Word: bakst
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...until comparatively recent times did such painters as the late Léon Bakst and goat-bearded, mystic Nicolas Constantinovich Roerich attempt to start a really Russian school of painting, based on Russia's Byzantine iconographers. There were few examples of this at the Hammer Galleries. The sort of pictures that the Tsars and their friends liked were skillful paraphrases of British and French 19th Century portraits, sentimental landscapes, super-magazine illustrations. On view were five seascapes by Ivan Aivazovsky, a marine painter so beloved by Grand Dukes that they used to buy his pictures by the square inch...
Last week Nijinsky was in a Swiss insane asylum, Ida Rubinstein was aging in Paris, Léon Bakst was dead, but Michel Fokine was in Manhattan watching another Scheherazade which he had produced on ten days notice. Fokine's Scheherazade was the indoor sensation of Paris in 1910 and the outdoor sensation of New York in 1934. Jammed to capacity, Lewisohn Stadium seated 15,000, gave standing room to 2,000. Police reserves were called to handle a crowd of 10,000 who jostled outside the gates, were unable to get in. Quick to seize the advantages...
...assembling Russian painters, exhibiting their work expensively in St. Petersburg and Paris. He took the Russian Opera and Chaliapin to Paris before he took the Ballet. But the dancers established his reputation with the world. He had Fokine create ballets that had true dramatic context. He used settings by Bakst, Derain, later Picasso. He commissioned composers like Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel to write him music. Expense was no item to Sergei Diaghilev. The Russian Ballet was the rage of Europe. Men like Baron Dmitri Gunsburg, Sir Basil Zaharoff and Aga Khan were proud to support it. Diaghilev is the villain...
...Russian Ballet which Serge Diaghilev brought out of St. Petersburg into Europe. He built up its reputation to top-notch not only because he had dancers like Karsavina and Nijinsky and a choreographer like Fokine but also because he had the imagination to commission artists like Bakst, Matisse and Picasso to do his settings, composers like Ravel, Stravinsky and Milhaud to write his music. Diaghilev fathered the Monte Carlo Company. He loved the Riviera, often took his dancers there to rehearse. When he died in 1929 a few stayed on because Charlotte, the hereditary Princess of Monaco, was interested...
...that to a lonely flat in Cleveland, Ohio. So it seemed to Nikolai Semenoff. Born in Russia some 50 years ago. he had entered the Imperial Ballet School at 8. In the Imperial Ballet, and in the triumphally trouping Sergei Diaghilev Ballet Russe-with its décors by Bakst, Picasso, Derain; its music by Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky; its surging choreography-Dancer Semenoff had taken part, close friend and assistant of Director Michel Fokine. When the Revolution changed things, Semenoff escaped through Poland, settled like many other emigrés in Paris. He went...