Ballets Russes, The Art of Costume (review)

Established in 1967, and opened in 1982, the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) made the celebration of modernism one of its central aims. It set out to do this by developing a collection of objects that best exemplified key episodes in the history of modernism. It could be said that twentieth-century artistic modernism became established in the minds of the Australian public with the performances of the Ballets Russes across the continent. Since 1973 the NGA has acquired items from Ballets Russes productions. Today it holds one of the world's richest collections of this material. This is on display, much of it for the first time, in the Gallery's exhibition for the (Australian) summer of 2010–11. The exhibition is presented to mark the centenary of the first Paris seasons of the Ballets Russes.

The sensation that the company caused at its early Paris appearances from 1909 is celebrated as being among the defining moments in early twentieth-century modernism. For the next three decades, Ballets Russes productions gripped audiences worldwide. Canberra's exhibition of 140 costumes captures these legendary explosive productions. Costumes and accessories, with paintings, drawings, photographs, and film from 34 productions display the creativity and drama of these performances. These exhibits capture the energy, collaboration and experimentation that marked the artistic world l'entre deux guerres and which the Ballets Russes represented so well.

This is an exhibition of many textures, much like the bricolage that made up Ballets Russes productions. Springing from the Russian Mir iskusstva (World of Art) movement, artists like Benois, Bakst, and Roerich drew on their Russian heritage to design sets and costumes in collaborations with composers like Stravinsky and Debussy, choreographers Fokine, Petipa and Nijinska, dancers like Pavlova, and Tamara Karsavina, and particularly athletic male performers like Nijinsky and Mikhail Mordkin. Benois, Bakst, and Roerich's evocation of Russian folk traditions seeded the blooms that flowered as "le style russe." Their interest in Russian historicism seduced Western artists and audiences alike who found Russian "style" exotic and provocative. Searching for the "New", the West found the direct "primitivism" of central-Asian folk expression intoxicating. Leading costumiers like Paquin, Germaine Bongard, and "Coco" Chanel worked with composers like Satie, Poulenc, and Prokofiev, choreographers like Massine and Balanchine, and artists like Braques, Gris and, Derain whose designs for ballet productions commissioned by Mir iskusstva impresario Sergei Diaghilev were distinguished by unparalleled, often outrageous modernity.

Diaghilev's untimely death in 1929 could not dampen the fertile spirit of artistic collaboration that he engendered over twenty years. Several new companies were formed to continue and develop his legacy, the most important being Les Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, formed in Monaco in 1932 by the Russian entrepreneur Colonel Wassily de Basil. De Basil's company toured in Australia three times during the 1930s, enthralling audiences with their productions.

Artists remained loyal to the experimentation that Diaghilev had triggered and to his concept of uniting the arts. Throughout the 1930s, at a time when freedom was becoming increasingly restricted, the Ballets Russes productions expressed freedom. NGA Curator Robert Bell casts the emerging Russian and European avant-garde who worked together behind these productions as artistic exiles: modern spirits who brought new, powerful energy to the stage, heroically defying the turbulent events that were unfolding around them in the wider socio-political arena.

Costumes once worn by dancers who whirled before delighted audiences are now seen on static mannequins. Joy in artistic collaboration bursts from them. Bristling with energy, they charismatically express the modern "spirit" and the curious blend of restlessness and the search for order that became modern art.

The impact of the Ballets Russes on Australians was immense. Young artists never forgot how they were stimulated by their productions. Former Ballets Russes associates who remained in Australia began their own dance schools and generated modern dance companies across Australia from 1940. Bell's exhibition only hints at this impact, displaying an image by...