'This is a man who is almost perfectly visual,' said the writer and painter Etel Adnan of her friend Robert Wilson. The world-renowned artist and theatremaker, who died last year at the age of 83, was a designer at heart. He thought by drawing, painted with light, and sculpted time and space with silence. Yet Wilson was also a Texas-born teller of tales. He overcame a childhood stutter to hone a speaking voice that shared the captivating, expansive, and finely calibrated character of his work for the stage. It gave him one more way to move freely between the ordinary and the fantastic, clarity and mystery. Within a five-minute conversation, he could go from pensive silence to imitating the warbly drawl of his maternal grandmother (whom he cast in several of his early productions) to reciting a Hamlet soliloquy, all with a shimmering coherence.
The book jacket features a 1976 photograph of Wilson by Robert Mapplethorpe, who was a couple of years behind Wilson at Pratt Institute. 'I have always admired the classical construction and formality of his work,' wrote Wilson of the photographer
Wilson’s dreamlike certainty and disarming charisma take on a new form in his highly anticipated memoir, out on 3 November 2026, from Penguin Press. Written with Keith McDermott, The Space Behind the Face unfolds in stories arrayed according to the three traditional ways that artists construct space: portrait, still life, and landscape.
'If I hold my hand in front of my face, I can say it is a portrait,' Wilson once explained. 'If I see my hand at a distance, I can say it is part of a still life, and if I see it from across the street, I can say that it is part of a landscape.' This trio of perspectives is also at play in works such as Einstein on the Beach, the landmark opera he created in 1976 with Philip Glass. It grounds the book in a freewheeling chronology, illuminating people, motifs, and themes independently while allowing them to recur and recombine.
Wilson’s Tribeca loft overlooked the Hudson River, where four towers designed in 1925 by Erling Owre house the ventilation system for the Holland Tunnel. 'I used one of the buildings in Einstein on the Beach,' he said, 'and I had a figure of Einstein up in the window making calculations.'
Act IV, Scene 1C ‘Building’ from Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson. McCarter Theater, Princeton, New Jersey, 1992
Wilson described the highly visual nature of his work for the theatre as a means of making it accessible on its surface, 'so that someone formally educated or someone from the moon can come into the theatre and appreciate something'. This approach is transposed from the stage to the page through sprightly stories in unvarnished prose. What emerges is signature Wilson, at once vividly personal and starkly pure.
Most striking is how Wilson’s superpower of isolating essences carries through to the written word. His encounters with cultural figures ranging from Philip Johnson and Finn Juhl (in whom a 21-year-old Wilson recognised a fellow lover of chairs) to Marlene Dietrich and Lady Gaga are concentrated into radiant details, as is a brush with former US President George HW Bush – craving ice cream, reading Vogue, and clad in red pyjamas on an overnight flight to Paris.
Robert Wilson
The reader is invited to follow along as Wilson discerns virtues and collects elements that he would make his own. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy and Agnes Martin introduce him to the wonders of counterpoint. From John Cage he gets a 'sense of spontaneous possibility'. A stint with Paolo Soleri shows him the power of thinking big and the skill of 'involving large groups of people in creating one’s vision'.
He admires Yvonne Rainer’s 'simple movements carried out with an integrity that elevated them beyond the mundane', appreciates Christophe de Menil’s eye for colour (she will not abide an 'Air France-stewardess blue'), and learns from Lou Reed to appreciate and inhabit 'the loudness of sound'.
The Watermill Center in Water Mill, New York is a laboratory for creative thinking. Wilson founded it in 1992 on four principles: honour the present, look to the past, support the local community, and support the global community. 'Performances are ephemeral, but I see this place continuing long after I am gone,’ wrote Wilson. 'The Watermill Center is my greatest artistic achievement.'
Tasked with eliciting, assembling, and helping to articulate some eight decades of Wilson tales was actor and writer Keith McDermott, a native of Houston, Texas who performed in five Wilson productions and authored a superb novel, Acqua Calda (2005), that is the ultimate roman à Bob. Wallpaper* spoke to him in New York ahead of the book's publication.
Wallpaper*: When did you first encounter the work of Robert Wilson, better known simply as Bob?
