As for Bakst, this work of his constituted a striking but isolated episode in his life as an artist. Man of the theater that he was, his aim was that of utilizing and transforming space in accordance with his vision; here he transformed a surface, in the sense of material and philosophic depth.
THE SPIRAL ROAD
Into this period of researches and visions in Greece falls many an episode that is entirely different but no less significant. Since 1903 Bakst had been using the ballet of the “Dolls’ Fairy” on the imperial stage. It furnished the prototype of those romantic productions, of those entertainments for children which are colorless reflections of Hoffmann’s Coppelius or of Andersen’s tales and in which one sees toys awakened to an artificial and mechanical life by a magic wand—entertainments, furthermore, which have become vapid by their being produced on innumerable German stages. Also, he rendered homage thereby to that “old Petrograd” that was dear to the members of “Mir Iskousstva”.
The prologue, which represents the busy coming and going in a doll shop in the capital city of 1830, is acted by a big crowd of people—shop=attendants, customers of every sort, small merchants and grand ladies, lackeys and grenadiers, mailmen and policemen produced on the stage as the naive action unfolds. All these masques and costumes are absolutely authentic, but they seem fragile and delicate like a dream. The fact is that the documents from which the dossier of the decorator was constructed were anything but commonplace. Bakst did not seek his information from the more direct sources supplied by the engravings of that time: he went to the show cases of porcelain ware.
Too little are the charming products of Russian porcelain makers—the Gardners and the Popovs—known. To be sure, they often merely misrepresent, in their style, the models from Saxony or Sèvres, but they do it with a naive flash of pure color that appeals to rustic artisans. But side by side with such imitations these obscure Russian artists modeled an entire little world of their own in tender clay—cossacks in uniform, drunken serfs, nude women, coiffed “en cabriolet” and burying their chilly hands in fur muffs. Whatever tastefully conventional there was in these figures, Bakst transposed into the language of the theater. Ever since that time this form of ballad (or “boutade”, as it was called
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SUBMARINE MONSTERS (“SADKO” OPERA). (GOUACHE)