Music for the Eyes: “Crafting the Ballets Russes” at the Morgan Library & Museum

Léon Bakst (1866–1924), set design for bedroom scene for Schéhérazade (1910). Gouache on paper. Boris Stavrovski Collection, New York. Photography by Janny Chiu.

“I listen to music through my eyes. I want my ballets to be music for the eyes.”

So declared the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska, one of the leading lights of the Ballets Russes, the ballet troupe that blazed a cometlike trail across Western Europe and the Americas from 1909 to 1929, when it came to an untimely end along with its founder, the flamboyant impresario Serge Diaghilev.

The words “ballet troupe,” as devotees know, barely convey a fraction of what made the Ballets Russes important or why it electrified audiences in so many countries. Diaghilev was a superb convener of talent who coerced and cajoled a startling number of A-list artists in multiple disciplines to produce some of the most original work of their careers. In critic Joan Acocella’s words, Diaghilev’s most radical dance spectaculars “were like nothing that had ever been called ballet before.” They featured equally innovative music by Debussy, Stravinsky, Ravel, and Prokofiev as well as set designs and costumes by Matisse, Picasso, and Coco Chanel.

Michel Fokine, who preceded Nijinska as the company’s resident choreographer, cited as its guiding principles “the alliance of dancing with the other arts” and “a condition of complete equality” among all the arts. The Morgan Library & Museum’s new exhibition Crafting the Ballets Russes: The Robert Owen Lehman Collection, organized by Associate Curator of Music Manuscripts and Printed Music Robinson McClellan, honors that spirit with a diverse but cohesive array of autograph manuscripts, choreographic sketches, set and costume designs, and photographic portraits. Recorded excerpts from the most famous scores (practically a greatest hits playlist for twentieth-century classical music) waft into the exhibition space from the entryway, making for a kind of happy synesthesia in keeping with Nijinska’s credo.  

In its early years, the Ballets Russes showcased an exoticized “Russianness” calculated to titillate Western European tastes. This aspect of the troupe’s productions, with an emphasis on sensual, “barbarian” elements, readily tipped into an off-the-charts Orientalism (we never seem to be far from the sultan’s harem) that may give twenty-first-century viewers pause even as they admire, for instance, Léon Bakst’s extravagant set design for Schéhérazade (1910).

That phase culminated in the 1913 succès de scandale of The Rite of Spring, a pagan spectacle set to Stravinsky’s exhilarating rock ‘em, sock ‘em score. Mercifully, the Morgan’s wall text dispenses with the uproar surrounding the Rite’s Paris premiere—a foundation myth of modern art that doesn’t need another airing here—in one sentence.

The choreographer of the original Rite was the brilliant, erratic dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who comes to life at the Morgan through an array of media that capture him in his most famous roles: depictions made more poignant by our knowledge of Nijinsky’s irrevocable slide into mental illness just a few years later.

Samples of the eerie visual art Nijinsky started creating around 1919, just prior to his withdrawal from the world, read like bulletins from the brink that today we would recognize as outsider art. They validate Bronislava Nijinska’s diary entry from 1921, when she got to see the extent of her brother’s decline for herself: “He lost himself in his visions and forgot the way back.”

Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962), curtain design for Les Noces (1915). Opaque watercolor over graphite on paper. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Christian Brinton, 1941, 1941-79-96. © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / UPRAVIS, Moscow.

Other standout pieces here include a pair of characterful portraits of Stravinsky by Picasso that convey an acerbic personality in a minimum number of lines. Best of all is Natalia Goncharova’s curtain design for an unrealized early version (1915) of the ballet Les Noces, in which bright citrus splashes of color and intricate symmetrical patterns combine with a kind of children’s-book ingenuousness to enchanting effect. That Goncharova would pivot to an austere black-and-white scheme for Les Noces when it was finally staged in 1923 only testifies to the fecundity of her imagination.

Along with Nijinska and Goncharova, the exhibition’s spotlight on a third woman keeps the Ballets Russes story from becoming the pageant of an overachieving boys’ club that it can sometimes seem to be. Ida Rubinstein was a Russian Jewish dancer, actress, and transcontinental scenester who made an impression in the company’s 1910 Schéhérazade but quickly left when it became clear there was no place for a woman with her ambitions in Diaghilev’s orbit. When her own troupe, Les Ballets de Madame Ida Rubinstein, debuted in Paris in 1928, she notched back-to-back successes with the premieres of Ravel’s Bolero and Stravinsky’s The Fairy’s Kiss. Her poaching two of the brightest stars in Diaghilev’s orbit hints at the entropy that had overtaken the original article near the end of its two-decade existence.

Program for Les Ballets de Madame Ida Rubinstein (detail), Académie Nationale de Musique et de Danse, May 1929. Library of Congress, Ida Rubinstein Collection.

Regarding that twilight phase, I would have liked some wall text acknowledging Diaghilev’s death from diabetes at age 57 in 1929. But as compensation Lynn Garafola’s essay in the exhibition catalog (recommended) explores Diaghilev’s career in detail and gives him his due as a commissioner of new music.

Crafting the Ballets Russes is an ideal summer refuge for aesthetes: You can step inside from the blazing streets and lose yourself in the sumptuous visions of a bygone world, set against the Morgan’s cool teal and burgundy backdrops. The exhibition justifies what E. M. Forster said about the Ballets Russes when he looked back on the company’s heyday nearly forty years later. He called it “an attempt of the twentieth century to create civilized pleasure.”

Crafting the Ballets Russes: The Robert Owen Lehman Collection is on view at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City through September 22, 2024.

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