Design for a Stage Set at the Opéra, Paris 1830 - 1890

Curator: Eugène Cicéri's "Design for a Stage Set at the Opéra, Paris," likely created between 1830 and 1890, is a fascinating glimpse into the 19th-century Parisian theater world. It's rendered primarily in pencil on paper. Editor: It feels very ghostly, doesn't it? Like a dream of a marketplace, captured in a whisper of lines. You can almost smell the old paper, the hint of something decaying yet beautiful. Curator: Well, let's consider that it's not meant as a finished artwork in itself, but as a functional design. We see the grid, those careful pencil lines indicating measurements. The labor is embedded in its execution, a means to an end of creating spectacular illusions for bourgeois consumption. The drawing is not a "precious" object. Editor: That makes sense. Knowing it was made for a stage changes everything. But even with that, the attention to detail! Look at the canopies over the stalls, the implied bustle of the Parisian marketplace. Curator: I find myself wondering about the actual production processes at the Opéra during this time. How much of the aesthetic vision of artists like Cicéri filtered down to the anonymous artisans tasked with building these sets, the underpaid laborers producing these images? What were their working conditions like, reproducing the city for its visitors? Editor: Oh, that's a good point. It's easy to get caught up in the romance of the Opéra. And I get it: this is an ideal, a spectacle. Curator: Precisely. Cicéri would be instrumental in shaping stagecraft practices but we need to remember it involves so many hands – whose stories do we ignore when just looking at the name “Cicéri"? Editor: A beautiful ghost, a sketch holding a history lesson, and I can't wait to hear more about the performances the stage produced at the opera. Curator: Indeed. We need these ghostly records to reveal both the grand designs, and all those shadowed figures to build that magic.