Exhibitions

Diaghilev (Barbican Art Gallery, till 14 April)

Patron of the arts

Martin Gayford

You don't have to like ballet to enjoy the Diaghilev exhibition at the Barbican, though it probably helps. Personally, I must confess, I have always had a philistine blank when it comes to dance — rather as many people seem to have about jazz. So it says a good deal for Diaghilev: Creator of the Ballets Russes that it made me feel quite wistful about the impossibility of seeing these long-gone productions: Pavlova and Ida Rubenstein in Cleopktre with costumes by Leon Bakst, Nijinksy dancing to Stravin- sky's music in Petrushka, and all the rest. Actually, it turns out that the great man himself wasn't all that keen on ballet to start with (indeed his collaborator Alexan- dre Benois claimed that he never really got over this antipathy). The medium seems to have chosen him rather than vice versa. Serge Diaghilev was a great generalist of the arts. In him, Benois wrote, the features of Don Quixote and a patron of an earlier age were mingled with those of an Ameri- can businessman.

He himself put it more breezily in an early letter written to his stepmother. `I am, first, a great charlatan, though with dash, second, a great charmer, third cheeky, fourth, a person with a lot of logic and few principles, and fifth, someone afflicted, it seems, with a complete absence of talent. I think I've found my true voca- tion: to be a patron of the arts. For that I have everything I need except money. Mais ca viendra.'

Money always 'remained a problem. The first night of Petrushka was held up while Diaghilev borrowed 4,000 francs to pay for the costumes from Misia Sert. 'But,' the latter remembered, in those happy days one's chauffeur was always waiting,' and the money arrived in time.

Born a little later, Diaghilev might well have gone into the movies. As it was, he became an impresario, inspirer and explainer — of Russia to the West and the West to Russia. Diaghilev first made his mark as a prime-mover in the art magazine Mir Iskusstva (World of Art), which became in turn a movement aiming to bring Russian painting and sculpture up to date. It was determinedly modern, but modern as the term was understood in the 1890s — the age of decadence and art nou- veau, Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde.

The young Diaghilev was fashionably Wildean, Whistlerean, Wagnerian and Nietzschean in thought. With his single lock of white hair, and ever-faithful nanny — she can be seen, still sitting patiently in the background of the portrait by Bakst, painted when Diaghilev was in his thirties — there is a touch of Sebastian Flyte about him, as well as Anthony Blanche. But Diaghilev was also an energetic mover and shaker.

Diaghilev's next incarnation was as an organiser of exhibitions, a Norman Rosen- thal of the day. In 1905 he put together a massive display — in modern terms, a blockbuster — of historic Russian portraits (this had the fortunate effect of preventing many of these from being burnt by the incendiary revolutionaries of that year). Then he presented a big exhibition of con- temporary Russian art in Paris in 1906.

After that, the logical step was into the performing arts, of great interest to Diaghilev and his friends who were fasci- nated by the notion of the Gesamtkunst- werk — total work of art — integrating drama, music and spectacle. In 1908 Diaghilev presented Boris Godunov in Paris with Chaliapin in the leading role. But opera proved expensive — as it is inclined to be. So, inexorably, Diaghilev was led to ballet — an archaic form, much patronised by the Tsars, which was beginning to sim- mer with new ideas. In 1909 the Ballets Russes began.

All this is clearly hard to exhibit, and it is even harder to pin down Diaghilev's own role as talent-spotter, catalyst and inspirer. But the exhibition at the Barbican does the job imaginatively and well. The top floor is mainly given over to the artists of the Mir Iskusstva movement — few are first rank (the most striking exhibit is a huge fire- place in ceramic tiles symbolically evoking the River Volga, by Mikhail Vrubel, an elder figure who went mad and died before the Ballets Russes got under way)..

Clever installation, however, evokes the period pleasingly. The visitor raises heavy velvet curtains to inspect fin de siecle eroti- ca by Somov, Bakst and Beardsley. Bakst's Nikolai Roerich's costume design for a youth in The Rite of Spring original setting for the 1906 exhibition in Paris — the walls transformed into a gar- den arbour with foliage and trellis — gives a lift to some overripe Russian art nouveau sculpture.

With the exception of the modernists Larionov and Goncharova, the artists of Diaghilev's circle obviously came into their own when they started to design for the stage. Their art always looked stagey. Downstairs, there is a long succession of recreated theatrical 'flats' dividing the gallery into sections devoted to different productions, with original costumes and astonishingly flamboyant designs by Bakst, Benois, Goncharova et al. Bakst is the star here, deploying an extravagant, sensuous style that could be described as Beardsley plus colour.

It only adds up to a flavour of the origi- nal productions, of course. Music, for example, is present only on a film about Stravinsky — Diaghilev's greatest discovery — and a set of headphones on which one can listen to Chaliapin. The dancing is gone for good. But even so, for the bal- letomane and balletophobe alike, it makes it easy to understand why the Ballets Russ- es took Edwardian Paris by storm.

Giannandrea Poesio, our dance critic, writes: DESPITE being a minority, balletophiles have their own pride and do not like to be culturally mistreated. Since the legendary 1954 Diaghilev exhibition in Edinburgh organised by Richard Buckle, the great impresario and his celebrated • company have prompted a myriad of similar events. Through the years, however, the focus has gradually shifted from dance to visual arts, arguably a more accessible cultural field: today the Ballets Russes are too often syn- onymous with impressive paintings related somehow to ballet.

The title of the exhibition at the Barbi- can, Diaghilev: Creator of the Ballets Russes, sounded, therefore, terribly appealing to those who hoped to be surprised (`surprise me' was Diaghilev's motto) and to find, for a change, a good deal of dance history in it. Unfortunately, the dance-related informa- tion is minimal and often inaccurate, and it is not just the case of two photographs of Giselle and Swan Lake being misplaced in the gallery upstairs. Downstairs, a board informs that the Ballets Russes started in 1909 in Paris and performed mostly at the Opera. Yet the company became the Bal- lets Russes only in 1911 — until then it was a nameless group of Russian dancers and in 1909 it opened at the Chatelet The- atre, which then became one of the compa- ny's favourite venues in Paris (the Diaghi- levians appeared at the Opera in 1910).

A painting of eight figures by Roerich is captioned 'Design for The Rite of Spring' while, as the late Pannenia Migel Ekstrom claimed (no one ever listens to dance histo- rians, though), it portrays a moment from Musorgsky's opera Khovanshchina. As many items come from Russian collections, their connection to the original perfor- mances remains unclear (the Ballets Russ- es never performed in that country). Were they transferred to the Russian museums at a certain point in history or do they relate to subsequent performances or reconstruc- tions? Whatever the answer, some of Benois' sketches for Petrushka, enigmati- cally dated '1911/1921', are considerably different from the original ones. Not to mention the costumes displayed: compare, for instance, the doll's dress in Petrushka and the nearby photograph from the pre- mière.

It would have also been beneficial to add some interesting remarks here and there. Bakst's design for 'a costume' worn by Nijinsky in Le Festin is, as a matter of fact, a fascinating reinterpretation of the Blue- bird from the third act of Sleeping Beauty, a ballet Diaghilev was particularly fond of. It does not take an expert to spot all the inac- curacies — after all, the necessary informa- tion can be easily gathered from the many publications on the subject, including those for A-Level students.