Nataliart

The Russian 'saisons de danse', which came as a revelation to foreign audiences, had a great impact on the further development of ballet, of stage design and of painting.

Among the many Russian artists involved in Diaghilev's productions — including Alexan¬der Benois, Nikolai Roerich, Alexander Golovin, Ivan Bilibin, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Konstantin Korovin, Valentin Serov, Konstantin Yuon, Boris Anisfeld, Fiodor Fedorovsky, Natalia Gon-charova, Mikhail Larionov and Sergei Sudeikin — Leon Bakst was undoubtedly in the first rank, as he was the company's leading stage designer, responsible for the sets and costumes of most of its productions. In fact, the Russian seasons in Paris brought him fame that no stage designer had ever before earned. He was a mature master, with years of dogged effort and protracted searching behind him when he became that 'bright star in the theatrical firmament'.

Leon Bakst's creative career started in the late 1880s, after four years — 1883 to 1887 — at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts. Then still in his salad days, he undertook diverse commissions, illustrating books for children and making copies of portraits.

The decisive event in his life came in 1890, when he made the acquaintance of the then young artist Alexander Benois, and his friends Konstantin Somov, Dmitry Filosofov, Walter Nouvel, Sergei Diaghilev and Alfred Nurok. These men shared a characteristic urge to absorb and assimilate the culture, not only of their own country, but of all of Europe. Naturally Bakst's aesthetic horizons were broadened by their discussions on various aspects of literature, music and art, their reading of new books and illustrated foreign magazines and their attendance at theatrical performances and concerts.

Bakst's travels abroad, especially his long stay in Paris, contributed in no small measure to his artistic development. His visits to the Louvre and the Luxembourg Museum, to exhibitions at the Salon, to Versailles and Chantilly, and his travels in Italy, Spain and northern Africa, generated a plethora of new impressions. On the whole he preferred the old masters, such as Velazquez, Rubens and Rembrandt. When he looked at nineteenth-century art his eye was drawn primarily to painters of the Barbizon School, such as Camille Corot, Theodore Rousseauand especially Jean-Frangois Millet, whose art he regarded as the continuation of the lofty classical tradition he admired.

The more aware Bakst grew of the grandeur of the art of past centuries, the more dissatisfied he was with his own efforts. Realizing that it was vital to polish his skills, he took drawing lessons at the studio run by the veteran Academician, Jean-Leon Gerome, and also painted from models at the academy maintained by Rodolphe Julian. He derived great benefit from the classes given by Albert Edelfeldt, a Finnish artist then resident in Paris, who helped him master the intricate art of the plein-air school. Finally, he found the several years (1893-1900) he spent working on studies for the painting 'Paris Welcomes Admiral Avelan' (commis¬sioned by the Russian government) to be a good discipline.

The greatest progress he made in those years, however, was in the use of watercolours and pastels. The small studies he exhibited at shows mounted by the Society of Russian Watercolourists earned well-deserved acclaim.

Bakst's efforts of the 1890s, efforts that reveal the influences of Konstantin Makovsky, the later Wanderers and also of Adolf von Menzel and Mariano Fortuny, clearly indicate the artist's anguished search for individuality. Though he dreamed of serious, persistent study in order to accomplish the objectives he had set himself, often the vicissitudes of life obliged him to produce sugary, salon-type pictures which he could sell cheaply to art-dealers. The letters he wrote to his friends at the time mirror his mental turmoil:

'I owe this year to myself and to my artistic conscience, against which I have often sinned, to reform and set out on the road pointed out by Millet, Rousseau and Corot... It has cost me much, both morally and physically, to shake off this prettily-smooth, spit-and-polish manner and start searching for, and trying to achieve, that monstrously wonderful and freely sweeping style of Rembrandt, Velazquez, Rubens, Millet, Menzel and others... While working on the picture, I simultaneously daub canvas after canvas, looking within myself for the freedom and daring to express my understanding of art without mean, ulterior motives. But that comes with difficulty and hardship. On the other hand, it is a delight to search within the realm of geniune art, to study and to remember that only the great masters really produced "high art". Damnation! No resources.

1898 was a milestone in Bakst's creative career. Benois and the other members of his group set up an artistic association which came to be known as Mir iskusstva [The World of Art]. Over the next few years many of the artists of St Petersburg and Moscow joined this association. They included Valentin Serov, Mikhail Vrubel, Konstantin Korovin, Philip Maliavin, Ivan Bilibin, Anna Ostroumova, Yevgeny Lanceray, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Alexander Golovin and Nikolai Roerich. They all shared a common refusal to accept either the official academism with its dogmatic, conservative conventions, or the creative efforts of many of the later Wanderers. They advocated inspiration and lyricism in art, and sought novel, more impressive means of visual expression.

Retrospective romanticism constituted a salient trend in fin-de-siecle Russian art. Dissatis¬faction with reality induced many artists to address themselves to past epochs. But whereas Andrei Riabushkin, Apollinary Vasnetsov, Nikolai Roerich and Ivan Bilibin were primarily interested in the authentically Russian, pre-Petrovian age, its history, mores and folklore, most World of Art artists gravitated towards the eighteenth century and the first half of the following century. Many concentrated on the days of Peter the Great, and the Rococo and Empire architecture of 'old' St Petersburg. Alexander Benois and Konstantin Somov were infatuated with Louis XIV, while Bakst preferred antiquity.

Most World of Art members were influenced by the Art Nouveau style current in western Europe at the turn of the century. The World of Art movement was associated with the crucial artistic phenomena of the day, and it reflected these in diverse activities, incorporating not only the visual arts but also art criticism, the theatre, even music and literature. It set the stage for the flowering of Russian book illustration, and largely contributed to the spectacular world-wide triumph of Russian ballet, Russian music and Russian stage design. Meanwhile, the annual exhibitions mounted by the group, together with the journal it published, introduced the Russian public to the cream of Russian and western European art and served to promote aesthetic tastes and surmount hidebound nationalistic attitudes to visual creativity. At the same time, by arousing an interest in national history, it helped to introduce a new appreciation for thegrandeur and majesty of Russian culture. Two outstanding personalities in the World of Art group, which was composed of generally well-educated and gifted people, were Sergei Diaghilev, who arranged exhibitions and edited the World of Art journal, and Alexander Benois, a superb illustrator of books, a stage designer, art critic and historian, unanimously acknowl¬edged by the group as their chief ideologue.

