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Narcisse
Léon Bakst
1911
Program cover of a 1911 performance of the Ballet Russe at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, showing Léon Bakst’s costume design for Narcisse.
Program cover of a 1911 performance of the Ballet Russe at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, showing Léon Bakst’s costume design for Narcisse.
Credits
AID-931 (1, 144-212), département Bibliothèque-musée de l’opéra, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Published in:The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 7.
The cover of the theater program for the Ballets Russes’ seventh season is illustrated with an image of Vaslav Nijinsky wearing a costume designed by Léon Bakst for the ballet L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune…
Another week had passed. The two men had just gone off together. With something of an annoyed laugh, his mother went to the door and stood fingering the catch of the lock. Finally she lifted it…
The audience at the first formal performance by the Habima theater troupe in 1918. This set of short plays, Neshef bereshit (A Festival of Our Beginning), was performed in the Moscow Art Theatre under…
Léon Bakst was born Leyb Rosenberg in Grodno in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus) into a middle-class Jewish family. He studied painting at the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts but was dismissed when he depicted the mother of Jesus as a Jewish peasant. Meeting Sergei Diaghilev in 1898 while cofounding the Russian art-nouveau World of Art movement (Mir Iskusstva) proved a fortuitous encounter, as Bakst came to design sets and costumes for many of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes performances in Paris. His revolutionary approach to ballet combined Russian folklore, an exuberant and often gaudy display of color, and geometric patterns that simultaneously hid and accentuated the dancers’ bodies. His style, based on art-nouveau principles, became known as Bakstian orientalism.
The cover of the theater program for the Ballets Russes’ seventh season is illustrated with an image of Vaslav Nijinsky wearing a costume designed by Léon Bakst for the ballet L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune…
Another week had passed. The two men had just gone off together. With something of an annoyed laugh, his mother went to the door and stood fingering the catch of the lock. Finally she lifted it…
The audience at the first formal performance by the Habima theater troupe in 1918. This set of short plays, Neshef bereshit (A Festival of Our Beginning), was performed in the Moscow Art Theatre under…