DANCE: NICOLA GORDON BOWEreviews Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929, Edited by Jane Pritchard, V&A Publishing, 240pp, £35
THIS HANDSOME, sumptuously illustrated and richly informative book, published to accompany a major exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, is a fitting centenary homage to Serge Diaghilev, the Russian genius whose vision and entrepreneurial skills resulted in the creation of the Ballets Russes company, which he masterminded between 1909 and 1929. On his death (in Venice, like his hero Wagner) the unique synthesis of the arts he had inspired, cultivated, directed and meticulously orchestrated as a beneficent despot ceased, even though his (and the company’s) continuing fame and influence have transcended the mortality he so feared.
One of the many fellow Russian colleagues he propelled into a hitherto-undreamed-of international limelight, the brilliantly innovative composer Igor Stravinsky, would describe Diaghilev’s “amazing activity as the inspirer, promoter, and organiser of a long series of artistic events”. This Stravinsky considered characteristic of the “cultured ‘barin’ such as used to exist in Russia (a nature generous, strong, and capricious; with intense will, a rich sense of contrasts, and deep ancestral roots)”. Diaghilev’s “will of iron, tenacity, an almost superhuman resistance and passion to fight and to overcome the most insurmountable obstacles” were tempered by his “intelligence, his culture, his extraordinary artistic flair and his sincere enthusiasm. His enterprises won the hearts of his co-workers. Working with him, they realised, meant working solely for the great cause of art”.
As a 21-year-old law undergraduate in St Petersburg, his cavalry-officer father’s estates in the Urals bankrupt, his homosexuality unresolved, Diaghilev had consulted Leo Tolstoy about his future as he became aware that “the dream and purpose” of his life were “to work in the field of art”. The result was an increasingly ambitious series of lavish cultural undertakings, first in the disintegrating Russian empire and then, when imperial funding ceased, from an exiled base in Paris, London and, later, Monte Carlo.
The impeccably classically-trained ballet company he established in 1910, deliberately for export, included an unprecedented majority of virile, athletic male dancers (including the star soloists Nijinsky, Massine and Lifar) and sleekly gymnastic ballerinas (such as Karsavina, Lopokova and Sokolova), expected to adopt an exciting, challengingly fresh approach to choreography.
A dazzling repertoire of no less than 98 productions ensued (whose first and last performances and world-wide venues are, for the first-time, chronicled here), the results of unimagined collaborations between the most innovative contemporary artists, musical composers, choreographers and dancers, initially from Russia and then Europe. Competitors melted away as, inspired by watching the movements of rehearsing dancers, designers responded to Diaghilev’s pioneering vision of a three-dimensional architectonic theatrical space in which moving, often daringly costumed bodies, sets and music were viewed as vital components in the artistic integrity of a production.
Backed up by stunningly detailed images of costumes that have survived the rigours of performance, alteration, touring and time, this book tells of the Russian artist Nikolai Roerich scouring St Petersburg markets for ethnic Uzbek silk ikat-weave tunics for his "barbaric" Prince Igorand researching ancient Russian folk culture for Stravinsky's shamanic Rite of Spring; of Leon Bakst being lionised by fashionable society "for the vigour and gusto of his exotic costumes and sets" in Scheherazade, Cleopatra, Le Dieu Bleuand The Sleeping Princess; and of Natalia Goncharova, the outstanding Moscow cubo-futurist intellectual, evolving bold new idioms of stage decoration informed by Russian Orthodox ritual in her mimed opera-ballet Le Coq d'Orand rural peasant tradition in Bronislava Nijinska's modernist Les Noces. Picasso's surreal cubist sets and costumes for Cocteau's Parade preceded his jubilant primitivist painting Two Women Running on the Beach, famously enlarged into a huge 10-by-11-metre front cloth by Alexander Shervashidze as a signature postwar image for the company.
The artistic roll-call also includes Matisse, Derain, Braque, Rouault, De Chirico, the Delaunays, the constructivists Gabo and Pevsner, Chanel and the musicians Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Satie, Poulenc and Prokoviev. In what John Bowlt calls “an extraordinarily varied arsenal of styles”, their ethnic diversity and cultural versatility were as remarkable a key to Diaghilev’s success as his unique ability to fuse tradition and modernity, old Russia with European avant-garde.
The unparalleled artistic achievements of such collaborations provide the focus of this collection of eight substantial essays, based on the latest research (particularly relevant for Russian material made available since 1989) by experts in dance, theatre, costume (Sarah Woodcock), music (Howard Goodall) and art (Bowlt). The enigmatic Diaghilev is interestingly analysed by his recent biographer Sjeng Scheijen. Their thoughtful observations, evocatively illustrated, are interspersed with double-page spreads with short texts on related contextual subjects, such as travel, daily class, Diaghilev’s boys, Diaghilev’s theatres, the Ballets’ sponsorship and funding, souvenir programmes, Diaghilev and Chanel, and Diaghilev under the hammer.
Jane Pritchard, who is curator of dance for the museum’s theatre and performance collections, as well as editor of and principal contributor to this publication and co-curator of the exhibition, has compiled a valuable addition to the already extensive literature on Diaghilev and his artistic ventures, backed up by a helpful timeline and selective bibliography. By concentrating on the processes involved in commissioning, creating and communicating key Ballets Russes productions, and the visual material that bears witness to those involved, she presents us with reminders of an elusive pre-Stalinist Russia and opulently bohemian period of creativity that still haunts us.
The VA has unsurpassed holdings of Ballets Russes material, notably the world’s largest collection of Diaghilev dancers’ costumes and front- and backcloths for six of its ballets (augmented after Richard Buckle’s 1954 Edinburgh and London landmark exhibitions and a series of Sotheby’s sales from 1967). In its latest major show, which runs until January 9th, it continues its enlightened policy of preserving, highlighting and resurrecting its incomparable collections by exhibiting and documenting these with suitably lavish, informed attention.
Nicola Gordon Bowe, an associate fellow in the faculty of visual culture at the National College of Art & Design, has lectured on the arts of the Ballets Russes and is completing a biography of the artist Wilhelmina Geddes
