Bread and Puppet is one of the longest-running non-profit making, self-supporting theatre companies in the USA, remarkable for its large-scale work produced with volunteers. It grew from the weekly puppet shows given in the early 1960s in a loft in New York’s Lower East Side, by the recent emigrants from Germany Peter Schumann and his wife Elka. Born in Silesia in 1934, Schumann became a refugee in Schleswig-Holstein with his family, where their life involved making sourdough rye bread baked in a communal bakery. As a child Schumann and his brothers and sisters also created puppet shows for any occasion.

Originally called the Moosach Puppet Theatre and People Puppet Theatre, the Schumanns took their show on the road in a trailer converted as a mobile puppet theatre, staging impromptu performances in New England. Back in New York City in 1963 the Schumanns converted the Delancey Street loft into a theatre and puppet museum where Bread and Puppet Theatre gained its name, referencing Schumann’s custom of sharing with his audience members sourdough bread baked by him. The company’s early work in New York City ranged from children’s puppet shows to the large-scale outdoor pageants and street shows of 1964,1965 and 1966 in the poorest areas of the city addressing urban, political and social issues, and protesting about the war in Vietnam, using massive moving sculptures or twenty-foot tall puppets. Their 1968 anti-Vietnam war show Fire led to performances abroad, at a festival in France in 1968, and in June 1969 at London’s Royal Court Theatre.

The Schumanns moved to Plainfield, Vermont in 1970 where Goddard College offered them a theatre residency. They started performing in a field at Cate Farm on the Goddard campus where their first summer show Our Domestic Resurrection Circus: ‘like a history of America, ending in Vietnam’ - embraced carnival and circus and featured the enormous puppets that characterised their work. In 1975 they moved to Glover, Vermont, where the landscape provided them with a natural amphitheatre in an old gravel pit allowing them to perform large scale outdoor productions without amplification.

Their vast and moving spectacles resulted in huge crowds gathering annually, but after 1998 the Circus was succeeded by a summer programme and touring productions addressing issues of the day, still featuring their astonishing and moving sculptural creations.

This exhibition of artwork relating to the Brancacci Chapel frescoes by the Italian artist Tomasso Masaccio (1401-1428) and workshop performances in collaboration with Bread and Puppet and the Central School of Art and Design, took place at Hammersmith's Riverside Studios in March 1979 when the company also produced Ah! in the main studio. The company had produced a papier maché model of the Brancacci Chapel during a two week workshop at the Porta Romana Institute of Art in Florence in 1976.

Their production Masaccio resulted from a two-week workshop at the Institute of Fine Arts in Florence in 1976 where students spent a fortnight studying the Brancacci Chapel frescoes by Tomasso Masaccio(1401-1428), learning to recreate them with the simplest of materials. Cut-out figures were added later by a group of art students from Paris, and in 1979 fourteen design students from London's Central School of Art and Design worked on The Death of Ananias. The resulting huge puppets and landscapes were used in the performance that Peter Schumann directed at the Riverside Studios in March, when the company also performed Ah! in the main studio. The artwork became part of the Masaccio display to be shown at other venues.