Léon Bakst

Léon Bakst was born Lev Rosenberg in Grodno in 1866, studied at the Academy in St Petersburg and in Paris, and in the 1890s became, with Alexandre Benois and Sergei Diaghilev, one of the founders of the World of Art group and its magazine. A painter and portraitist, he found his true field in the theatre: from 1909 he designed for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris the productions that changed European taste, ‘Cléopâtre’, ‘Schéhérazade’, ‘Le Carnaval’, ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune’, ‘Daphnis et Chloé’, ‘La Légende de Joseph’, with sets and costumes of a violence of colour and a sensuality that fashion, interiors and the applied arts of the 1910s and 1920s all took from him.

He was the company’s artistic director in its great years and worked as well for Ida Rubinstein’s own company and for Anna Pavlova, designing ‘Hélène de Sparte’, ‘La Pisanelle’ and ‘Phèdre’ for Rubinstein, his friend and muse. He settled in Paris, where he died in December 1924. His costume designs, among the most celebrated drawings of the twentieth century, are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum and the National Gallery of Australia, and have been copied and reproduced since his own lifetime.