DOI Heft:
No. 247 (October 1913)
DOI Artikel:Siordet, Gerald C.: Leon Bakst's designs for scenery and costume
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21208#0027
Leon Bakst's Designs for Scenery and Costume
de Sparte, or Signor d’Annunzio’s medievalist
experiments, S. Sebastien and Pisanelle. Bakst is
a real student, a genuine scholar in costume. His
designs are no mere archeological resuscitations
of the wardrobes of the past; neither are they
the summary, impressionistic stock-in-trade of the
quick-change artist. He is, indeed, a kind of
bright, particular chameleon. He will settle into
the strange, distorted glamour of the East, or the
simple graces of archaic Greece, or the fierce, gay
medley of the Middle Ages, and presently will
bring you forth not dresses merely but personages
who move with ease and certainty each in his own
time, and yet retain the stamp of their creator.
This peculiar receptivity of mind, which at the
same time recreates and rearranges, is of all
qualities that most fitted to adapt itself to the
art of the theatre, in which scenery and costume are
most telling only when they make no attempt to
conceal, rather welcome, the presence of conscious
recognised artifice—in fact, when the art that
makes them is considered as itself a plaything. It
is hardly possible to find a single design by Bakst
which is not from this point of view “ amusing.”
Of course some have greater value than others.
The last exhibition of his drawings contained a
number of designs which, admirable as they were
as working indications of costume and colour,
would by themselves have carried little proof of
the exuberant and at the same time fastidious
power of design which, among other qualities, gives
a permanent value to his more finished drawings.
One critic said of him, apropos of his drawings for
Scheherazade and Le Dieu Bleu, that he had “re-
discovered the luscious female line bequeathed by
the early Orientals.” I am not sure that I know
what he meant: historically the remark seems to
mean nothing; yet it is very true that Bakst shows
a passionate enthusiasm for the flesh, for the con.
tours of form, for strange poise and counterpoise of
limb, for furious, abandoned movement, that sets
an Eastern stamp upon his art, and reminds us that
he is of the nation that long ago watched King
David dance before the Lord “with all his might.”
PENCIL DRAWING FOR SCENERY OF “PISANELLE,” ACT I
BY LfiON BAKST
5
de Sparte, or Signor d’Annunzio’s medievalist
experiments, S. Sebastien and Pisanelle. Bakst is
a real student, a genuine scholar in costume. His
designs are no mere archeological resuscitations
of the wardrobes of the past; neither are they
the summary, impressionistic stock-in-trade of the
quick-change artist. He is, indeed, a kind of
bright, particular chameleon. He will settle into
the strange, distorted glamour of the East, or the
simple graces of archaic Greece, or the fierce, gay
medley of the Middle Ages, and presently will
bring you forth not dresses merely but personages
who move with ease and certainty each in his own
time, and yet retain the stamp of their creator.
This peculiar receptivity of mind, which at the
same time recreates and rearranges, is of all
qualities that most fitted to adapt itself to the
art of the theatre, in which scenery and costume are
most telling only when they make no attempt to
conceal, rather welcome, the presence of conscious
recognised artifice—in fact, when the art that
makes them is considered as itself a plaything. It
is hardly possible to find a single design by Bakst
which is not from this point of view “ amusing.”
Of course some have greater value than others.
The last exhibition of his drawings contained a
number of designs which, admirable as they were
as working indications of costume and colour,
would by themselves have carried little proof of
the exuberant and at the same time fastidious
power of design which, among other qualities, gives
a permanent value to his more finished drawings.
One critic said of him, apropos of his drawings for
Scheherazade and Le Dieu Bleu, that he had “re-
discovered the luscious female line bequeathed by
the early Orientals.” I am not sure that I know
what he meant: historically the remark seems to
mean nothing; yet it is very true that Bakst shows
a passionate enthusiasm for the flesh, for the con.
tours of form, for strange poise and counterpoise of
limb, for furious, abandoned movement, that sets
an Eastern stamp upon his art, and reminds us that
he is of the nation that long ago watched King
David dance before the Lord “with all his might.”
PENCIL DRAWING FOR SCENERY OF “PISANELLE,” ACT I
BY LfiON BAKST
5