Messel, Oliver, 1904-1978

Oliver Messel was Great Britain's leading theatre designer from the 1930s to the mid 1950s. He transformed British theatre design with his lavish and poetic style, leaving a lasting legacy to his followers. His work spans revues, musicals, theatre, ballet, opera and film. Peter Brook acknowledged him as 'by far the most talented designer of his generation' and the stage designer Desmond Heeley said he was 'one of the greatest set and costume designers England has ever produced'. Painterly theatre sets composed of borders, painted flats, cutcloths and backcloths, accompanied by colourful and opulent costume designs, in a pastiche of historical styles made him the most highly paid and sought after theatre designer in the world. As fashions for design in drama shifted in the mid 1950s, he received fewer commissions and therefore concentrated on opera and musical theatre, as well as developing parallel artistic outlets in decorative art, interior design and architectural projects in Great Britain, United States and the West Indies. Throughout his career, he also worked and exhibited as a painter.

Messel was born on 13 January 1904 to Maud Frances (1875-1960) and Lieutenant-Colonel Leonard Charles Rudolph Messel (1872-1953), of Nymans, Cuckfield, Sussex. Hi mother was the daughter of the Punch cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne (1844-1910), his father a soldier and a stockbroker with strong cultural interests. In 1922, after an education at Eton, he studied to be a painter at the Slade School of Fine Art under Henry Tonks; Rex Whistler was a fellow student. His formal studies concentrated on life drawing and painting, but he also made masks from papier maché and wax for student events. An exhibition of his masks at the Claridge Galleries in London in 1925 led to his first theatre commission to design masks for the Diaghilev ballet production of Zéphyre et Flore, directed by George Braque and performed at the London Coliseum in 1925.

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