The World of Art journal enriched Bakst's art, infusing it with greater substance and purpose. Book illustration acquired greater prominence. Indeed, the fact that the group had its own periodical enabled its members to translate into reality their view of the printed work as an art form, one whose components should harmoniously blend into one entity. The editors, namely Bakst, Benois, Somov and Lanceray, were able to attain a stylistic integrity and a high professional level of design for their publication. Entranced by this work, Bakst 'spent whole days in inventing elegant titles for the drawings and retouching the photographs, in an attempt to give them a more artistic character'. Meanwhile, his own drawings for the covers, his frontispieces, vignettes, head- and tailpieces done for the World of Art, for Khudozhestvennye sokrovishcha Rossii [Art Treasures of Russia], and for other journals and publications were conspicuous for their rhythmic severity, graceful elegance and expressive play of black and white. In them sinuous lines combined with broken or dotted lines, small dashes, hatching and shading. The overall character and the techniques employed betrayed the influence of western graphic artists, above all of Aubrey Beardsley and Felix Vallotton.

Bakst borrowed decorative elements for his drawings primarily from the classical art of ancient Greece, and now and again one encounters rocaille motifs. This was a singular stylization of antiquity, with the severity and laconic elements of the ancients transmuted into the linear subtlety of Art Nouveau. Later, between 1905 and 1910, Bakst borrowed archaic motifs from Greek mythology. An apposite instance is afforded by his 1909 frontispiece for the Apollon [Apollo] journal. Now and again the ornamental vignette gives way to a narrative drawing that not infrequently possesses a symbolical tinge. A case in point is the Tolling Bells' frontispiece for the Zolotoye runo [The Golden Fleece] journal (1906, No. 3), intended to accompany the obituary of the artist Victor Borisov-Musatov; it has an associative link with this text, serving subtly to convey the mood.

By contrast, the frontispiece for Alexander Blok's slender volume of verse in 1907, Snow Mask, with its allegorical content, play of fantasy, half-hints, linear rhythm and contrasted silhouettes conveys the lyricism of the series of poems, which Blok prefaced with the following epigraph: These verses are dedicated to You, tall lady in black with eyes winged and enamoured of the lights and gloom of my snow town. Alexei Sidorov, a connoisseur of Russian graphic art, thought this drawing 'a model of "synthesized" illustration, characterizing the basic mood and the main image of the book'. The two easel pieces, The Downpour' and The Vase', which Bakst produced in 1907, both develop from his book illustrations. The latter, also known as 'Self-Portrait', refers in allegorical form to the artist's family life. Meanwhile, The Downpour', by virtue of its stylized character and affectionately ironical attitude towards the past, as well as the fineness and accuracy of the drawing, has an affinity with the efforts of other World of Art artists, especially Konstantin Somov.

The technique of lithography, which had its heyday in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century, had been consigned to oblivion until the World of Art group rediscovered it in the course of their explorations into the various techniques employed in the graphic arts. Here the etcher Vasily Mathe and his pupil Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, who was to attain promi¬nence as a master of black-and-white and coloured engravings, played an important role. Perhaps of greatest interest among Bakst's lithographs are his portraits of the artists Isaac Levitan and Philip Maliavin (both dated 1899), which are conspicuous for their keen, lively characterization
.

At the time of the first Russian Revolution, in 1905-1907, many of the World of Art artists worked for the satirical journals Zhupel [The Bugaboo] and Adskaya pochta [Hell's Mail]. Indeed, the drawings published by Valentin Serov, Yevgeny Lanceray, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Ivan Bilibin, Boris Kustodiev, Boris Anisfeld and Dmitry Kardovsky are in the first rank of Russian political satire of the time.

Bakst, like many of Russia's progressive intellectuals, welcomed the Revolution with excited delight. 'Never before has it been so light, bright and springy in Russia as now! he wrote. Infatuated by the idea of publishing the Zhupel journal, he attended conferences of the editorial staff, where the efforts of artists and democratically-minded writers, headed by Maxim Gorky, were pooled. Later, in 1908, together with Dobuzhinsky, Bilibin, Kustodiev and Anisfeld, Bakst worked for the newly published art and political journal Satiricon, closely modelled on the German satirical Simplicissimus. This new journal achieved prominence in Russian intellectual life, started as it was in the dark hours of Stolypin's reaction to the revolutionary feelings in the air, when all progressive thought was suppressed. Bakst did a cover and several illustrations. His cover depicts a monotonous row of barack-like houses, bristling with pointed lightning-conductors. Above, high up in the heavens, sits Zeus, hurling bolts of lightning at the city. The caption on top read: 'Dedicated to Zeuses, great and small.' The allegorical meaning was quite clear: humans were no longer frightened of gods and demigods, as they had found ways and means of repelling their blows. Reactionary ideas could no longer crush the freedom-loving spirit of the populace, with their new-found aspirations. Reflected in this drawing, and others featured in the new journal, was the mood of the progressive intelligentsia, who craved political change and believed in an inevitable revolutionary upsurge in the near future.

Bakst's portraits now underwent a marked evolution. In his early studies of Spaniards, Arabs, Ukrainian peasant women, Roman ladies and French peasants, he had often given priority to national ethnic features, instead of specific characteristics. However, in 1895 he turned towards the more individualized portrait. Though he also produced many superficial, salon-type pieces, these did not convey his complete mastery of the genre. He was happiest depicting people who were kindred spirits. A case in point is the portrait of his friend and colleague Alexander Benois (1898), which radiates a real warmth and evinces a clear insight into the inner man. The sitter's serenity is brought out by the linear smoothness, the restrained color scheme and the soft texture of the pastel. The quickly sketched background, showing a folder of drawings and a rocaille-framed portrait of the Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, also serves to indicate the mood of an artist attracted to the history and art of eighteenth-century Russia.

Less traditional is the 'Portrait of Sergei Diaghilev and His Nurse' (1906), which follows the flat, silhouetted style of Art Nouveau. In it, Bakst has been able to reveal the complex character of this gifted man, showing us his lively, clever mind, boundless vigor — and his high-society polish and arrogance. Meanwhile, the contrast between the sitter's internally dynamic figure and the elderly nurse, calmly seated in the background with her hands folded in her lap, only amplifies the image's resonance and robust vibrancy. In its singular approach to the sitter, compositional arrangement and coloring, this portrait is linked to some of Valentin Serov's efforts.

