Bakst is better known for his Sheherazade than for any other of his ballets, but he also designed the scenery for Carnaval, Thamar, Jeux, Daphnis et Chloë, Narcisse, l’Après-midi d’un Faune, and Le Spectre de la Rose.
He has further utilized his supreme talent for decoration in staging the dramas in which that Russian mime, Ida Rubinstein, has appeared at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris during recent seasons: Oscar Wilde’s Salome, Verhaeren’s Hélène de Sparte, and d’Annunzio’s Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien and La Pisanelle, ou la Mort parfumée.
It was in this last play, produced in Paris in the spring of 1913 for ten special performances, that Bakst expressed himself perhaps more personally than he had hitherto been able to do. Unlimited means were placed at his disposal. He had all the money he wanted and an exactitude in color, in scene and costume, was aimed at which required the dyeing and redyeing of many stuffs, and the searching through countless shops for others.
The scene in the port, with the ship of the blood-red sails painted against a sky of blood-red clouds, in front of which figures garbed in scarlet, vermillion, maroon, rose, mulberry, carnation, and other shades of this brilliant color carried on the drama, will not soon be forgotten by those who saw it. In the final scene Bakst combined black, white, green, orange, rose, and magenta in the most extraordinary manner. In this play, too, he utilized a series of curtains of different colors, according to the scene, which hung half the depth of the stage on either side. And back of the proscenium arch, also on either side, was builded a column of gold, each column divided into numberless small pillars, like the mass which supports the ribs of a vaulted roof of a great Gothic cathedral.
This season Bakst has staged two new ballets for the Russians, Richard Strauss’s The Legend of Joseph, in which Paolo Veronese is suggested in the superb Venetian robes, and Papillons, which calls into play the same qualities Bakst had already exhibited in his designs for Carnaval.
The new school of scene-painting in Russia is said to have been the inspiration of the painter Wronbel, who, however, did not do much himself, as he died before his ideas were fully accepted. Bakst, Alexandre Benois and N. Roerich took up the work. To Roerich we owe the décors of the ballet The Sacrifice to the Spring, devised by Nijinsky to carry out the ideas of the cubists, and which aroused storms of hisses whenever it was given in Paris. Alexandre Benois painted the scenes for Petrouchka and also those for Le Pavilion d’Armide. Serge Soudeikine is responsible for the decorations used in La Tragédie de Salomé, and Theodore Fedorowsky painted the extraordinary scenes for Moussorgsky’s music-drama, La Khovanchina. The costumes of the Persian ballet in this opera, of orange, with vivid patches of green and blue, rest in the memory. The art of the Russians, it seems to me, has found nearly complete expression. It is impossible for them to go much further in their violent riots of color, their barbaric impressionism.
It is a style particularly suited to the Russian Ballet performances; the effect makes a complete whole which those who have seen it cannot erase from the memory. Its practical application to other branches of theatrical entertainment is more difficult. Certain plays of Shakespeare could be dressed in this manner. Certainly The Pirates of Penzance and Patience would be superbly fitted by it; so would the music-dramas of Gluck, Wagner, and Richard Strauss.
But there is still another source from which one might set the plays of Shakespeare, leaving aside the best way, which would be to give them in front of screens and draperies in the simplest manner possible. It often has occurred to me while wandering through various European galleries that the work of the early Italian painters might easily be adapted to the uses of stage decoration. Florence is full of this sort of thing, but three pictures I remember especially—three pictures of the fifteenth century, by an unknown painter. They are small and they hang, with other pictures between them, in one of the long galleries of the Uffizi. Two of them represent feasts. The simplicity and coloring of the architecture and the costumes would be joyously in keeping with certain plays of Shakespeare. The famous Marriage of Boccaccio Adimari with Lisa Ricasoli, in the Ancient and Modern Gallery in Florence, is another example. This train of splendid ladies and gentlemen, with a background of old Italian houses, would make as fine a stage pageant as one could wish for. One of its features is a bench with a cloth thrown over it, which would occupy the entire length of the front of the stage. Over this an awning is spread, under which the procession walks.
Numberless other examples of first aid to a producer who wants to do something new with Shakespeare could be mentioned. I cannot resist a passing reference to the frescos of Benozzo Gozzoli in the Palazzo Riccardi in Florence. The subject of the frescos is The Gifts of the Magi; what the artist has really shown is a Medici hunting party. The paintings, in a perfect state of preservation, depict youths in the most exquisite garments in which any actor could hope to disport himself. The combination of the greens, the purples, the blues, and the mulberries, all intertwined with the most lavish use of gold, would make such a stage-picture as has not been seen since the days when a desire for beauty and not a desire for photographic accuracy—which always defeats itself—governed those who put drama on the stage.
June, 1914.