SERGE DIAGHILEV’S Ballets Russes was the center of the Parisian art world during the early twentieth century. From its premiere of The Firebird in 1910—the year Virginia Woolf famously claimed “human character changed” fundamentally—to the death of Diaghilev in 1929, the troupe reigned on the stages of the Studio des Champs-Elysées and the Théâtre du Châtelet. After hours, the dancers attended late-night parties on the Seine, mingling with wealthy American donors and the likes of Jean Cocteau, Michel Fokine, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky; gathered in the bohemian Parisian quartier of Belleville to paint sets; and met for glamorous luncheons on the shores of Monte Carlo. Artists of every ilk congregated at the altar of avant-garde ballet, all overseen by their impresario, Diaghilev.
Ballets Russes alumni would continue to revolutionize ballet; chief among them were George Balanchine and Stravinsky, who exported their new conceptions of beauty and expression to the United States, shaping the art form as we know it today. More than a century has passed, and one still can’t overstate the troupe’s influence. It was apparent in the colorful, Léon Bakst–like silhouettes in the fashion show at the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Paris Olympics, and its traces remain in the architectural choreography of such works as Crystal Pite’s The Seasons’ Canon (2016), staged by the Boston Ballet this fall. But how can we tell its familiar history in new ways?
That question was at the forefront of the exhibition “Crafting the Ballets Russes: The Robert Owen Lehman Collection” at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum. Curator Robinson McClellan presented the Ballets Russes from two new vantage points. Music was the primary focus, as handwritten scores of famous ballets from Lehman’s extensive collection—on indefinite loan to the Morgan—took center stage. The exhibition secondarily highlighted the women who shaped the Ballets Russes, from choreographer and artist Bronislava Nijinska—sister of the Ballets Russes’ star male performer, Vaslav Nijinsky—to dancer Ida Rubinstein and set and costume designer Natalia Goncharova.
Lehman’s scores are extraordinary, particularly Stravinsky’s autograph manuscript for the adagio section of The Firebird. The composer was a maximalist: On large composition sheets, his original markings are overlaid with extemporaneous edits in bright red and blue pencil, the pastiche of his music taking shape in these layered amendments. Claude Debussy, by contrast, was a miniaturist, etching drafts of Afternoon of a Faun (1912)in minuscule notation as light as the oboe’s melody itself. And Maurice Ravel’s handwritten score for La valse (The Waltz, 1920) featured entire measures scratched out in dark cross-hatching and stick-figure dancers reeling in a blurry waltz at the bottom of the page.
More than a century has passed, and one still can’t overstate the troupe’s influence.
Aside from the scores, the exhibition displayed a panoply of ephemera: journals, set designs, and ornate sketches of costumes borrowed largely from Harvard University’s Houghton Library and private collections.
Nijinsky’s diaries are widely published, but the exhibition offered a rare glimpse into those of his choreographer sister. “See the music; hear the dance” is an aphorism famously attributed to Balanchine. But the core idea was originally Nijinska’s: “I want my ballets to be music for the eyes,” she wrote. “So if you would close your ears you could still hear the music—you could see the music. A paradox! But a paradox close to the center of my idea of ballet.”
Nijinska’s career was the major thrust of the exhibition, centering on her 1923 choreography of Les noces (The Wedding). A small photograph of an early version of the ballet’s most iconic pose stood out: In what Nijinska calls “the 4th tableau,” the corps de balletforms a pyramid of sorts, dancers lying atop one another, torsos and heads horizontal, as if falling asleep in a tight stack. One saw the formation again in a side-by-side display of Nijinska’s 1923 sketches of the pose and a photograph of her staging it at London’s Royal Ballet in 1966. The performers laugh and scratch their heads as they assume their positions, Nijinska looking on like a sculptor next to her raw clay. The display illustrated her power at the front of the studio and drew attention to the broad span of her career across the entire twentieth century.
McClellan offered a brief glimpse, as well, of the female-dominated history of Bolero (1928). Rubinstein, who commissioned the score from Ravel, danced the title role with choreography by Nijinska. The Spanish-inspired music is lumbering and hypnotic, as a central dancing woman works the men surrounding her into a frenzy. Bolero has continued as a trademark for powerful women in ballet: Sylvie Guillem, for example, performed Maurice Béjart’s Minimalist adaptation in the 2010s as a signature work at the end of her long career.
framed 85 1⁄4 × 41 1⁄2″.
Despite a massive portrait of Rubinstein by Howard Gardiner Cushing at the entryway of the exhibition, made around 1911—and another, by Jacques-Emile Blanche, of the dancer as Zobéide in the 1910 production of Fokine’s Schéhérazade at the end of the show—she remained more of an enigma than Nijinska and Goncharova. This is perhaps because her work as a dancer was ephemeral, more difficult to display than paintings or choreographic notation.
The Morgan is a space for what is hidden in the margins of manuscripts, sketches, or scores like those in the Lehman collection. By focusing on the details, McClellan revealed a bigger picture of the Ballets Russes. His two new perspectives—the framing devices of musical scores and women in power—spoke to what often goes unnoticed in a history dominated by the likes of a larger-than-life Diaghilev.
Elinor Hitt is a writer and a Ph.D. candidate in English literature at Harvard University. Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, The Paris Review Daily, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and The Washington Post, among other publications.