In his portraits Bakst preferred to use graphic techniques. Thus, possibly the happiest of the series of drawings done in 1899 is the 'Portrait of the Actress Maria Savina', which is appealing because of the charm of the sitter and the fine elegant line. Undoubtedly of interest are the works produced in 1905 and 1906 in mixed media, notably black and coloured pencil, charcoal, chalk and sanguine. Most follow a similar pattern, with the centrally-positioned face modelled in detail against a blank field where there is a sketchy outline of the figure. The portraits of Konstantin Somov and Andrei Bely, as well as the artist's self-portrait, fall into this group; all were commissioned and produced in 1906 for Nikolai Riabushinsky, the publisher of Zolotoye runo, for eventual reproduction in his journal.

Bakst draws closest to western Art Nouveau trends in his 1902 painting The Supper'. 'A stylish, fin-de-siecle, decadent woman, black-white, lissom as an ermine with a mysterious Gioconda smile'8: this is how Vasily Rozanov, aptly and expressively, described the main personage. A concealed apprehension is sensed in the mobile, pale face which the auburn-haired lady turns sharply towards the viewer, in her posture and in the way the fur neckpiece ispoised to slip off the back of the chair. This feeling is accentuated by the asymmetrical structure, the fragmented composition and the characteristic drawing built on a host of sinuous lines. All this, along with the subtly refined silhouette, the fluidity of form, the flat decorativeness and the touch of poster-like grotesquerie, imparts a particular vigour to the piece. Shown at the 1903 World of Art exhibition, this picture, which did not conform to current aesthetic notions, shocked audiences by its extravagant 'playfulness'. It was far better received in Germany when it was displayed at the Sezession exhibition in Munich.

After his travels in Greece in 1907, made in the company of Serov, graphic principles came to the fore in Bakst's efforts. His mounting interest in archaic art, his fascination with two-dimensional, silhouetted painting, such as is found on classical vases, may account for the gradual increase of linearity in his work. Highly significant in this respect is the preliminary drawing for The Sleeper', in which the volume of the prone female figure is conveyed by contour lines alone, with virtually no chiaroscuro modelling. This same preoccupation can also be felt in his graphic portraits. Bakst preferred working in black pencil, almost to the exclusion of all other media; he did not resort to any tinting and he also abandoned thick shading and washes (compare his 1907 portrait of Mily Balakirev with his two 1908 portraits, of Alexander Golovin and Isadora Duncan). However, by the 1910s, when Bakst was obsessed with the riotous colours of Diaghilev's ballets, his portraits reassumed a painterly character and simultaneously revealed the expres¬siveness of his stage designs. Cases in point are his portraits of Jean Cocteau (1911), and of the dancers Casati (1912) and Virginia Zucchi (1917).

One of Bakst's more exciting portraits is the somewhat stylized image, in watercolour and gouache, of Ida Rubinstein (1921). Though the dancer, with whom the artist was creatively associated over a long period, is presented offstage, the portrait is highly theatrical. Indeed, the tall figure with the tiny head, sumptuously dressed, holding an enormous muff, seems to be standing in front of footlights. The artistry and refined elegance of the sitter are well conveyed through the finely-etched profile, proud bearing, singular costume and elegant colour scheme. Yet the entire image also reveals those elements of extravagant, decadent weariness that were characteristic of Ida Rubinstein's dancing.

Bakst's portraits, especially those in black and white, are conspicuous for their mastery, their authentic artistry. Their main feature is a fresh immediacy, due in great measure to the brisk manner of execution. To the artist's way of thinking, protracted work on a portrait, coupled with an attempt to convey every detail, inevitably resulted in the loss of inspiration, the portrayal becoming dry and lifeless.

It must be said that Bakst's portraiture has not been properly appreciated in the extensive literature published about him; his landscapes, too, are rarely mentioned, though the artist, who loved the countryside and had a genuine feeling for nature, time and again took up landscape painting. In his younger years he produced rapid impressionistic studies in oils and watercolours that depicted nature's changing condition. His 'Evening in the Neighbourhood of ATn-Za'i'nfour, Sfax' (1897) and 'In the Vicinity of Nice' (1899) are pieces that appeal by virtue of their lyrical perception of the natural world.

The artist produced most of his landscape pieces in 1903 and 1904 when in France, Finland and outside Moscow. Among these are his 'Olive Grove', 'Landscape' and 'Village Church'. More generalized from the angle of form and colour, these landscapes conform to a somewhat monotonous greenish-grey colour sheme. Whereas before Bakst was chiefly interested in the state of nature as evinced by a sunset or by rain, he now sought to convey the overall character, influenced in no mean measure by his contacts with Serov and such Moscow painters as Abram Arkhipov, Konstantin Korovin and Sergei Vinogradov. In 1903, these men founded the Union of Russian Artists at whose shows Bakst exhibited after the disintegration of the World of Art group.

Later on we can observe a certain decorative conventionality in the artist's landscapes. This is well illustrated by his 1906 watercolour 'Sunflowers Beneath the Window', in which the ornamental and two-dimensional interpretation of form is clear. One of Bakst's best landscapes is his 1908 'Acacia Branch Above the Sea', astonishing in its unexpected compositional arrangement and colour scheme. The vivid colouring, a blend of full-blown blues, greens, yellows and pinks, anticipates the vibrant splashes of colour which were to emerge two years later in the decor for the ballet Scheherazade.

The trend the artist followed in this genre dovetailed with the mainstream development of Russian tum-of-the-century landscape painting. In Bakst's mind nature was invariably associated with music. Music lent him inspiration and evoked flights of fantasy. 'Without flowers and music half of happiness is lost!' he said.

Best known of Bakst's easel-work is his 1908 painting Terror Antiquus', which evoked a diverse range of opinions in the press. Some critics thought it 'merely an airplane view of a geographical map in relief'. Others considered it 'a work stemming from complex and significant intellectual efforts'. This large canvas, the subject of which derives from the legend of the sunken city of Atlantis, is a bird's-eye view of a landscape, illuminated by huge flashes of lightning. The sea rushing inland inundates a craggy coast. We see buildings rocking and panicstricken inhabitants scurrying to and fro. Frothing waves, about to engulf ships, dash against the walls of stone fortresses. Above it all towers the archaic statue of the goddess Aphrodite; she is calm, imperturbable, a frozen smile on her lips. This statue is the incarnation of the feminine ideal, with love and art triumphing over everything mundane and transient, and it imparts an enigmatic, symbolic meaning to the picture.

