Sergei Diaghilev – { feuilleton }

The art of Nikolai Petrovich Theophilaktoff, 1878–1941

I’m taking the biographical details about this Russian artist from a Christie’s listing, accuracy being of particular importance to auction houses. The trouble with searching for information about Nikolai Theophilaktoff is that he’s one of those Russians whose name isn’t common enough to exist in a settled non-Russian form, so you may find his drawings credited to “Nikolai Feofilaktov” or even “Nikolai Theophylactus”. Whatever the spelling of his surname, Theophilaktoff is remembered today for illustrations with a distinct Beardsley influence, which is how he came to my attention. Aubrey Beardsley only had a few years for his art to impress itself on the world but he was known in Russia during his lifetime; Sergei Diaghilev was especially enthusiastic, using his position as editor of arts journal Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) to promote Beardsley’s work after the artist’s death. A later Russian arts journal, Libra, maintained the enthusiasm, devoting an entire issue to Beardsley in 1905. It was reading about Libra that led me to Nikolai Theophilaktoff, an artist who was sufficiently beguiled by Beardsley’s drawings to embark on his own variations on the Beardsley style.

Theophilaktoff’s cover art for the Beardsley issue of Libra, November, 1905.

You can usually divide Beardsley’s followers into two groups: those who pick up on the striking contrasts that Beardsley created using areas of solid black against the white of the paper—Harry Clarke, Will Bradley and John Austen are good examples of this type. A second class would be those who favour the delicate, filigree style of Beardsley’s illustrations for The Rape of the Lock—Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt) and Nikolai Theophilaktoff are in this category. (Harry Clarke was also an expert filigree-ist but Clarke is really in a class of his own.) If you accept this artistic division it’s notable that the weaker artists are in the latter class. It’s easier to disguise deficiencies of figure drawing, say, with abundant stippling and decoration than it is when using nothing more than fine lines and masses of black ink. Theophilaktoff’s accomplishments are very uneven but they’re also rare examples of Beardsley’s style of Decadent art in a country that would soon have no time for such a thing at all.

Most of the pictures here are from a book, 66 Dessins (1909), which collected many of the Theophilaktoff drawings published in Libra. The pornographic drawing at the very end is a swipe from an auction listing. Also near the end are drawings for Wings (1906), a novel by Mikhail Kuzmin which is one of the first literary works to openly deal with same-sex relationships. As for Libra, I thought copies of the magazine might be impossible to find but the trusty Internet Archive has what seems to be a complete run here. Mir Iskusstva, which seems rather staid by comparison, may also be found at the Internet Archive in a series of bound volumes.

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René Bull’s Russian Ballet

L’Oiseau de feu.

I’m sure I’ve said this before but one reason I spend so much time scouring the Internet Archive is in the hope of turning up gems like this recent arrival. The Russian Ballet was a study by Alfred Edwin Johnson of the Ballets Russes, written for an English readership and published in 1913 shortly after Diaghilev’s company had staged their historic performance of Le Sacre du printemps in Paris. Johnson discusses this event, which he attended, but he gives equal space to examinations of the company’s other ballets, from earlier avant-garde pieces like L’après-midi d’un faune to that hardy perennial, Swan Lake. In place of production sketches or photographs we have René Bull’s many illustrations, in colour plates and black-and-white drawings, with the chapters being announced by a title in a graphic style that matches the theme of each ballet. I’d only seen a few of these before on a Flickr page so it’s a treat to see the whole book at last.

Schéhérazade.

Johnson’s discussion has a tendency to falter when faced with the difficulty of describing a wordless artistic medium. The problem is compounded by the radical nature of many of the ballets, so that Bull’s illustrations become an essential component of the book, giving a flavour of the costumes and dances while the author attempts to relate the emotional qualities of the performances. Bull’s work here isn’t as elaborate is in his illustrated Rubáiyát but then the drawings are serving a documentary purpose.

Schéhérazade.

Narcisse.

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L’après-midi d’un faune

Listening recently to a collection of Debussy’s music it occurred to me that I knew rather a lot about the creation and performance of the Nijinsky ballet based on Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune but couldn’t recall having seen a performance of the original dance. Not in full, anyway, although “full” here only means the entire 12 minutes, Debussy’s short piece being the only completed part of what would have been a much longer composition.

This filmed version of the ballet dates from 1980, and forms part of a tribute to Nijinsky staged by Rudolf Nureyev and Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, the other works being Petrouchka and Le Spectre de la Rose. L’après-midi d’un faune is the only one of the three ballets that was choreographed as well as danced by Nijinsky, and was famously radical at the time, with the dancers adopting the stylised postures of figures from the ceramics of Ancient Greece. The erotic tone of the piece also generated controversy.

The Nureyev/Joffrey film restages the original Ballets Russes performance from 1912, using the costumes and decor designed by Léon Bakst. The choreography departs so much from classical ballet it might serve as a different kind of prelude, to the even more radical and controversial dances that Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes staged the following year. The original performance of The Rite of Spring was subsequently resurrected by the Joffrey Ballet after a lengthy period of historical research by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer. A 1989 BBC documentary about the process of research and reconstruction, The Search for Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, is essential viewing for anyone interested in Diaghilev’s company.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• George Barbier’s Nijinsky
• The Rite of Spring reconstructed
• Vaslav Nijinsky by Paul Iribe
• Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes
• Pamela Colman Smith’s Russian Ballet
• Images of Nijinsky

The Rite of Spring and The Red Shoes

The Red Shoes: Moira Shearer and Léonide Massine.

