From 1924 to 1976, artist-scene designer Boris Aronson applied his aesthetic vision to over one hundred productions in the Yiddish and English-speaking theatres of America. Aronson arrived in New York in 1923, bringing with him a new visual vocabulary rooted in Russian avant-garde art and scene design principles. Recurring adaptations and reinterpretations of Russian Cubo-Futurist and Constructivist art and scene design values were evident in varying degrees throughout the entire body of his work for the American theatre.;Aronson's work was affected by the abstract aesthetic philosophy of Russian Cubo-Futurist designers Alexandra Exter and Natan Altman, as well as Kamerny Theatre director Alexander Tairov; the Constructivist practices of director Vsevolod Meyerhold and his collaborator, scene designer Liubov Popova; the exaggerated Jewish folk art imagery of Marc Chagall; and the highly expressive theatricalist production style of director Evgeny Vakhtangov.;Cubo-Futurist and Constructivist qualities can be seen in Aronson's use of architectural constructions to sculpt and organize three-dimensional stage space; geometrization of lines and forms; preference for multi-leveled stage floors; and creation of abstract emblematic designs that acted as visual metaphors to evoke a play's central mood and meaning. These characteristics were prominent in his Yiddish theatre work in the 1920s, and were later restated but somewhat concealed for his realistic designs of the 1930s (such as Awake and Sing, 1935). Abstract elements appeared at times in the 1940s for his ballet and musical theatre designs that veered toward expressionism. In the mid to late 1950s, abstraction began to re-emerge in a more obvious form with the designer's epic creations for productions such as The Firstborn (1958) and J. B. (1958). Aronson's abstract aesthetic was recast with a technologically-oriented patina for the concept musicals of Harold Prince in the 1960s and 1970s. By the time he began his association with Prince, Aronson had absorbed an urban American sensibility which he ingeniously distilled and fused with Russian avant-garde precepts of abstraction. The Prince musicals marked the apotheosis of Aronson's career by embodying the designer's ultimate cross-cultural union of Constructivism with American high technology.
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