Word: diaghilev
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...countesses at bridge and Prime Ministers at lunch-table debates. He became a leader of the Bloomsbury set of avant-garde writers and painters, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forster. At a party at the Sitwells, he met Lydia Lopokova, a ballerina of the Diaghilev Russian ballet. She was blonde and buxom; he was frail and stoop-shouldered, with watery blue eyes. She chucked her career to marry him. His only regret in life, said Keynes shortly before his death of a heart attack, was that he had not drunk more champagne...
Spring, 1917. World War I ground grimly on. All the same, the famed impresario of the Ballet Russe, Sergei Diaghilev, commissioned a young poet, Jean Cocteau, to conceive a new ballet. At the time Cocteau was obsessed by visual images, especially the Harlequins, Pierrots and musical instruments in Picasso's paintings. As Cocteau recalled later, "My dream was to hear the music of Picasso's guitars," and he set about building his ballet around them, hoping to cajole the Spanish painter into designing sets and costumes. Picasso, a friend of Cocteau's, was cajoled...
...Parade rolled down portraying a delightful procession of circus folk. But when 10-ft. figures decked out in wild cubist costumes strolled onstage, oranges started flying into the orchestra. At the ballet's conclusion, Composer Erik Satie was slapped in the face; next day the press cried "Scandal!" Diaghilev dropped Parade...
...Picasso, the taste of theater was seductive. He stayed on with the Ballet Russe for eight years. He married Diaghilev Ballerina Olga Koklova, sketched the troupe as it rehearsed, painted dancers' portraits, and designed theater curtains, scenery and costumes for five more ballets-often appearing in the wings on opening night with paint and brushes to add his final touch...
Flamenco at Toulouse. Among the sketches in the show are several sly caricatures of Diaghilev, a top hat perched on his balding pate, a pince-nez trailing across his crooked countenance. There is a portrait of the ballerina Koklova, previously seen only by Picasso's intimate friends. Some of the most delightful works are sets and costumes designed for Manuel de Falla's The Three-Cornered Hat, a merry Spanish folk tale replete with flamenco dancers. For the Toulouse Festival, the Paris Opéra reproduced the 1919 costumes, including a coquettish gown that the original first ballerina...