Emeric is often too easily accused of basing the principal male character of The Red Shoes on Serge Diaghilev, to which he replies: “There is something of Diaghilev, something of Alex Korda, something of Michael, and quite a little bit of me.”

Michael Powell, A Life in Movies (1986)

Despite Emeric Pressburger’s qualificatory comments, there’s a lot more of the Ballets Russes in Powell and Pressburger’s film of The Red Shoes (1948) than first meets the eye. Or so I discovered, since I’d known about the film via my ballet-obsessed mother for years before I’d even heard of Diaghilev or Stravinsky. The most obvious connection is the presence of Léonide Massine who took the leading male roles in Diaghilev’s company following the departure of Nijinsky. He also choreographed Parade, the ballet which featured an Erik Satie score and designs by Picasso. The fraught relationship between Diaghilev and Nijinsky forms the heart of The Red Shoes: Anton Walbrook’s impresario, Boris Lermontov, is the Diaghilev figure while the brilliant dancer who obsesses him, and for whom he creates the ballet of The Red Shoes, is Moira Shearer as Victoria Page. That the dancer happens to be a woman is a detail which makes the film “secretly gay”, as Tony Rayns once put it. Diaghilev and Nijinsky were lovers, and fell out when Nijinsky married; in The Red Shoes Lermontov demands that Vicky choose between a life of art or a life of marriage to composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring). She chooses love but ends up drawn back to art, with tragic consequences that mirror the Hans Christian Andersen story. That story, of course, ends with a young woman dancing herself to death after donning the fatal shoes, a dénouement that’s unavoidably reminiscent of The Rite of Spring.

Anton Walbrook as Lermontov.

Lermontov: Why do you want to dance?

Vicky: Why do you want to live?

Other parallels may be found if you look for them, notably the figure of Julian Craster who comes to Lermontov as a young and unknown composer just as Stravinsky did with Diaghilev. Craster’s music isn’t as radical as Stravinsky but The Red Shoes was already giving the audience of 1948 enough unapologetic Art with a capital “A” without dosing them with twelve-tone serialism. The film aims for the same combination of the arts as that achieved by Diaghilev, especially in the long and increasingly fantastic ballet sequence. This was another of Powell’s shots at what he called “a composed film” in which dramaturgy and music work to create something unique. The Red Shoes is a film that’s deadly serious about the importance of art, a rare thing in a medium which is so often at the mercy of Philistines. In the past I’ve tended to favour other Powell and Pressburger films, probably because I’ve taken The Red Shoes for granted for so long. But the more I watch The Red Shoes the more it seems their greatest film, even without this wonderful train of associations. The recent restoration is out now on Blu-ray, and it looks astonishing for a film that’s over sixty years old.

Seeing as this week has been all about The Rite of Spring, here’s a few more centenary links:

• Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Visualized in a Computer Animation for its 100th Anniversary
• George Benjamin on How Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring has shaped 100 years of music
• Strange Flowers visits the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Rite of Spring, 2001
• The Rite of Spring, 1970
• The Rite of Spring reconstructed

The Rite of Spring reconstructed

This week sees the centenary of the first performance by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Everyone is familiar with the details of that momentous occasion, and Stravinsky’s score is probably performed more frequently today than any of his other works. Less familiar is the nature of the ballet which caused so much outrage. A combination of the hectic schedule of the Ballets Russes and the loss of choreographer Nijinsky a few months later meant that the choreography was never properly transcribed. This caused problems for subsequent revivals, and the only reason we have an idea of the radical nature of the ballet is thanks to a decade of research by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, a pair of cultural archaeologists who’ve specialised in reviving ballets. Hodson and Archer scoured archives looking for details of Nicholas Roerich’s costumes, and also traced surviving members of the 1913 company in order to verify their choreographic researches.

The performance here is a recording of the Joffrey Ballet’s staging of Hodson and Archer’s reconstruction from the late 1980s. I first saw this in 1989 and was aghast at how strange and savage the dancing is compared to classical ballet. Hodson and Archer have since amended some of the performance details but there’s more than enough in this staging to convey why the ballet was so threatening and disturbing to the audience in 1913. Even today, after decades of modern dance it looks surprisingly crude with its dancers stamping their way across the stage. I was also thrilled to see the restoration of Nicholas Roerich’s costumes and decor. In addition to giving the ballet its distinctive look, Roerich contributed the pagan dramaturgy, something that tends to be overlooked when so many big names are competing for attention. (There’s more about Roerich and his involvement with the Rite here.) I always enjoy the way Roerich provides a link between this favourite ballet and the writings of HP Lovecraft. I’ve no idea what Lovecraft would have made of The Rite of Spring but he had a lot of time for Roerich’s paintings, and refers to them in At the Mountains of Madness.

The recording linked here is annoyingly split into three parts (and the soundtrack is hissy mono) but if you’ve any interest in the original ballet it really needs to be seen.

• The Rite of Spring: part one | part two | part three

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vaslav Nijinsky by Paul Iribe
• Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes
• Pamela Colman Smith’s Russian Ballet
• Le Sacre du Printemps
• Images of Nijinsky