Customer Reviews

Ballets Russes

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I very rarely buy a book for the pictures, unless it's a book about maps, gardening, or handicrafts. This book is a major exception. The Ballets Russes, lead by the great producer, Sergei Diaghilev was home or patron to the foremost dance and musical composition talents of the first half of the 20th century, the foremost being dancers Nijinsky and Leonide Massine and composers Stravinsky, Poulenc, and Darius Milhaud. What may be easily fogotten is the third leg of the company's artistic greatness, the graphic designs of Leon Bakst, who did most of the scenic and costume designs. This can easily be visualized in a moment from a scene in 'The Red Shoes', where the Diaghilev-like character approves the senic designer's drawings in a moment, as 'perfect, as usual'.
Baksk's drawings are very much of his age, laying somewhere between 19th century Art Nouveau and the 20th century of Picasso. The most wonderful aspect of the designs is that they seem to fit so well into the mood of the new music, especially that from Stravinsky in 'The Rites of Spring' and 'Les Noces'. The book has certainly served me well as an occasional reference when, for example, I wanted to verify that the choreographer of the 1935 movie version of 'A Midsummer's Night Dream' was indeed a former member of the Ballets Russes troupe, and Nijinsky's sister!!! Thjis is one book i recommend wholeheartedly exclusively for the value of the color pictures!

Richard Shead provides a serviceable chronicle of the Ballets' Russes tumultuous history, if one can get past his pompous style and emphasis on pure description. The blow-by-blow narrative gets mired in gratuitous minutiae and opinionated digressions, seemingly meant solely to demonstrate the erudition of the writer. The result resembles less a scholarly work than a sequential stack of playbills interspersed with alot of high-brow gossip (and, indeed, there was much to gossip about) He reserves particular venom for Njinsky's wife Ramola, whom he views as has having maliciously and selfishly robbed the world of a great light. All of this gets in the way of serious or in-depth analysis or discourse on the context, ethos, and influence of the Ballets Russes. Shead has little to say about the visual artists involved, their backgrounds and aesthetic beliefs, or their designs' timely integration of folkloric and modernist imagery. For example, he derides the collaboration between Picasso, Satie, and Cocteau as a dissonant battle between conceptual agendas, but seems utterly uninterested in what those agendas might have been, or how the historic moment of their intersection may have been significant. Yet, at the same time, the reader is bombarded by names, places, dates, and other details that could only appeal to a die-hard balletomaniac. The book is useful insomuch as it provides an almanac for ballet historians,.

The images, however, especially the vivid color reproductions of renderings by Bakst, Benois, Picasso, Roerich, and others, are truly spectacular, worth the price of the book alone. The photos of actual dances are a bit more problematic, only because the book's designers decided to tint the black-and-white images with single-color overlays of pale green, pink, blue, sepia, etc. Some photos were allowed to remain in their original black-and-white, but the majority have been irresponsibly tarted up for a misguided design concept.