Keith McDermott: In 1974, I saw A Letter to Queen Victoria, and it changed my life. I was a commercial actor who would go and see anything. Somebody gave me a ticket, and I thought oh, it’s a boring history play, but I’ll go see it anyway. Before the play started, two people – it was Andy De Groat and Julia Busto – were on either side of the stage, just turning slowly in place. It was fascinating. They had a very non-performative attitude. It looked like they would be doing it, if there was an audience there or not. As the house lights began to lower, they started going faster and faster, and they raised their hands and their palms were red as if pressed in turmeric. It was just this blur, and then the curtain went up.
Scenes, some of them excruciatingly slow but very beautifully lit, unfolded, and I was so moved. I thought, 'How can this be, with no plot?' Bob, the director, was in it, and his grandmother played Queen Victoria, and then Christopher Knowles came out, this obviously neurodivergent teenager, and completely broke the fourth wall. It was amazing. I left the theatre feeling like I had fallen in love. And I really wanted to work with him.
A lifelong art collector, Wilson purchased his first painting during a childhood visit to the Louisiana home of African American folk artist Clementine Hunter. Some six decades later, he honoured her with his conception of Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter, a collaboration with singer, composer, and social activist Bernice Johnson Reagon.
Carla Duran and Robert Osborne in Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter. Music by Bernice Johnson Reagon and Toshi Reagon, book by Jacqueline Woodson, 2013
W*: And you later met Bob when you were starring in Equus on Broadway, opposite Richard Burton?
KMD: Yes. Bob came to see the play. I think I remember him saying that Burton should spend more of his time looking away from the audience instead of to the audience. [Laughs] Then I saw Einstein on the Beach when it was at the Metropolitan Opera House [in November 1976]. Everybody in the art world was waiting outside. It went up late. They had to take out a Lohengrin set and bring in Bob’s set. The audience was filled with first-time opera-goers, people under 50. It stank of pot. The idea then, when he was doing these longer plays, is that you could walk in and out. It was a great experience.
I finished doing Equus and went to LA, and he came to LA to do Patio [the 1977 play I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating]. I went with him to San Francisco and appeared in ten minutes of it. And then I worked for him in plays in a million different ways.
'I think one reason my work has enjoyed success is that it is visual,' wrote Wilson. 'From the beginning, work is directed visually and this is a universal language.'
Vasilena Vincenzo (Ariel) in Act IV of The Tempest by William Shakespeare, directed and designed by Robert Wilson, National Theater ‘Ivan Vazov,’ Sofia, Bulgaria, 2021
W*: As an actor, how did you find the process of working with Bob?
KMD: The first play I did with him was Edison, and at that time I had done all commercial theatre. The lines were non-sequiturs – 'I’m not real', 'Your hair smells like lemon daisies'. – and they were very hard to learn. I was trying to figure out the work and how to do it, and I made the terrible mistake of saying, 'How am I doing, Bob? Am I doing what you want?' It was just horrifying to him. He didn’t ever give any notes like that. He would say, 'Your finger has to be here, in the light.' Just technical stuff like that. And then I began to love it. It was like being able to switch channels. It was very freeing.
Wilson first encountered Christopher Knowles in 1973 via a cassette tape of his rhythmically repetitive language. 'I connected with the text right away; to me it sounded like Gregorian chant,' wrote Wilson. 'The word patterns were similar to those of Gertrude Stein, a conjugation of thought.' The two are pictured here performing at the 1974 Shiraz Arts Festival in Iran
W*: What was the process of making this book like?
KMD: When we started it, I was thinking chronologically. Well, that wouldn’t work with Bob. In our discussions, he just wouldn’t stay on subject, and I cringed whenever I heard my own voice on the tapes, interrupting and saying, 'But don’t forget…' I realised that as Texans, we’re storytellers. We’re loquacious. He often went into Texas twang mode when telling some of these stories.
Bob was so busy that I thought to get any time with him, that’s going to be my real project. So, I was surprised by his generosity of letting me into everything completely, especially once we said, let’s do it in stories. Then I just was with him everywhere.
Wilson and Estonian composer Arvo Pärt developed Adam’s Passion in Tallinn, and the production was first staged in a century-old former submarine factory. Writes Wilson, ‘During our premiere, I whispered to Arvo Pärt, “It’s like being in a cathedral,” and he whispered back, “Oh, but much better.”’
