with rounded gestures, draped in white, blue or red tunics that looked like a schoolboy’s drawing after a plaster=cast relief of Phideas. They displayed the angular shoulders of the warriors on one of Aegina’s bas=reliefs; the conical helmet with a visor protecting the brow and the nose, as well as the metal shin protectors, tended to simplify the lines of the actor. On the other hand the garments were brightcolored; the purple robe of Creon was resplendent with its ornamentation copied from Ionian pottery. The sixth century dispossessed the fifth, archaic art crowded out the classical canons, the intense colors of many hues
PROJECT OF LANDSCAPE (UPPER SAVOY). DRAWING
obtained preference over the marble whiteness of the statues. People breathed again; they felt themselves freed.
The great age of Pericles, which for three centuries had been exploited by every academy of Europe, which had been vulgarised, debased, enervated by the Alma=Tademas and the Siemiradskis, seemed gloomy, formal, deathly cold. Besides, an art that is perfect and definite, and that has reached its zenith affords no occasion for further research, for further development. It condemns its followers either to imitating it or else to diminishing it. Instinctively Bakst took issue with the academic rules. The fact that he possessed this divination of the right road to take is what placed him several years ahead of his contemporaries.
For he was quite alone in his passion for this Greek antiquity which at every new turn seemed different from every preconceived notion. His friends of the “Mir Iskousstva” were entirely taken up by their craze for rococo curios or for the majesty of imperial architecture; Diaghileff was looking for Russian portraits of the eighteenth century and was preparing the famous exposition of the Tauride Palace; Alexander Benois was living at Versailles, fascinated by the sight of regal splendor. The only one who followed his efforts with solicitude was Serov. So that, when Bakst felt the urgent need of testing his intuitions by direct observations, of knowing positively what he had merely guessed at, he succeeded in persuading the great portraitist to join him on his voyage of exploration into archaic Greece—a journey that was one of the outstanding events of his intellectual life.
Our great master has reserved to himself the task of some day telling in detail the thrilling events of this journey. With that devotion to friendship that is characteristic of him he has kept a minute account of the utterances and impressions of Serov’s manly and delicate mind. It will make a splendid volume some day.
Serov had guided Bakst’s first steps. This Greek expedition was Bakst’s return gift. With the help of these antique realities, which served him as striking arguments, he turned the tormented realist, the sensitive psychologist that Serov was, to a study of syntheticized painting expressing itself in broad and severe forms. And so Serov, pupil of Repine the “wanderer”, portraitist of important Moscow merchants and of great Russian intellectuals, brought back from this voyage a memorable “Abduction of Europa”. His days, however, were counted. And once again Bakst had to continue his solitary way unaided.
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