In the painting the abstract symbol does not exclude historical verisimilitude. Thus the dark blue sea, studded with isles that seem to glow with a phosphorescent light, is actually the view one sees opening up before one when looking from the Acropolis; the brownish, ash-grey mountains rising up on the right are the same 'epically gigantic mountain ranges and bare cliffs — savage and classical... which Bakst so enthusiastically describes in his travel notes from Greece. Also discernible are the Lion Gates of Mycenae, the ruins of the palace in Tiryns and the Acropolis of Athens, while the statue of the goddess is reminiscent of the archaic korai that lent inspiration to Valentin Serov in his painting The Rape of Europa'.

Terror Antiquus' translated into reality the artist's long-cherished dream of producing a work with a profound philosophical meaning. However, the end result of his three years' endeavour gave Bakst no satisfaction. The elements of theoretical contemplation and delibera¬tion that he introduced interfered with his aim of arresting the viewer's attention; the picture was rather like an academic treatise. Nonetheless the painting was largely consonant with the work of other Russian painters between 1905 and 1915. The interest evinced in the latest scientific discoveries, the peculiar romantic aura imparted by the archaic elements and the use of a decorative panel centring on an intricate symbolic image make Terror Antiquus' akin to some of the efforts of Nikolai Roerich, Konstantin Bogaevsky, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and Mikalojus Ciurlionis. Terror Antiquus' mirrors its author's tendency towards monumentality and archaism. The dream of the archaic is the last and most cherished dream of the art of our age,' Maximilian Voloshin observed in 1909.

After his travels in Greece his interest in antiquity became all-absorbing and Bakst began to lecture and publish articles on classical culture. His ideas are set out most fully in the article 'Classical Trends in Art', which he published in Apollon (1909, Nos. 2/3). Repudiating subjectiv¬ity and aestheticism, he advocated the art of large forms, the continuity of tradition and the need for thorough professional schooling. He believed that recourse to archaism, to a 'crude, lapidary style' and to children's drawings, with their spontaneity of perception and bright, pure colours, would infuse art with fresh vigour. Amongst contemporary painters he singled out the trio of Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Maurice Denis, who had chosen the same road, which Bakst contended was the one and only road. Naturally, views like this were to bring him to Fauvism, whose echoes were manifest not only in his painting and drawing, but also in his method of teaching at Elizaveta Zvantseva's art school. The basic demand that he put to his students was 'the ability to arrange contrasting colours, to balance their reciprocal influences and to translate this into the simplest of forms'. However, Bakst taught, although successfully, for only four years. After 1910 he settled in Paris for good, dedicating himself entirely to his job as stage designer for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

Bakst had conceived an interest in the theatre in his boyhood. He often recalled how he used to entertain his sisters by putting on toy shows, with paper figures cut out of books andmagazines. But the decisive moment in his choice of the theatre as a career was when he established a close relationship with Benois and his group, all of whom were great enthusiasts of music and theatre. Indeed, the theatre was an integral component of the intellectual and creative activities of the World of Art members. The demands they made in the visual arts regarding an artistic and stylistic integrity were extended to the theatre. This happened to coincide with other efforts to reform stage design, especially scenic painting. Here the way waspaved by the Private Russian Opera of Moscow. Its patron, Savva Mamontov, invited to design sets, not the art staff of the Imperial Theatres, who adhered to rigid stereotypes, but such highly talented easel-painters as Vasily Polenov, Victor Vasnetsov, Mikhail Vrubel, Konstantin Koro-vin, Valentin Serov and Isaac Levitan. The overall reform of the stage by Konstantin Stanis¬lavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theatre — founded in 1899 — naturally served to renovate stage design. In this field Konstantin Korovin and Alexander Golovin were most closely connected with the World of Art. In the early 1900s they designed several productions at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and at the Maryinsky Theatre in St Petersburg.

In 1902 Bakst first tried his hand at stage design with a production of the French pantomime Le Cceurde la Marquise [The Heart of the Marchioness] at the Hermitage Theatre of the Imperial Court in St Petersburg. Though his sketches still had vestiges of his training in book illustration, they were conspicuous for their Empire-style elegance and their refined colour scheme. These traits asserted themselves in his decor for Josef Bayer's Die Puppenfee [The Fairy Doll], produced at the Hermitage and Maryinsky Theatres in the following year.

Indeed, this ballet, which had little to recommend it, was completely transformed into a festive, poetic spectacle, thanks to the stage designer's talent and aesthetic sensibility. In his presentation of the two worlds, one of everyday happenings, the other where the toys are brought to life, Bakst displayed a remarkable ability for conveying the cheerful, bright fantasy of the fairy-tale and its traditional romantic dichotomy.

Bakst's sketches of the real-life personages of this ballet vividly reproduced the St Peters¬burg social life of the 1850s. Most exciting, though, were the figures of the dolls, which were astonishing in their refined draughtsmanship and meticulous presentation of faces, hair¬styles and detailing of the garments. What was apparent here was the inherent affection of a World of Art artist for expressive details and 'charming trifles'. 'One simply cannot tear one's eyes away from these admirable costumes, in which each dot, each splash, each bow, each curl, gloves and even beauty spots are so precisely conceived and so indispensable from the point of view of colour, one reviewer commented.

