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Set designer Eugène Frey’s light projections in Monaco


ByCaroline Roux

18 August 2020

An exhibition at Monte Carlo’s Villa Paloma is an illuminating journey through the Belgian set designer’s intricately crafted productions for theatre


Caroline Roux

18 August 2020

  • Theatre
  • Review
  • Crafts magazine

Maquette for La Walkyrie, Alphonse Visconti et Eugène Frey, c. 1909. Photo: François Fernandez

You won’t have ever seen an exhibition like this before, for the simple reason that Eugène Frey and his contribution to stage design had been quite forgotten. Then, several years ago, two collections of his work turned up in Monaco, all carefully stored away in the attics of private family homes, in long unopened boxes. Here were the elaborate miniature sets, the hand-painted glass slides, the modified projectors that had made Frey part of Monte Carlo’s exuberant theatrical world.


La Damnation de Faust/Mefistofele, Eugène Frey, 1905. Image: Monte‐Carlo Société des Bains de Mer

A painter with more than a little interest in playing with mechanical parts, Frey – who was born in Brussels in 1864 – spent 34 years at the Opéra de Monte Carlo, from 1904 to 1938. Building on the already popular inventions of shadow theatre and magic lantern shows, Frey brought together pictorial, photographic and early cinematographic techniques. He used an elaborate system of projection lanterns that passed light through the painted glass slides, to create lucid moving images across already elaborate stage sets. At the time, it was a revolution and Frey helped to set new standards of immersive entertainment in the theatre.


Projection for Chevauchée des Walkyries, Eugène Frey, 1922. Image: Archives NMNM

Celia Bernasconi, the chief curator at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, has put together this exhibition. It has been a few years in the making, during which time she has also created the first academic documentation of Frey’s work. The grand house in which it is being shown – the exquisitely restored 1913 Villa Paloma which the municipality of Monaco acquired in 2008 – is half the national museum. The rest occupies the Villa Sauber – an incredible architectural wedding cake that was one of the municipality’s last Belle Epoque homes to be built. This being Monte Carlo, you don’t feel that money is tight.

Bernasconi has come at the exhibition from several angles. While primarily it is intended to explain the craft and technique behind Frey’s work, she offers a broader context of moving image works from the American Loie Fuller dancing under coloured lights in the early 1900s to Michel Ocelot’s 1980s gothic paper-cut animations made for French TV. She also invited the Portuguese Joao Gusmao, an artist preoccupied with movement and duration, to make new works inspired by Frey’s techniques and these are dotted throughout the show. In one, three disks slowly turning in front of geled projectors, create a mountain landscape that moves through many shades of blue – a gentle reminder of the illusory qualities of light.


Exhibition view of Schattenspiel (Jeu d’ombre), Hans‐Peter Feldmann, 2002. Photo: Andrea Rossetti

The early contextual pieces are instructive about the development of movement in imagery. Among them, a work by Caran D’Ache from the end of the 19th century plays out scenes from the Napoleonic Wars in silhouettes created by intricately cut zinc plates – Frey would would have seen it in Paris at the Chat Noir. Also fascinating is work by Emmanuelle Cottier who applied his skills as a watchmaker to making metal figures with many perfectly moving parts; these were used in Chinese Shadowplay. My favourite exhibit, though, is a much later ensemble by the German artist Hans Peter Feldman from 2002 which demonstrates the enduring fascination with shadow play and its influence on contemporary practice. Feldman – an exhaustive collector of every possible object from daily life (he once had much of it on display in a so-called “shop”) – has created a series of turning tableaux placed between a projected light and a wall, where the shadows of Barbie dolls and wedding cake couples, doll house toilets and bird houses pass by one by one. The tacky found objects become part of a more mystical narrative.


Boards for La Walkyrie, Eugène Frey, c. 1909. Photo by Andrea Rossetti, 2020

But it is Frey who provides the meat of the exhibition, with his intensely additive processes and his lush and complex scenarios against which stories could be acted out. These were not necessarily unpolitical and provide a reminder of the times in which he lived. One series of backdrops, that would have been used for what were effectively the news broadcasts of the day, include a railway station, a French colonial village, a factory and the courts of justice – key components of late 19th French life.

I suspect, though, that it’s the most intricate details of Frey’s productions that draw visitors in, particularly the glass plates that he painted by hand. For a 1905 production of Faust, Frey designed the final act, the Ride to the Abyss, adding intense moving imagery to the musical thrill of this journey to damnation. Here Frey’s process is clearly revealed: first, beautifully executed works on paper where witch-like figures are picked out in white paint on a charcoal black background; then a transformative process by which the resulting photo-gravure is hand coloured with gouache, and the witches broomsticks are alight with brilliant yellow and gold flames.

By the 1920s, Frey was doing the rounds as an expert of the light projections, regularly giving lectures explaining his craft and in 1925 publishing a book called “La Technique des Decors Lumineux”. But interesting as the unravelling of the process might be, like film today, it’s still the sum of the parts that dazzles.

Variations - Les Décors lumineux d'Eugène Frey, Villa Paloma, Monaco, until 30 August 2020


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