Michalis Theophanous (Man) in Adam's Passion. Music by Arvo Pärt, directed and designed by Robert Wilson, Tallinn, Estonia, 2015
W*: When Bob told a story, it felt like you were the first person he was telling the story to, even if he had been telling it for decades. Was that your experience, too?
KMD: Yes, and in writing the book, I would find other elements to the story. For example, I knew the story of him choreographing a performance with the iron lung patients at Goldwater Memorial Hospital, but I hadn’t heard that he had gone to a concert of Otis Redding’s and managed to get Otis Redding to come to the hospital to sing during the performance! That was a new element.
He had an arc to stories, and he had a last line that would punch it. And some stories felt new because he would cry every time. The book has a story about Jessye Norman that would always move him to tears.
Wilson first met Samuel Beckett in 1972, and the two later bonded over their shared appreciation of Buster Keaton. 'There are two major challenges in doing Beckett. The first is how to perform silence,' writes Wilson, pictured here performing in his production of Krapp’s Last Tape. 'The second and most important challenge is to find the humour.'
Robert Wilson in Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett; directed and designed by Robert Wilson, 2016
‘When Bob told a story, it felt like you were the first person he was telling the story to, even if he had been telling it for decades’
Keith McDermott
W*: Were there aspects of Bob’s life that he was reticent to discuss for the book?
KMD: Bob was talking about his first trip to Europe, as a college student, and he said, 'I was going through Barcelona, and I spent a couple of nights with this bullfighter,' and then went on. I said, 'Whoa, what do you mean you spent a couple of nights with this bullfighter? You can’t just say that. How did that happen? What was it like? Our readers will want to know!' It became a running thing. When we’d be working at the Watermill Center and staying there, I would cook meatloaf, which Bob loved. And my line became, 'No matador, no meatloaf.'
I don’t know if it’s true, but he said he saw that the matador didn’t kill the bull, and he was so impressed that he went and talked to him. It was hard to get those stories.
At the 1972 Shiraz Arts Festival in Iran, photographer Basil Langton asked to photograph Wilson and John Cage, together. 'John, in his ironic tone of voice, said, “Yes, but only if we can stand behind a curtain,”’ wrote Wilson
W*: The book opens with an author’s note in which you introduce Bob through a series of his staccato messages to you – charming email requests-cum-directives. How did you decide to do that?
KMD: It was so classic Bob, asking me to do everything. First, he gives me the wonderful gift and opportunity to work with him on this book, and then it’s immediately, 'Can you pick up my hair tonic?' And everything is crucial. An emergency.
Wilson’s long association with the operatic soprano Jessye Norman began with Great Day in the Morning, a programme of spirituals that premiered in 1982 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. 'Jessye sang from a place of joy,' wrote Wilson. 'Of course, she’d been trained, but to her, singing was as natural as breathing.'
Jessye Norman in Great Day in the Morning by Robert Wilson and Jessye Norman, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, France, 1982
W*: How did the book’s title come about?
KMD: There was no talking about it. He just picked it. It was the very first meeting we had, and while we were talking, he’s drawing. He’s drawing a picture of a face – the oval part, neck, shoulders, he’s drawing, and then he just said, 'The space behind the face.' He often told us as actors, 'Don’t forget the space behind your face,' and then he had a speech about how that’s where your power is and how it’s like a bow and arrow.
And the title just stuck. That’s how he worked. We all talk about trusting your instincts, and he trusted them absolutely. Even when his instincts were so out of proportion with what anybody thought was possible, he would stick to those first things. He’d say, 'We can do that.'
Informed by German Expressionist cinema and Weimar-era cabaret, Wilson’s staging of The Threepenny Opera was constructed with lines of light, including an opening scene in which a series of circles fades in and out as in a carnival. Bertolt Brecht’s imperious daughter, Barbara, was present on opening night at the Berliner Ensemble. 'It’s a very strange and different take on Brecht’s work – but I think Papa would approve,' she later wrote to Wilson.
Stefan Kurt and Angela Winkler in Prologue to The Threepenny Opera, Berlin, 2007