It was Die Puppenfee that made Bakst's name in the world of the musical theatre. His reputation was further established by the sets he designed for two classical tragedies: Euripides' Hippolytus and Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, in 1902 and 1904 respectively, at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Thus far antiquity had been represented on the stages of the Imperial Theatres in what one might term its classical version; that is, in the form of a Greece of white marble, populated by men and women of ideal proportions garbed in snow-white robes, who spoke only with 'rounded gestures'. However, the action in these two tragedies was set in a far earlier period, in the archaic chapter of Greek history. With this in mind Bakst turned to the ancient myths and epics and studied the artifacts excavated by Schliemann and Evans at Troy, Tiryns, Mycenae and Crete. Fascinated by the simplicity and perfection of archaic elements, he decided to introduce them into his scenery and costumes.
His setting for Hippolytus was both simple and dynamic. One sees a square in the Peloponnesian town of Troezen, with the palace of King

Theseus in the background. In front of the palace are the huge, archaic statues of Aphrodite and Artemis, the two goddesses whoserivalry provoked the tragedy. The artist had conceived their hieratic, static oppressiveness as symbolic of the tragedy's basic message. In their desire to create an effect reminiscent of the ancient theatre, the two directors, Yuri Ozarovsky and Dmitry Merezhkovsky, introduced a chorus that Bakst placed on the lower proscenium, around the sacrificial altar whence fumes of incense curled upwards. The grim-visaged courtiers, with their pointed beards, wearing flowing cloaks and chitons, the warriors in their tall helmets, holding large round shields, the women with their curling locks, dressed in long pleated tunics, and the mute dark-skinned slaves, all served to create a living picture conjured up from the days of the ancient Greeks. The many-coloured costumes, the angularity of the silhouettes and the somewhat jerky, sharp movements were in marked contrast to the hitherto current notions of 'ancient' Greece. The costumes were abundantly embellished with the type of ornaments encountered on ancient Greek pottery and in ancient Egyptian art. With the meticulous attention he paid to every detail, Bakst sketched all the props, and used make-up on the actors' bodies as well as on their faces, to create greater verisimilitude. The costumes designed for the two productions, though historically authentic, nevertheless possessed a precisely measured dose of scenic convention and artistic generali¬zation. In short, this was no superficial stylization, but a talented reinterpretation of the very spiritof ancient times. The severe and noble colouring of Bakst's costumes and his highly intelligent interpretation of classical dress were unique; nothing of the sort had been seen either in the Russian theatre or in any other theatre in the world,' Benois wrote.

Even more than in Die Puppenfee, the productions of these two Greek tragedies revealed the singular features of Bakst as a stage designer. These were his ability to offer an independent, original and bold interpretation, the richness of his imagination, and, chiefly, his fundamentally novel understanding of the role played by costume on stage. His most meticu¬lously executed costume sketches were undoubtedly works of art in their own right. They were more than simple sketches of garments. They were actual portraits of the people in their characteristic attitudes. At the same time, the sharply delineated contours, the clear-cut drawing, the precise use of colour and the detailed directions as to cut, colour and material to be used, made these sketches totally comprehensible to the costumier. Bakst indeed went further than simply providing the sketch; not infrequently he himself chose the necessary fabrics, supervised the making of the costumes and was present at the fittings.

Bakst's talents were not appreciated by the management of the Imperial Theatres. On the other hand, they were readily acknowledged by the dancers, singers and actors who began to ply him with commissions. What brought about the great change in his destiny was the collaboration between the World of Art artists, especially Bakst and Benois, and the budding choreographer, Michel Fokine. Indeed, Bakst was, in the late 1900s, associated with Fokine's debut.

Also in line with Bakst's interests at this period was his involvement with Vera Komissar-zhevskaya's drama company. With her sensibility attuned to new trends in art and her desire to keep abreast of the times, she became close friends with a group of Symbolist writers and invited Vsevolod Meyerhold to direct at her new theatre. At this time not only theatre people, but also poets, novelists and artists energetically debated the theatre's destiny, producing an intensive search for new theatrical forms. The then young actor and director Meyerhold, noted for his ventures into the theory and practice of the conventional stage, advocated the repudiation of naturalism and verisimilitude in favour of symbolic conventions, emphasizing theatricality. He attached great significance to decor, which he viewed as crucial for conveying the basic message of the play. The repertory billed for the opening season of the Komissar-zhevskaya company consisted of plays by Henrik Ibsen, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Maurice Maeterlinck, Leonid Andreyev and Alexander Blok, and showed clearly a move towards Symbolism.

The Elysium that Bakst depicted on the Komissarzhevskaya theatre curtain was in its way 'a flight into a dream'. By enticing the viewer into a phantom world, where figures in white and blue garments flitted among flowering groves and classical temples, the artist created a mood that was in harmony with the spirit of the Komissarzhevskaya company. Incidentally, the artist's well-known 'Elysium' panel of 1906 is a later version of this curtain.

Bakst first collaborated with Meyerhold in 1908, in a joint effort to produce Oscar Wilde's Salome at the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St Petersburg, with Ida Rubinstein in the title role. The highlight was to have been the 'Dance of the Seven Veils', which Fokine choreographed to the music of Alexander Glazunov. Bakst had enthusiastically agreed to design the sets andcostumes. He was attracted to the biblical Orient's colourful, monumental character. However, Salome was banned by the Imperial censors a few days before the first night, as the Russian clergy suspected an affront to Orthodoxy. Still, the inspired labours of Bakst, Meyerhold and Fokine were not completely wasted. Some six weeks later Ida Rubinstein performed the 'Dance of the Seven Veils' at a recital at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire; she wore the costume Bakst had designed and danced in front of his set. She later repeated this performance abroad.

The Salome costume sketch is in fact a portrayal of Rubinstein performing the 'Dance of the Seven Veils'. In it a transparent scarf of a cerulean blue flutters behind her back. The strings of pearls winding around her body seem to follow the overall rhythm of her movement. The pale face, the elegant arms and legs, the flowing lines and the colour scheme of soft pale-blue and greyish tones produced an unconventional image of the Judaean princess that was largely consonant with the lyrical nature of the image created by Oscar Wilde. Though Bakst was subsequently to return to this subject, he never had so complete a success. His sketches for later productions of Salome in Paris betray an Art Nouveau pretentiousness; we no longer feel the poetic grace of the image; instead it has become cruder, more corporeal.

Bakst's stage designs for the two Greek tragedies and Die Puppenfee reveal two basic aspects of his work which are, as a rule, tentatively designated the Oriental and the Romantic. We can see these trends develop in his work for the Ballets Russes. Bakst's creative efforts cannot truly be separated from Sergei Diaghilev's initiatives and ventures. The World of Art exhibitions, which ended in 1903, left Diaghilev's tremendous vitality far from exhausted. In 1905 he mounted (at the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg) a stupendous exhibition of Russian portraits. Next came the 1906 retrospective show of Russian art. Visitors to this were astounded not only by the abundance of remarkable Russian works of art, ranging from icons to modern pieces, but also by Bakst's interior decoration. He repeated it for the Russian art show that Diaghilev organized at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in that same year. The decoration of the exhibition,' Alexander Shervashidze commented, 'its cosiness, the restrained luxury of the first three rooms, lined with a faintly glittering brocade, the elegant mini-garden with a very good bust of Paul I in the middle and with greenery and flowers up above and down below (which amazed the French visitors) is superb. The other rooms were decorated with printed stuff, accentuated by a fine frieze of thin wooden boards tinted to match. The mini-garden and friezes were designed by Bakst, truly one of the cleverest and most gifted decorators of the day, who naturally enjoys well-deserved success.

