Sources available online now cover all published volumes—including the biblical (through 332 BCE) and early modern to contemporary periods (1500–2005). Sign up here for free access and updates.
Nijinsky as the Faun
Léon Bakst
1912
Image
Please login or register for free access to Posen Library
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 plot of Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot described the love of a Jewish musician and composer for the Christian daughter of a Russian antisemite as epitomizing the promise of America…
Grace Mendes Seixas Nathan was born in Connecticut in 1752 to a patriotic, literary Jewish family. In 1780, she married the British merchant Simon Nathan, a supporter of the American Revolution who…