Quick Facts
Original name:
Lev Samoylovich Rosenberg
Born:
April 27 [May 10, New Style], 1866, Grodno, Russia [now Hrodna, Belarus]
Died:
December 27, 1924, Paris, France (aged 58)

Léon Bakst (born April 27 [May 10, New Style], 1866, Grodno, Russia [now Hrodna, Belarus]—died December 27, 1924, Paris, France) was a Jewish Russian artist who revolutionized theatrical design both in scenery and in costume. His designs for the Ballets Russes, especially during its heyday (1909–14), were opulent, innovative, and extraordinary, and his influence on fashion and interior design was widespread.

The origins of Bakst’s adopted last name are unclear. Bakst was a teenager when an era of virulent anti-Semitism began in Russia. Despite this, he was proud of his heritage throughout his life (though he was forced to “convert” in order to marry a Christian woman and from 1903 to 1910 he was nominally a Lutheran). He was interested in the visual arts from an early age, though his first attempt (at about age 16) to gain entrance to the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg failed. After a year of further study, he was accepted in 1883, and while there he formed a lasting friendship with an older student, the painter Valentin Serov. In 1887, when Bakst submitted for a school competition a Pietà showing the familiar biblical figures—Mary, with her red-rimmed eyes, and the disciples—as impoverished Jews, the school authorities were scandalized and dismissed him.

Little is known of Bakst’s activities in the next few years. He produced a variety of illustrations for magazines and children’s books, and in 1890 he was introduced to Alexandre Benois and his circle, a group known informally as the “Nevsky Pickwickians.” As a member of this group, Bakst met Serge Diaghilev and others who would influence his art and life. During the early 1890s Bakst traveled in Europe, and between 1893 and 1896 he lived in Paris and studied at the Académie Julian and with Jean-Léon Gérôme. After completing his studies in Paris and further travel, he returned to Russia. He was part of a group of artists who formed the Mir Iskusstva (“World of Art”) movement, and with Diaghilev and Benois he founded the journal of the same name (1898–1904). Members of the movement attempted—by means of articles, lectures, and exhibitions—to educate the Russian public about trends, movements, and issues in the arts. Paid work on the magazine freed Bakst from the patronage system and allowed him to focus on graphic arts and painting.

Under the influence of Savva Mamontov, an artist, industrialist, and patron of the arts, Bakst and others of the Mir Iskusstva group became interested in theatrical production. Bakst began to design scenery in the early1900s, first at the Hermitage Theatre. While involved in theatrical productions, he also showed his work in an enormous traveling exhibition of Russian art organized in 1906 by Diaghilev. In 1909 Bakst went to Paris, where he began designing stage sets and costumes for Diaghilev’s newly formed ballet company.

The first production of the company that came to be called the Ballets Russes was a mixed program with excerpts from Russian operas and ballets, featuring Russian music and dancers. For this program, Bakst designed the spectacular decor and costumes for Michel Fokine’s ballet Cléopâtre (1909; originally named Une Nuit d’Égypte). It was the acknowledged highlight of the evening. This production—with its innovations in dress and emphasis on the Oriental, the violent, and the sensual—provided the template for future Ballets Russes extravaganzas, and Bakst therewith became the company’s main set designer. He followed up this success with another, providing stage and set designs for the wildly popular Le Carnaval and the ballet Schéhèrazade (both 1910). The latter is generally considered one of the definitive works of the Ballets Russes. Its opulence of colour and texture in stage set and costumes provided powerful support to its sensational story. Bakst further designed decor and costumes for Le Spectre de la rose and Narcisse (both 1911) and for L’Après-midi d’un faune and Daphnis et Chloé (both 1912), and he designed costumes only for Les Papillons (1912) and La Legende de Joseph (1914). Throughout this period, he worked with other companies and in other media as well.

