Leon Bakst: Masterpieces in Colour

L©on Samoilovitch Bakst (1866 €“ 1924) was a Russian painter and scene- and costume designer. After graduating from gymnasium, he studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts as a noncredit student, because he had failed the entry, working part-time as a book illustrator, though, he would eventually be admitted into this institution in 1883. At the beginning of the 1890s he exhibited his works with the Society of Watercolourists. From 1893 to 1897 he lived in Paris, where he studied at the Acad©mie Julian while still visiting Saint Petersburg often. After the mid-1890s he became a member of the circle of writers and artists formed by Sergei Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois, which later became the Mir Iskusstva art movement. As a member of the Sergei Diaghilev circle and the Ballets Russes, he designed exotic, richly coloured sets and costumes and revolutionized both theatrical design and contemporary fashion with his sensual and exotic visions. He first collaborated with Diaghilev in St Petersburg on the magazine World of Art, which he co-founded in 1899. His career as a designer began in 1900 with Petipa's Le CÅ“ur de la Marquise, for the Hermitage Theatre in St Petersburg. In 1909 he went with Diaghilev to Paris, designing Fokine's Cl©optre, the first of a series of gorgeous Bakst creations for the Ballets Russes. Subsequent seasons brought Carnaval and Scheherazade (1910), Spectre de la rose and Narcisse (1911), Le Dieu bleu, Thamar, L'Apr¨s-midi d'un faune, and Daphnis et Chlo© (1912), Jeux (1913), Les Femmes de bonne humeur (1917), and Diaghilev's London staging of The Sleeping Princess (1921), for which Bakst designed elaborate and extravagantly expensive sets and costumes. He also worked with the choreographer and dancer Ida Rubinstein. He designed Pavlova's The Sleeping Beauty (New York, 1916), including real dogs, cats, and birds on stage. Although Bakst used many styles, he is probably best remembered for his wildly coloured Orientalist designs and his tantalizing eroticism, the finest example of which is undoubtedly Scheherazade. In 1922, Bakst broke off his relationship with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. During this year, he visited Baltimore and, specifically Evergreen House - the residence of his friend and patron, art philanthropist Alice Warder Garrett. Having met in Paris in 1914, when Garrett was accompanying her diplomat husband in Europe, Bakst soon depended upon his then new American friend as both a confidante and agent. Alice Garrett became Bakst's representative in the United States upon her return home in 1920, organizing two exhibitions of the artist's work at New York's Knoedler Gallery.