ART
Stage Designs
THE exhibition of stage designs by Alexandre Benois at Tooth's is well timed for the ballet-goer, but not so well timed for the scene designer. It is agreeable to be able to go from Covent Garden to Bond Street and to compare what is hap-. pening now in this field with what was happening twenty-five years ago, but the Benois designs set a standard which it is hard for the younger artist to live up to.
In attempting to estimate the position of Benois it is almost inevitable to make the comparison with Bakst. It cannot be denied that Benois owes much to his master—above all his sense of colour and his feermg for the glamorous and the exotic—but he has many qualities which were almost lacking in the older designer. Bakst was a master in a limited field, but Benois shows a versatility which is striking, even in a small exhibition like the present one. No one could do the fantastic and the rich type of setting better than Bakst ; no one could touch him in the field of romantic oriental themes, in which freedom of imagination and flamboyant colours could do the trick. But outside this field he was less masterful.
Benois, on the other hand, is equally at home in a dozen manners. He too can be full-blooded, as in the design for the Moor's room in Petrouchka ; but he can also play in
the Louis Napoleon key, as in La Dame aux Camiliqc ; he can be fancifully baroque, as in Les Noces de Psyche ; modern-
istically simplified, as in the sea-shore scene for La Princesse Cygne ; comically satirical, as in the Ceremonie du Itiolacte Imaginaire ; or coldly clear as in the scene from Napoleon showing the staircase of the Tuileries after the attack of the revolutionaries.
This ability to design in so many different styles may perhaps be connected with another characteristic which stands out from the work of Benois, namely, the astonishing accuracy of his settings from the archaeological point of view. There is not a single sketch in the exhibition of which one is tempted to say : " What a pity he did not take more trouble to get such and such a detail right." His taste seems to be so infallible in this matter and his knowledge of decoration and architecture of all periods so remarkable, that he can do what he wants without there being any visible straining after scholarly accuracy or any failure in precision. Benois must be constantly feeding his mind by the study of different styles of architecture and this gives him a breadth lacking in Bakst. The precision with which he reconstructs an historical setting appears in a different form in the few sketches from actual buildings which are shown in the exhibition.
In addition to all this Benois has enough sense of space and for the establishing of the main lines of a design with absolute clarity to be able to risk overlaying his settings with elaborate ornament. In his most baroque designs, for instance, there is never a hint that the detail is going to swamp the scaffolding or that the space is going to become confused or mean. The combination of all the qualities which are best in Benois is perhaps shown at its clearest in the setting for the third act of Le Medecin malgre lui, showing the street outside the house of Geronte. It is more convincing as a reconstruction of seventeenth-century Paris than all the models in the Carnavalet, and at the same time it is perfectly adapted to the purposes of the play.
The. London Gallery has been showing the works of Oskar Schlemmer, a painter little known in this country. He too is an artist largely interested in the stage, for which he worked particularly when he was on the staff of the Bauhaus. But in the present exhibition he appears only as a painter. His achievement in this field is not easy to define. Like Moholy- Nagy and many of the artists associated with the Bauhaus he seems to be obsessed with problems of light. He has been in his day an almost completely abstract painter, but even in canvases like the four Arabesques shown at the London Gallery he is not, like the usual abstract painter, making patterns of colours so much as patterns of light. In his more realistic works this approach survives, and the scenes which he now depicts are conceived in terms of patches of dark against light which seem to have the shapes of human beings only by accident. The paintings are like stage scenes in which the spotlights are the most important part of the effect.
ANTHONY BLUNT.
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