Marcela Gutierrez, Start with Light, watercolor on paper. An illustration of Robert Wilson’s Watermill residence with objects from his collection, including the sofa he designed for Parzival (1987).
“Start with light,” the architect Louis Kahn told a group of Pratt Institute students in 1962. One was a freshman named Robert Wilson, who likened the words to a hammer blow. He would spend the next six decades or so applying Kahn’s advice, to stunning effects.
For Wilson, light did not simply illuminate space but create it. Throughout his career, the Texas-born artist and experimental theater maker, who died last summer at the age of 83, used it to slice and flow, expose and envelop, denote and connote, sometimes all at once. He was equally attuned to the nuances of natural light, with its power to transform a room into what he called “a time machine.”
One of Wilson’s favorite time machines was his residence at the Watermill Center, the “laboratory for arts and humanities” he founded in 1992 on the grounds of a former Western Union telecommunications research compound on Long Island’s East End (think: Einsteins on the beach). Perched on the second floor, the loft-like apartment is as multifaceted as Wilson himself, forever in flux yet classically cohesive. Its 2,000-square-foot footprint unfolds across five distinct spaces: an antechamber, a closet turned jewel-box gallery, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a combined living room and studio.
The famed light of the Hamptons enters through north- and west-facing sash windows, makes prisms of skylit passages, and streams through an east-facing wall of glass that opens onto a spacious teak terrace, where the sun rises over the surrounding farmland. Assisted by track lighting and ceiling-mounted industrial bulbs, it plays across the white walls and polished concrete floors, illuminating meticulously arranged artworks and artifacts spanning five millennia — a fraction of a collection that exceeds 6,000 objects.
As daylight moves through the apartment, new relationships emerge between objects separated by centuries and continents. During a recent tour, Noah Khoshbin, the Watermill Center’s curator, compared Wilson’s collection to those of Andy Warhol and André Breton. “All periods, mediums, and cultures are represented,” he said. “There are no glass boxes, no hierarchy. Everything that is part of the collection is looked at as being of equal importance.”
By way of example, Khoshbin gestured to the nearest corner, where works by Donald Judd, Willem de Kooning, and Richard Prince are placed in conversation with Zulu pots, carvings from Papua New Guinea, and a Toraja tau tau figure. On a neighboring wall, costume designs by Moidele Bickel for Wilson’s 2014 Paris production of Jean Genet’s The Blacks hang above a framed textile work by Sheila Hicks, all under the watchful eyes of Inuit masks.
“Anything you see here with feathers is Inuit. One of the last projects that Bob was working on was about Inuit culture,” noted Khoshbin. “He would get involved with the cultures he was working in and would end up collecting works in the country of origin that would really inspire the work that he was doing on the stage. Even if he was doing a Shakespeare piece somewhere, there would be an overlay of the local culture.”
With its carefully selected and deliberately arranged objects, the apartment creates a “spatial context in which Bob’s many varied interests can coexist — like a microcosm of Watermill itself,” says Josh Pazda, whose Houston gallery has represented Wilson for 35 years. “Curiosity, discovery, and a sense of play abound, with everything on a level playing field.”
Familiarity with Wilson’s oeuvre and personal history makes many of the apartment’s juxtapositions even more resonant. Portraits of collaborators — including John Cage and Philip Glass, photographed by a young Robert Mapplethorpe — share space with supporters such as Betty Freeman, drawn by David Hockney, and artistic touchstones from Bertolt Brecht to James Dean. Nearby, a stack of DVDs ranges from Richard Wagner operas and Richard Rutkowski’s The Space in Back of You — a documentary about the Japanese dancer and choreographer Suzushi Hanayagi — to Friends with Benefits, starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis.
“What I saw in Bob’s collection was the embodiment of a statement he often reiterated: ‘The purpose of art is to ask questions, not to say what something is but to ask, what is it?’” says Clifford Allen, who spent a decade as the archivist for Wilson and the Byrd Hoffman Watermill Foundation. “The residence and Watermill were like peering into Bob’s brain.” Every arrangement seemed to pose another question.
Allen’s first visit offered an immediate glimpse into that world. In August 2013, he was summoned from his home in Brooklyn to Water Mill for a job interview at the apartment’s round Alvar Aalto prototype table, now colonized by a mischief of bronze mice created by Paul Thek in the mid-1970s. Allen recalls Wilson demonstrating the movements of a nearby si gale gale figure, a traditional Batak puppet used in funerary dances, during the interview. Other memorable juxtapositions included “a massive block of yellow upholstery foam that occupied the front room, kind of like an unmanipulated John Chamberlain” and stacks of books Bob was “getting to,” with subjects ranging from contemporary art and performance to Indonesian masks and rare ethnographies.
For Wilson, these unexpected encounters formed part of a larger vision. He described his collection as personal and eclectic yet also “a kind of history of man,” a history that extended from the apartment to the Watermill Center itself. Envisioned as an enduring “library of inspiration” for resident artists, the collection encompasses the precious — a René Magritte cloudscape, a long-coveted Agnes Martin grid drawing formerly owned by Judd, and a beach-ball-sized Chinese Neolithic pot Wilson transported from Shanghai to New York over four separate international flights — and the everyday: smoking pipes, ladders, and found objects of all sorts. There is also an astonishing array of chairs, including the sculptural seats Wilson designed for productions but never intended as stage props. Among the greatest crowd-pleasers is a pair of Marlene Dietrich’s made-to-measure Massaro silk pumps, tipped in rhinestones and flecked with blood.
Hiram Butler, Pazda’s longtime business partner, first crossed paths with Wilson in Dallas in the early 1980s. Over the decades, he came to know both Wilson’s delight in sharing new discoveries and his uncompromising eye for detail. During one visit, Wilson wanted to show Butler a recent acquisition — an especially exciting piece of pottery. “It was late at night, but Bob said, ‘Let’s go look at it!’” says Butler. “So, we went upstairs to wherever all the pots were kept, flipped on the light, and there was somebody asleep on the shelf where the pot was supposed to be!”
When Butler mounted Wilson’s first gallery exhibition in Houston in 1992, he encountered an equally enthusiastic yet more exacting side of the artist. Arriving the night before the Saturday morning opening, Wilson decided the light wood frames were too dark. After considering the limited options for finding paint on a Friday evening, he devised a solution. “He said, ‘Go to the drugstore and get some white shoe polish,’” Butler recalls. “So that’s what we did. We put it on all the frames, and then they were the color Bob wanted.”
Within the systems Wilson masterminded and controlled — from the abstract “megastructures” he diagrammed and realized on stages around the world to his living spaces, just-so shelves, and shoe-polished frames — he created worlds to fill. He filled them with light and movement, volume and void, theme and variation, constantly calibrating the space around each element to eschew decoration, illustration, or collage. What remained was a finely tuned freedom — to absorb, to ponder, to connect, to dream.
Christoph Schletz, who later served as Wilson’s personal assistant, still remembers arriving at Watermill in 2004, when “everything was very improvised and rough and yet had a magic and beautiful energy.” It was a world designed not to provide answers, but to invite discovery, a principle that guided Wilson's work until the end of his life. Speaking in Milan in April 2025, where he unveiled his vision of Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini through an installation of light and shadow as part of the Salone del Mobile design fair, Wilson reflected: “Great works are never finished. Great works are something we continue to think about in time.”