Through these and other works, Bakst achieved international fame. His bold designs and sumptuous colours combined with minutely refined details clearly influenced the fabrics and fashions of the day. Still, after 1912 his influence on and participation in the Ballets Russes began to wane as Diaghilev sought out new artists. Bakst, however, was not lacking for work, having befriended such people as the dancers Anna Pavlova and Ida Rubinstein, both of whom had formed their own companies, and he continued to design sets and costumes for theatre as a freelancer. His penultimate design for the Ballets Russes was the 1917 production of The Good-Humoured Ladies (Les Femmes de bonne humeur). Though Bakst was commissioned to design a future production, Diaghilev rejected his drawings, and the two men, who had quarreled often and reconciled, effectively ended their friendship in 1919. Yet Bakst was engaged in 1921 to design Diaghilev’s London production of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty (also called The Sleeping Princess). It proved to be his last major work. He visited the United States in 1922–23, where, among other projects, he designed a private theatre (restored 1990) for Evergreen House (now the Evergreen Museum and Library), the Baltimore home of railroad magnate and diplomat John Work Garrett and his wife, Alice.

Kathleen Kuiper
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Art Nouveau

artistic style
Also known as: Modernismo, Modernista, Sezessionstil, Stile Floreale, Stile Liberty
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Art Nouveau, style of art that flourished between about 1890 and 1910 throughout Europe and the United States. Art Nouveau is characterized by its use of a long, sinuous, organic line and was employed most often in architecture, interior design, jewelry and glass design, posters, and illustration. It was a deliberate attempt to create a new style, free of the imitative historicism that dominated much of 19th-century art and design. About this time the term Art Nouveau was coined, in Belgium by the periodical L’Art Moderne to describe the work of the artist group Les Vingt and in Paris by S. Bing (byname of Siegfried Bing), who named his gallery L’Art Nouveau. The style was called Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, Stile Floreale (or Stile Liberty) in Italy, and Modernismo (or Modernista) in Spain.

In England the style’s immediate precursors were the Aestheticism of the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, who depended heavily on the expressive quality of organic line, and the Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris, who established the importance of a vital style in the applied arts. On the European continent, Art Nouveau was influenced by experiments with expressive line by the painters Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The movement was also partly inspired by a vogue for the linear patterns of Japanese prints (ukiyo-e).

The distinguishing characteristic of Art Nouveau is its undulating asymmetrical line, often taking the form of flower stalks and buds, vine tendrils, insect wings, and other delicate and sinuous natural objects; the line may be elegant and graceful or infused with a powerfully rhythmic and whiplike force. In the graphic arts the line subordinates all other pictorial elements—form, texture, space, and color—to its own decorative effect. In architecture and the other plastic arts, the whole of the three-dimensional form becomes engulfed in the organic, linear rhythm, creating a fusion between structure and ornament. Architecture particularly shows this synthesis of ornament and structure; a liberal combination of materials—ironwork, glass, ceramic, and brickwork—was employed, for example, in the creation of unified interiors in which columns and beams became thick vines with spreading tendrils and windows became both openings for light and air and membranous outgrowths of the organic whole. This approach was directly opposed to the traditional architectural values of reason and clarity of structure.

Color pastels, colored chalk, colorful chalk. Hompepage blog 2009, arts and entertainment, history and society
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There were a great number of artists and designers who worked in the Art Nouveau style. Some of the more prominent were the Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who specialized in a predominantly geometric line and particularly influenced the Austrian Sezessionstil; the Belgian architects Henry van de Velde and Victor Horta, whose extremely sinuous and delicate structures influenced the French architect Hector Guimard, another important figure; the American glassmaker Louis Comfort Tiffany; the French furniture and ironwork designer Louis Majorelle; the Czechoslovakian graphic designer-artist Alphonse Mucha; the French glass and jewelry designer René Lalique; the American architect Louis Sullivan, who used plantlike Art Nouveau ironwork to decorate his traditionally structured buildings; and the Spanish architect and sculptor Antonio Gaudí, perhaps the most original artist of the movement, who went beyond dependence on line to transform buildings into curving, bulbous, brightly colored, organic constructions.

After 1910 Art Nouveau appeared old-fashioned and limited and was generally abandoned as a distinct decorative style. In the 1960s, however, the style was rehabilitated, in part, by major exhibitions organized at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1959) and at the Musée National d’Art Moderne (1960), as well as by a large-scale retrospective on Beardsley held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 1966. The exhibitions elevated the status of the movement, which had often been viewed by critics as a passing trend, to the level of other major Modern art movements of the late 19th century. Currents of the movement were then revitalized in Pop and Op art. In the popular domain, the flowery organic lines of Art Nouveau were revived as a new psychedelic style in fashion and in the typography used on rock and pop album covers and in commercial advertising.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Alicja Zelazko.
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