Leon Bakst: In Praise of Excess

Figure 1.

Messenger, costume sketch for Euripides' tragedy Hippolyte.
Watercolor, gouache, crayon and silver on paper, 29 x 21 cm.
Location: Gallery of Paintings. Erevan, Armenia
Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

Figure 2.

The nymph Echo, costume sketch for Nicolai Cherepnin's ballet Narcissus, 1911.
Watercolor, gouache, crayon and gold on paper, 39.5 x 26. cm.
Location: Private collection
Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

Figure 3.

Iskander, costume sketch for Paul Dukas's ballet The Peri, 1911.
Watercolor, gouache, and crayon on paper.
Location: Private collection
Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

Impatient with academic formalism, Serge Diaghilev, a charismatic, furiously energetic former law student, founded the World of Art movement inSt. Petersburg in October 1898. Like Aubrey Beardsley's The Yellow Book in England, the group's journal, World of Art, aimed to discuss and support painting, music, literature and applied arts, while promoting the philosophy "art for art's sake." They rejected the standard belief that arts such as furniture making or book and stage design were aesthetically inferior to "high" art.

They held no prejudices against any art form and were willing to experiment and take chances in their efforts to bring twentieth-century Russian art to the world.

Figure 4.

Faun, costume sketch for Claude Debussy's ballet L'après-midi d'un Faune, 1912.
Watercolor and gold, paper on cardboard, 39.9 x 27.2 cm.
Location: Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.A.
Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

Among those Diaghilev invited to join the World of Art were Leon Bakst (born Lev Samoilovich Rosenberg in 1866 in Grodno, Belarus), along with Bakst's good friend Alexander Benois. Bakst was an outsider in many ways. While most of the group had been upper-class schoolboys, he was a Jew who lacked an exclusive education. Bakst had studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, where he had already shown a tendency to push against the limitations of artistic convention. The academy announced a competition asking students to depict the Madonna weeping over Christ's body. Bakst rejected the idealization and sentimentality of his contemporaries in favor of a naturalistic style. On a large canvas he depicted biblical characters as peasant Jews and set them against the backdrop of a ghetto synagogue. The Virgin was portrayed as a ragged, disheveled woman. Fearing a scandal, his friends warned him not to submit the painting, but Bakst did so and was promptly disbarred. His formal education in the arts ended after eighteen months.

Little is known about Bakst during the years immediately following his dismissal from the academy and before he joined the World of Art. He was fiercely ambitious, yet worked mostly illustrating religious publications, painting murals in wealthy homes and doing decorations for elaborate balls. Believing that an artist's first canvas is himself, he dressed impeccably in a stylishly cut suit, with elegant hat, cane, spats and a colorful, elaborately arranged silk handkerchief in his top pocket. He had flamboyant features: brisk blue eyes, a prominent nose and curly red hair. According to Benois, Bakst's membership in the World of Art saved him from compromising his talents as a society painter but did nothing to curb his ostentatious appearance.

Figure 5.

Cleopatra, costume sketch for Ida Rubinstein's ballet Cleopatra, 1909.
Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

In addition to publishing an influential art journal, the World of Art held exhibitions devoted to painting, embroidery, pottery and industrial design. At its first official exhibition in 1899, Bakst's and Benois's work was shown alongside that of the most important Russian and Finnish painters of the day: Vrubel, Serov, Levitan, Korovin and Nesterov. Eventually the group would help introduce such major French artists as Monet, Degas, Gaugin and Van Gogh, but it first provided an international forum for...