Drawing Boards for the Ballet Russes

Nineteenth century Russia was restless, and so was Léon Bakst. The young man belonged to a new generation of creatives, one ready to turn Realism on its head with one flick of a bejewelled, utterly fabulous wrist. Today, his name is “a byword for excitement, for colour and glamour” and a radical new approach to the arts spearheaded by the Ballets Russes. Caught between a country in the midst of full social upheaval and his own religious persecution, he was in the eye of the storm. The stage was more than a creative stomping ground, it was a life-raft.

Bakst was born “Lev Samuilovich Rosenberg” in 1866, and grew up in a bourgeois Jewish family in St. Petersburg. He fell in love with the theatre from an early age, as his parents would often take him to shows — but back then, there was no real formation for becoming a stage designer. He enrolled at art school, but didn’t fit in with the crowd. “He showed no particular leaning to any of the essential core subjects,” says author Elisabeth Ingles in Bakst, “He failed to shine in any field, and overstepped the limits of his teachers’ patience when he produced an altogether too realistic representation of a religious subject” for the prejudiced staff: The Lamentation of Christ, only, everyone had typically Jewish features”.