BAKST.*
Tins magnificent volume is not quite in the usual picture- book tradition. The reproductions of Bakst's drawings and colour work are splendid, the binding and paper sumptuous, but Mr. Levinson's life of the designer is not quite crushed out of life by all this magnificence. Not that it can be called a good memoir : it is muddled, almost entirely eulogistic, and it is written in curious English. What, for instance, does this mean : " But the opera was never put on. There is a veritable hoode about this Sylvia, which kept haunting the Russian ar* ists and yet was never pro- duced" ? Or there is this admirable phrase about Max Reinhardt : " Until that same intrepid pioneer let loose upon the arena of a circus the hysterical multitude of a chorus of wild persons." However, there is something strangely attractive about these confused judgments and the recollections of " Governmental-secretary Diaghileff," of Fokine, Pavlova, Karsavina, Nijinsky—" that galaxy of stars of the -dance." -
The book is valuable, too, in that it gives us a background for Bakst. We see what it is that prevented the elegant fripperies in such ballets as The Sleeping Princess and The Good-Humoured Ladies from cloying. The austerity and power or imagination expressed in Terror Antiquus are significant. Bakst is revealed as a man who was not likely to be smothered by upholstery, or even carried away more than temporarily by a tendency to an undue reliance on sumptuousness, which some of us feared we noticed in The Sleeping Princess, with its insistence upon the use of real velvets, satins and furs— Bakst : The Story of the Artist's Life. By Andre Levinson. London: The SSyard Preas. (110 10s4
a couturiere's paradise which seemed to some of his admirers a little unworthy of a great man. For there can be no doubt that Bakst is a very great man, great as a colourist and with an extremely rich, subtle and complex imaginative power. This story of the little Jewish boy's early life, with its setting in that strange city, the St. Petersburg of 1900 or so, gives a clue to a restlessness which occasionally antagonizes his English disciples, and certainly gives a hope that if this master later gives us work of his old age, this restlessness may be remedied and his work may display the repose and massiveness which it alone lacks. The present book shows the vigour of his line and the resource of his colour to admiration.
Previous page
