Mr. Kander said musicals were uniquely suited to tragedy because they draw on so many art forms.
She has also been able to draw on the newly vital art world of Tehran.
The first three films were set in the nineteen-thirties and drew on Art Deco styling in clothes, cars, and aircraft.
As it happens, Stalin Empire style, which draws on Art Deco and the clean lines of Mussolini-era Italian design, is enjoying something of a mini-revival in Russia, said Xenia Adjoubei, a lecturer in architectural history and theory at the British Higher School of Art and Design who also has a design practice in Moscow.
It's by Austrian video artist Rainer Kohlberger, who says he draws on Art Concrete as inspiration.
The Douaumont Ossuary also draws on Art Deco principles in its structural architecture, avoiding straight lines in favour of gentle, soft, intersecting curves.
She says Muslims gave the world "visual perspective" but her paintings draw on Islamic art in what the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said would likely have registered as Orientalism: the patronising western raid of eastern culture.
While it clearly draws on folk art and American Indian art, the animism and spirituality of the latter was vital to its being: it was imperative to communicate with the spirits, not as an aesthetic gesture or a form of escape from the world, but because existence — yours, and that of your ancestors and descendents — depended upon it.
"We get a developer's fee of around 8 to 10percentt of the project cost," Mr. Shapiro said, "and minuscule profits from rents, which we draw on for promoting art exhibitions in the 3,500-square-foot 3,500-square-foot 3,500-square-foot