This exhibition, which translated into reality Diaghilev's long-cherished wish to 'exalt' Russian painting in the western world, demonstrated the high standard of Russian art and signally contributed to the popularity of Russian culture in Europe. In 1907 Diaghilev arranged five recitals of Russian music at the Paris Grand Opera. In 1908 he produced Modest Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov, with the bass Fiodor Chaliapin in the title role. This was a sensation; Parisian opera lovers were profoundly moved both by the music and by this singer's powerful and original talent.

When Alexander Benois first suggested taking Russian ballet abroad Diaghilev responded enthusiastically, and engaged Anna Pavlova, Mathilda Kshessinska, Tamara Karsavina, Vera Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Vera Karalli, Mikhail Mordkin, Adolf Bolm, Sofia Fedorova andEkaterina Geltzer, star dancers of the Maryinsky Theatre in St Petersburg and the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. He also invited, as choreographer, the young and gifted Michel Fokine, who sought to revitalize ballet by making it more modern, more striking and closer to the mainstream of art in general. Fokine saw painting as crucial to ballet productions, and this led him to seek contacts with the World of Art artists, who became co-directors of his ballets. He maintained that costume innovation could not be separated from dance innovation, and in the ballets he choreographed dance is most intimately associated with the decor, the painterly, plastic elements almost coming to dominate.

Diaghilev's company had its debut in the spring of 1909 at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. The designs that Bakst produced for the ballet Cleopatre, which was presented during the first Russian season, earned him unprecedented success. The setting of an Egyptian temple was conspicuous for its clarity and conciseness. Without attempting to reproduce faithfully Egyptian architecture, the designer summarized his conception of this architectural style by emphasizingits solemn and austere monumentality. Here again, as in some of his previous work, the historical material served only as a point of departure for his stylization. He said: 'I always sought to convey the music of the image, shaking off the shackles of archaeology, chronology and mores.

The decoration, in which orange-gold blended with azure-blue, produced the sensation of blazing heat that excellently conveyed the stern spirit of the play, with its rituals, sacred rites and tragic denouement; it was a fitting frame for the action. The costume sketches for Cleopatre disclosed the artist's immeasurably increased mastery, with the line now more sinuous, the silhouette more expressive, the form more plastic and the colour far richer.

Still more sensational was the eclat with which his production of the ballet Scheherazade was received when it opened at the Paris Opera the following season. When the curtain rose, the audience was dazzled with the sight of the sumptuous, fabulously rich apartments of the Khan's harem. The walls and ceiling were resplendent with mosaics and paintings; the floor was covered with a red carpet on which scarlet rugs stood out as dark splashes of colour; gold and silver lamps were suspended from above. Spectators were greatly impressed by the emerald-green silk curtains, lavishly ornamented with pink and gold. One sensed in their colouring, texture and ornamental design the Oriental languor and lyricism characteristic of the entire production. The freely organized setting produced the illusion of a real-life interior, while the undulating and mingling contours of the objects introduced a dynamic element.

The colouring dominated the sets. The vivid greens, blues, reds and pinks created a sense of Oriental opulence and luxury. It was the colouring which produced a definite emotional response, an appropriate mood in the audience, the moment it was revealed. The intensity of the colour scheme, dominated by reds and greens, already introduced something mysteriously ominous, a mood that expressed the gist of the sensual poetry of the Arabian Nights and emphasized the moving drama of Rimsky-Korsakov's music. As he worked on the decor for Scheherazade, Bakst drew mainly upon Persian miniatures, to which he added motifs from Turkish and Chinese ornaments, thus synthesizing his conceptions of Oriental art.

The costumes were in perfect harmony with the scenery. They echoed the basic colours of the sets and thus served to promote and complement the main colour scheme. In his costume designs Bakst used pure, primary colours, contrasted in a daring, at times sharply accentuated, manner. Yet, despite the vivid chromatic character of the decor and the abundance of movement, full harmony reigned on the stage. This was attained by an unerring choice of tones and a strict adherence to the rhythm of the colour scheme. Everything was attuned to one basic key, with even the smallest details geared to the overall concept.

Scheherazade disclosed for the first time Bakst's full coloristic potential. In this production, colour engendered an exceptionally great emotional impact. One notes that Bakst was able to adapt the colour scheme to the music and by means of the various nuances of colour, enhance the feelings produced by the music. To convey the mood generated by the music through colour, to interpret in a painterly way the emotional sensuality inherent in the music — this was the most significant innovation to occur in theatre design for many years.

Bakst possessed an unerring sense of colour. He displayed a capability for both blending and contrasting his colours, discovering unprecedented combinations which served to create anew resonance and produce unexpected effects. In his careful study of the mise-en-scene he traced the movements of every single person in order to correlate the design and colour of his or her costume with those of the other people on stage. 'My mise-en-scenes,' he said, 'are the products of a deliberately designed arrangement of splashes of colour against the background of the sets... The costumes of the leading players dominate and blossom within the bouquet of the other costumes.

Scheherazade made a sensational impression. 'Paris is enchanted by this creative effort of Bakst's, as spicy, sensuous and vivid as Oriental fabrics and semi-precious stones, impreg¬nated with the aroma of the Orient,' Yakov Tugendhold, the St Petersburg correspondent of the Apollon journal, wrote.

