Opening Night, Ziegfeld Follies
c. 1926
Howard A. Thain (1891 -1959)
Oil on canvas, 16 1/8 X 20 1/8
Signed lower right: Howard Thain
The Robert R. Preato Collection, 91.76.15

 

Blazing lights, a crush of people on the sidewalk, and a sea of automobiles are deployed in this scene to convey the excitement of an opening night on Broadway. The event of record, on June 24, 1926, at the Globe Theatre on Broadway and 46th Street, was impresario Florenz Ziegfeld's show No Foolin'. From 1907 until 1925, Ziegfeld (1867 -1932) treated New York to an annual musical revue first produced under the title Follies and then, beginning in 1911, under the title Ziegfeld Follies. Ziegfeld's Follies have been called "undoubtedly the most revered and long-lived of Broadway's musical revues."¹ Glamour and opulence were the keynotes of Ziegfeld's extravaganzas, to the extent that "Ziegfeld" has become synonymous with lavish splendor. To create these fantasies, Ziegfeld negotiated contracts with the nation's most beautiful women (Paulette Goddard and Louise Brooks among them), outfitting them in elaborate costumes designed by such artists as Erté. He also hired the best creative talents of the period: set designer Joseph Urban; composers Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Rudolph Friml; and such outstanding stage personalities as comedians W. C. Fields, Bert Williams, Will Rogers, and Fannie Brice. One critic of the period commented: "Out of the vulgar leg-show, Ziegfeld has fashioned a thing of grace and beauty, of loveliness and charm; he knows quality and mood."²

The year 1926 presented Ziegfeld with something of a problem; pending litigation with two of his partners had prohibited use of the highly recognized Ziegfeld Follies title on the Globe's marquee. The letters in the upper-right corner of the canvas denote the solution he devised: "zieg no f" is part of "Ziegfeld's No Foolin'." "glo," beneath, refers to the Globe Theatre, where the show opened, and, below, "glorifin ameri" is part of the line "Glorifying the American Girl," the well-known theme for all of Ziegfeld's Follies. This production was the first by Ziegfeld to play at the Globe. Previously, his shows had been housed in the New Amsterdam Theater at the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue before they departed New York on road tours. After the event commemorated in this painting, "Flo" Ziegfeld offered two more, in 1927 and 1931. Upon his death, the Shubert organization purchased rights to the name and presented several editions, which were considered lacking in the imagination and taste of Ziegfeld's work.³

The diagonal arrangement of this tripartite composition -buildings featured above, vehicles in the middle, figures at the bottom -directs the eye to the heart of the work: the theater's lit marquee. The repeated pattern of men's hats and noticeably similar postures of the figures give much of the work a static aspect, countered by the animation of the flickering letters, the bright facades of the nearby buildings, and the spotlights that have been brought in to shine on the theater. The density of the composition infuses the scene with a sense of ex-citement and anticipation as Broadway prepares to measure another new show.

Howard Thain was born in Dallas, Texas, where Vivian Anspaugh was his first teacher. About 1912 he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he studied at the Washington University School of the Arts. He later matriculated at the Chicago Art Institute under the Russian painter S. Ostrowsky, who had been a pupil of Jean-Paul Laurens. When Thain came to New York City in 1919, he enrolled at the Art Students League, studying with Frank Vincent DuMond, Robert Henri, and John Sloan. In New York his work moved away from the Impressionist influence of his earlier Chicago canvases, becoming more conservative. He lived in several sections of the city, supporting himself with commercial work but constantly sketching New York's buildings and urban activities, particularly scenes found in the theater district and in New York's poorest blocks. Eventually he moved his family to New Jersey and worked as an art director for a lithographic company until illness required his retirement in 1956, when he returned to Dallas.

Notes:

  1  The Robert R. Preato Collection of New York City Paintings and Drawings (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1994), p. 46.

  2  Quoted in Gerald Bordman, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 732.

  3  Ibid.