Léon Bakst

Origins and early life

Léon Bakst was born Leyb-Khaim Izrailevich Rosenberg on 10 May 1866 at Grodno, in the Pale of Settlement, into a prosperous Jewish family of tailors; he took the name Bakst from his maternal grandfather. He remained a Jew, and this fiche states plainly what that cost him: he studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg and was expelled from the capital in 1910 as a Jew without a residence permit, at the very moment when his designs for Diaghilev were making him famous across Europe, and he had to be granted an exemption to return; earlier, a religious commission had rejected his painting of the Pietà because he had painted the mourners as the Jews they historically were.

Work and career

He was a founder, with Diaghilev and Benois, of the movement and journal Mir Iskusstva, The World of Art. From 1909 he designed for the Ballets Russes in Paris the productions that changed the European stage: Cléopâtre, Schéhérazade in 1910, whose oranges, emerald greens and violets caused a sensation, L'Oiseau de feu, Le Spectre de la rose, Narcisse, Daphnis et Chloé, and L'Après-midi d'un faune in 1912 with Nijinsky.

Bakst's principle was that a stage design is not a backdrop but the visual argument of the ballet, and that the costume must move with the dancer's body; his drawings, sold and reproduced everywhere, changed dress design, interior decoration and fabric printing throughout the 1910s, and Paul Poiret and the couturiers of the decade worked in his wake. He taught Marc Chagall in Saint Petersburg. He died in Paris on 27 December 1924 and is buried at Batignolles.