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‘Perhaps it is worth probing the area between what we perceive and what we think we see’

NICHOLAS GEORGIADIS

Anthony and Cleopatra. Set design by Nicholas Georgiadis

INTRODUCTION

Nicholas Georgiadis was one of the most outstanding stage designers of the last century and a highly influential teacher of stage design at the Slade School of Art for many years.

Trained as a painter and architect, he never lost the desire and need to paint and seized every opportunity to do so. He exhibited regularly in London and Athens and at the 1966 Venice Biennale.

It was, though, with the theatre that he was most widely identified. Here his painterly instincts and his historical sense were brought to bear to wonderful effect, his eye for colour and texture and his concern for form.

With his love of architecture and fascination with Byzantine decoration he was ideally suited to undertake the design of the great nineteenth and twentieth century ballets when the moment came, but such were his flexibility and imagination that he seemed unfailingly able to find a telling and illuminating visual solution to every demand made upon him, big or small in scale.

With Nico’s death we have lost one of the most important stage designers working in the last century. He was both a giant and a poet amongst designers and dominated the second half of the twentieth- century in the way that Leon Bakst and Alexandre Benois had done in the first part. His fame was worldwide and his influence second to none.

Extract by Sir John Tooley, General Director of the Royal Opera House,

Covent Garden (1970-1988).

MORE ABOUT NICO

All for Love. Set design by Nicholas Georgiadis, The Edinburgh Festival, Edinburgh (1977), play by John Dryden, directed by Frank Hauser

A CENTENARY TRIBUTE

The painter, Nicholas Georgiadis was born on the 14th of September 1923 and died on 10th of March 2001. Autumn 2023 marks 100 years since the birth of one of the greatest costume and theatre designers of the 20th Century.

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