architectural projects. This work entailed reading scripts, attendance at rehearsals, the supervision of lighting and of practical construction. He smoked a hundred Turkish cigarettes a day, and had a pot of coffee always on his desk. His one recreation was attending prize fights. He died in New York, from a not surprising heart ailment, July 10, 1933, after an illness which had to his bitter disappointment prevented him from going to Chicago to see his colors applied on the exposition buildings. He was admitted to American citizenship in 1917.
Urban became known around the world for his innovative use of color, his pointillist technique, and his decorative use of line. He designed buildings throughout the world from Esterhazy Castle in Hungary to the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York. He was also one of the originators of the American Art Deco style. In 1900 he won the grand prize for decoration at the Paris Exposition. In 1904 he won the grand prize for decoration of the Austrian building at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St. Louis).
In 1918 Urban divorced his first wife, Mizzi Lefler, and on January 23, 1919, married Mary Porter Beegle of New York. He had a daughter, an artist, of his first marriage.
