Along with Robert Edmond Jones, Norman Bel Geddes, and Lee Simonson, Joseph Urban brought the New Stagecraft to America in the 1920s. No other designer of his period lavished more lush color on the stage or brought scene design closer to the level his contemporaries called “Art.” Urban produced the backdrops of the famous Follies for Florenz Ziegfeld, and the Metropolitan Opera continued to use his sets for more than two decades after his death. As early as 1917 the New York Times risked the prediction that “when the historian of the New York stage writes the record, of the uplift of the art of its decoration received in the teens of the twentieth century he will have to give the greatest credit to Joseph Urban.” Instead, he has been virtually ignored: for example, Brockett and Findlay in their history of the modern theatre, Century of Innovation, fail to mention Urban at all. In view of his extensive design record it is surprising that he remains so little known.