The American theatrical critic Kenneth Macgowan fashioned an aesthetic defense for a new visual style of scenic design that began to appear on the American stage during the second decade of the twentieth century. Macgowan's defense for this new visual style, which he labeled the -new stagecraft-, was modeled after the British art critic Clive Bell's aesthetic theory of -significant form- in art. Bell's formal theory of art, which favored formal abstraction over visual representation, provided Macgowan with an attractive premise upon which he could formulate his own theory of the simplified or...