The production had a marked influence on French theatre and on the efforts of easel-painters. Oriental-style furniture, rugs, carpets, coloured cushions, vivid textiles with Oriental ornamental designs, headdresses in the form of turbans and sundry other 'exotic' items came into fashion. The top Paris couturiers — Worth, Paquin, Poiret — based their dresses on Bakst's costumes. Bakst unexpectedly found himself an arbiter of Parisian fashion. Maximilian Voloshin wrote: 'Bakst... has been able to find that elusive nerve that rules fashion, and currently his influence is felt everywhere in Paris, both in ladies' frocks... and at pictureshows. The desire to introduce a note of beauty and aesthetic taste into everyday life induced him to design textiles and ladies' clothes. The Orient was brilliantly interpreted once again, this time in Bakst's decor for Gabriele d'Annunzio's mystery play, La Pisanella, which Ida Rubinstein's company performed at the Theatre du Chatelet in 1913. The action is set in the kingdom of Cyprus in the thirteenth century. The time is a most curious one, a time I know well; one which has yet to see itself presented on stage,' he wrote to the producer, Vsevolod Meyerhold. The overall character is languorously magnificent and blazingly mad. A whole heap of colours, and... contrasts. The artist's enthusiastic approach to the material was manifested in his four sets and myriad costumes, as well as different, richly ornamented curtains for each act. The show was seen as a brilliant carnival of stylization and symbolism, which both artist and director held close to their hearts. La Pisanella was an intricate, opulent production that could be compared only to Scheherazade in its breadth of approach, scale of artistic imagination and power of painterly temperament.

Though Bakst was entranced by the Orient, he was also eager to present Greece on the stage. In 1911 and 1912 he produced stage designs for four productions based on ancient myths: Narcisse, Daphnis and Chloe, L'Apres-midi d'un Faune and Helen of Sparta, the last for Ida Rubinstein's company. These were markedly different from the productions he had done a decade earlier for the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. In these four Bakst scaled the heights of artistic expression. His concept of ancient times had broadened and his approach was likewise modified. In addition to studying ancient art, literature and archaeology, he also drew on the personal impressions he had gained from his travels in Greece. Thus the olive grove in Narcisse, the austere, rusty-red cliffs in Daphnis and Chloe and the wild, rocky landscape in Helen of Sparta are all echoes of what he had seen on first setting foot in Greece. But his impressions of contemporary Greece were not enough, and he introduced a note of archaic austerity which he modified by filtering it through the prism of twentieth-century aesthetic concepts and his own Weltanschauung. Thus what Alexander Blok said about the writer Viacheslav Ivanov is equally valid of Bakst: he 'construed the ancient symbols in conformity with the logic of his own modern heart and mind'.

Among Bakst's masterpieces may be ranked the costume sketches for the Boeotians and Bacchantes in the 1911 ballet Narcisse. Their robust figures, presented in highly dynamic motion from complex angles, and their dances, permeated with healthy sensuality, are frankly reminiscent of the peasant women of Delphi with their 'muscular sun-bronzed legs', whose crude perfection of form had struck the artist during his travels in Greece. Movement constitutes a salient feature of his costume sketches. With his sensitive ear for music and a fine understanding of the specific features of choreography, he conveyed through his sketches movements that were archetypal. Together with the body, the garments 'spring to life', in tune with an overall dynamic rhythm, and they serve to accentuate the position of the arms, legs and torso. Compositional balance was also attained with the help of long scarves which enveloped the figures of the dancers. The colours employed in the Narcisse sketches are vibrant and full-bodied; combinations of two colours, in the fabric and the ornamental designs, are seen in most of the costumes: green and blue, orange and pink, yellow and orange or red and violet; and when Bakst brings various costumes together in the dance, he seeks to counterbalancecontrasting colours. Most vividly manifest in his Narcisse sketches are his characteristic feelings for colour, line and plasticity. Noting that these sketches were executed 'with a calligraphically sure hand in marvellous, vibrant colours', Benois compares them to the 'drawings of Eisen, Toyokuni and other charming Japanese connoisseurs of costume and ornament'. Their expressiveness, their intricate angles and a certain preciousness cause these sketches to show a particular affinity with Art Nouveau graphic work.

Another major success for Bakst was the costume and make-up he designed for the Faun in the ballet L 'Apres-midi d'un Faune to the music of Claude Debussy (1912). The brown leotard with its large, dark splotches was highly reminiscent of the hide of an animal. The abbreviated wig and golden horns narrowed the forehead, while the make-up emphasized the elongated eyes and the skull and also made the mouth larger, the lips thicker and the nose fleshier, thus giving the face a naive, infantile expression. Igor Stravinsky recollected that 'in the production of this ballet Bakst played possibly the main role, doing the sets, marvellous costumes and even furnishing tiny movements in the choreography. Yet Bakst's designs for the backdrop and the costumes, which conformed to his usual style of painterly illusion, jarred with the Constructivist principle that Nijinsky employed in the choreography. The tendencies that Nijinsky introduced in his production of L 'Apres-midi d'un Faune were further elaborated by him in his ballet toStravinsky's music, Le Sacre du Printemps, which was produced in 1913, with designs by Nikolai Roerich, and, in a lighter mood, in a ballet originally planned as a divertissement, Jeux, to the music of Claude Debussy, with designs again by Bakst. In this second production, also in 1913, Nijinsky intended to show athletic movements expressed lyrically — his aim was to convey the dynamic spirit of the day. The setting of the story was a garden party, and the subject was love, revealed through a tennis game. For the first time a choreographer introduced the theme of sport, and dancers — a boy and two girls — in sports clothes. The plasticity of their dance, their simplified angular gestures and movements, unbending knees and sharply bent elbows had an affinity with Cubism, which had by now established itself in the visual arts. The stage design and decor accentuated the choreographer's concept; one saw a lawn, framed by bright green trees and flowerbeds that were somewhat geometrical. In the background were yellow rectangles, representing buildings.

L'Apres-midi d'un Faune, Jeux and also the later (1917) production of the ballet Les Femmes de Bonne Humeur, in the first version of which Bakst introduced Constructivist elements, displayed his attempts to conform to the latest trends in art. However, he was unable to renege on his own creative credo. While accepting Cubism in easel-painting, he believed it to be unacceptable for the musical theatre, and he completely repudiated Constructivism on the stage. On the other hand, Diaghilev, who gravitated to everything fashionable and acutely contemporary, eagerly turned to this newest trend in western art. Characterizing the evolution of the Ballets Russes, Anatoly Lunacharsky noted: 'From Bakst, Benois and Fedorovsky via Goncharova to Picasso and Braque.

As Diaghilev grew increasingly dissatisfied with Bakst's creative tendencies, he twice asked avant-garde artists to do productions that he had originally commissioned from Bakst. Andre Derain designed the ballet La Boutique Fantasque in 1919 and Leopold Survage designed the opera Mavra in 1922. In the early 1920s Bakst and Diaghilev broke off relations. The last designs Bakst produced for Diaghilev were for The Sleeping Beauty in 1921.

