LЙON BAKST (1866-1924)
Russian artist who revolutionized theatrical design both in scenery and in costume
Bakst attended the Imperial Academy of Arts at St Petersburg but was expelled after painting a too- realistic "Pietа". He returned to Russia after completing his studies in Paris and became a court painter. He was a co-founder with Sergey Diaghilev of the journal Mir /skusstra ("World of Art") in 1899. Bakst began to design scenery in 1900, first at the Hermitage court theatre and then at the imperial theatres.
in 1906 Bakst went to Paris, where he began designing stage sets and costumes for Diaghilev's newly formed ballet company, the Ballets Russes. The first Diaghilev ballet for which he designed decor was Oйopвtre (1909), and he was chief set designer thereafter, working on the ballets Scheherazade and Carnaval (both 1910), Le Spectre de la rose and N arasse (both 191 I), L'Apres-midi d'un faune and Dof>hn/s et Ch/oй (both 1912), and Les Papillons (1914). Bakst achieved international fame with his sets and costumes, in which he combined bold designs and sumptuous colours with minutely refined details to convey an atmosphere of picturesque, exotic orientalism. In 1919 he settled permanently in Paris. His designs for a London production of Pyotr liyich Tchaikovsky's Sfeeping Beauty in 1921 are regarded as his greatest work.
sometimes resembles a film montage and suggests the inner space of a reverie. The general atmosphere of these works can imply a Yiddish joke, a Russian fairy tale, or a vaudeville turn. Often the principal character is the romantically handsome,
curly-haired young painter himself. Memories of childhood and of Vitebsk were major sources of imagery for Chagall during this period.
Initially enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution of October 1917, Chagall returned briefly to his native Vitebsk, where he launched ambitious projects for a local art academy and museum; but after two and a half years, marked by increasingly bitter aesthetic and political quarrels with the faculty of the art academy, he gave up and moved to Moscow. There he turned his attention for a while to the stage, producing sets and costumes. In 1922, however, he left Russia for good. Until the outbreak of the Second World War he travelled extensively, working in Brittany in 1924, in southern France in 1926, in Palestine in 1931 (as preparation for his Bible etchings), and, between 1932 and 1937, in the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, and Italy. His reputation as a modern master was confirmed by a large retrospective exhibition in 1933 at the Kunsthalle in Basel, Switzerland. The outbreak of war, and the Nazi menace for European Jewry, forced Chagall to move yet again, this time, in July 1941, with his family to the United States. Adolf Hitler's rise to power had changed his painterly visions, as reflected in the powerful White Crucifixion (1938), in which Jewish and Christian symbols are conflated in a depiction of German Jews terrorized by a Nazi mob; the crucified Christ at the centre of the composition is wrapped in a tallith, a Jewish prayer shawl.
Chagall was prolific for the last 30 years of his life, continuing to paint on canvas while also designing theatre sets - he completed a number of projects for the Paris Opera and the New York Metropolitan Opera, including his highly regarded set and costume designs for the 1967 production of Mozart's The Magic Flute- and in the late 1950s mastering the difficult art of stained glass. He designed a number of windows at international locations such as the Cathedral of Metz in France (1958-60), the synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem (1960-1), the United Nations building in New York (1964), and the Art Institute of Chicago (1977), His stained-glass windows are often considered to be some of the strongest work of his late career; the medium's capacity for brilliant colour was perfectly suited to his magical imagery,
Chagall's repertory of images, including massive bouquets, melancholy clowns, flying lovers, fantastic animals, biblical prophets, and fiddlers on roofs, helped to make him one of the most popular major innovators of the twentieth-century School of Paris. He presented dreamlike subject matter in rich colours and in a fluent, painterly style that, while reflecting an awareness of artistic movements such as expressionism, cubism, and even abstraction, remained invariably personal. Although critics sometimes complained of facile sentiments, uneven quality, and an excessive repetition of motifs in the artist's large total output, there is agreement that at its best it reached a level of visual metaphor seldom attempted in modern art.
Perhaps the most influential of all Russian painters to work primarily outside Russia was Vasily Kandinsky. Having travelled widely in his youth, when he decided in his late twenties that, rather than take up a professorship in jurisprudence, he would become a painter, nothing seemed more natural to him than to pack his bags and take a train to Germany, a seedbed of artistic activity and learning.
It took many further years of study and familiarization with various artistic traditions and trends before the emergence of Kandinsky's strikingly personal style. His instincts had always been to abstraction in art, however: he later recalled that, as an adolescent, he had a strong conviction that each colour had a mysterious life of its own. Gradually, the many influences he had undergone coalesced. His impulse to eliminate subject matter altogether stemmed from his desire for a kind of painting in which colours, lines, and shapes, freed from the distracting business of depicting recognizable objects, might evolve into a visual "language" capable - as was, for him, the abstract "language" of music-of expressing general ideas and evoking deep emotions.
The vision was not, of course, entirely new, and in these years just before the First World War Kandinsky was by no means alone in his attack on figurative art. Between 1910 and 1914 the list of pioneer abstract artists included many fine painters, working under the umbrella of a variety of movements. But if Kandinsky does not quite deserve to be called, as he often is, the "founder" of non-figurative painting, he remains a pioneer of the first importance.
In his Blue Mountain (1908) the evolution toward non- representation was already clearly under way: the forms are schematic, the colours non-naturalistic, and the general effect that of a dream landscape. By 1910 his Improvisation X/V was already, as its somewhat musical title suggests, practically abstract; with the 1911 Encircled, he had definitely developed a kind of painting that, though not just decoration, has no discernible point of departure in the depiction of recognizable objects. After that came such major works as With the Black Arch, Black Lines, and Autumn-, in such pictures, done between 1912 and 1914 in a slashing, splashing, dramatic style that anticipates the New York abstract expressionism of the 1950s, most art historians see the peak of the artist's achievement.