Due to his amazingly multi-faceted gift for stage design, Bakst was able to create, in addition to the colourful, dynamic decor for productions on Oriental and Greek themes, highly lyrical settings for Romantic ballets. Thus, billed at the Grand Opera in Paris in 1910, at the same time as Scheherazade, was the ballet Le Carnaval. His costumes for this piece were refined, elegant and delicately coloured in pastel tints, expressing a light, bubbling humour which magnificently corresponded to the character of the music and the choreography. In his comments on the ballet Michel Fokine noted: 'Bakst transports the spectator into the age of Schumann, a time of German Romanticism, with its conventionally studied grace and height¬ened sensuality, an age of melancholic daydreaming.'30 Again, his inspired Romantic decor for the ballet Le Spectre de la Rose, to the music of Carl Maria von Weber, which was produced in 1911, cannot truly be separated from the choreography and the music. The artist designed the set, a girl's bedroom, in the German Biedermeier style of the 1830s and 1840s. The young man's costume, a leotard dappled with pieces of fabric cut to resemble rose petals of different reds and pinks, evokes immediate associations with the graceful, tender blossom.

For Bakst the peak of his Romantic period was his decor for Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty, which Diaghilev presented at the Alhambra Theatre in London in 1921, under the titleThe Sleeping Princess. This time Bakst was faced with a particularly heavy responsibility. This popular ballet, which had first been produced by Marius Petipa, and which already had a thirty-year history on the Russian stage, had its own established traditions. Nonetheless, Bakst did not copy either the first Maryinsky Theatre production of 1890 — which had required a team of five designers — or the second, 1914, production, when that master of theatrical painting, Konstantin Korovin, had done the designs. Bakst chose his own approach, which brimmed over with innovation.

The settings for the Prologue, based on a blend of white, red and gold, were solemnly festive. The capacious hall was flanked on either side by slender columns. The colourful backdrop created an illusion of a broad flight of stairs with another hall opening to the left, beyond the landing. Bakst's perfect command of linear and aerial perspective, and his use of the achievements of the eighteenth-century Italian monumentalists enabled him to transform the limited area of the stage into two magnificent halls by trompe I'oeil alone. The sumptuous Baroque elements were in perfect keeping with the resonant intensity of colour that was characteristic of Bakst's Post-Impressionist style.

The scene of the festivities held in honour of Aurora's coming-of-age was a grassy lawn in a park, set against the background of an elegant, sparkling-white double colonnade. Beautifully conspicuous amidst the greens and whites were the crimson splashes of the dancing peasants' costumes and the differently coloured courtiers' dresses. The end of this scene was conceived in a most effective manner, one that was uncommon at the time. After the princess fell asleep, two rows of lilac-bushes gradually hid the now slumbering kingdom, the Lilac Fairy appearing in a gap between the shrubs, lit only by the glow of the rising moon.

In the hunting scene, autumn (in the first production the action took place in summer) engendered a nostalgic sadness, in keeping with the prince's mood. The landscape's brown and grey colour scheme served as a fine foil for the golden-chestnut, olive, light-green and muted-blue splashes of the costumes of the hunters. The somewhat subdued and restrained colour scheme reminded one of a medieval French tapestry.

For a ballet in the early 1920s, when 'chamber theatre' was prevalent in the west, so impressive a production, with six different sets and about 300 costumes, appeared stupendous. Turning again to the tradition of illusory scenic design, Bakst challenged contemporary art with its urge for simplification and stereotype.

Bakst spent the twilight of his life working primarily for the Paris Opera. He not only designed the sets but also wrote the books for some of the pieces he produced. At the same time, he painted portraits, gave lectures on theatrical art and modern-dress fashions and wrote articles and essays.

As a world-famous master, an arbiter of elegance and good taste, Bakst was elected to membership of multitudes of art, theatrical and music societies and associations in France and elsewhere. Exhibitions of his work were mounted in various cities of Europe and America. However, in the hurly-burly of life he felt lonely, and at times was obsessed by deep nostalgia. 'His fame was his tragedy. I well remember my last meeting with him and what he said about having no time to do what he really wanted, Dobuzhinsky wrote about his mood at the time.

A man of brilliant original gifts, Bakst also possessed great charm which appealed to everyone he met. His manner was both natural and simple. To work with Bakst,' Valerian Svetlov said, 'was a real delight; he was a delicate, well-bred man; even when he did not agree with somebody, he used to defend his own opinions but hesitatingly and he was liable to yield the ground as soon as he met with a weighty argument. Alien both to self-esteem and to blind obstinacy, he was a very sincere and simple man. Bakst's creative ceuvre, which is diverse, complex and at times contradictory, largely reflects the specific features of the ideological and artistic life of both Russia and western Europe towards the close of the nineteenth century and throughout the first quarter of the following century. His bold search, his romantic fervour and his perfect grasp of the salient features of contemporary culture, were all geared to one objective: attaining beauty and harmony in art and in life.

Leon Bakst is one of those Russian artists whose creative efforts are held in high esteem throughout the world. Though more than sixty years have passed since his death, time has not diminished the regard in which he is held. To this day exhibitions of his work are mounted and articles and monographs are still devoted to him. It is true that in the literature published in western Europe and America, Bakst is seen almost exclusively as a stage designer who was affiliated with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Though stage designs unquestionably constitute the most valuable part of his legacy, Bakst, as a true World of Art artist, succeeded in many fields. He was an excellent portrait painter, a clever book illustrator and a fine dress designer and interior decorator.

Speaking of the important role played by early twentieth-century Russian stage designers and more specifically of Bakst, Anatoly Lunacharsky wrote, "... in the realm of theatre art, especially set and costume design... such eminent Russian artists as Roerich, Benois, to some extent Yuon and Dobuzhinsky and, above all, Bakst, created a real revolution. True, not everyone accepts the superfluous extravagance and brilliance of the Russian decorative palette, the overly independent, at times even dominant, role of the stage designer. Yet the influence Bakst exerted, which is reflected in many theatrical productions, transcended the limits of the theatre and modified the style of ladies' fashions and interior decoration. The names of Bakst and his fellow artists whose talents were devoted to the service of the theatre shall remain in the history of Europe's artistic culture.

Text by Irina Pruzhan,

Translated from Russian by Arthur Shkarovsky - Raffe