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Léon Bakst
1866–1924Costume and stage design154 items13 collections1900–1945
Russian painter and designer whose sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes brought saturated colour to the European stage.
Léon Bakst was born Leyb-Khaim Rosenberg in Grodno in 1866 and trained in St Petersburg, where he joined Sergei Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois in the World of Art group and worked as a portraitist and illustrator. At a private school there he taught the young Marc Chagall.
When Diaghilev took Russian ballet to Paris in 1909, Bakst designed it. Cléopâtre (1909), Schéhérazade (1910) and L'Après-midi d'un faune (1912) set dancers in clashing emerald, orange and ultramarine, in harem trousers, turbans and painted silks that draw on Persian miniatures and Greek vases. His costume drawings are works in their own right: figures caught mid-step, fabric flying, every pattern specified for the workshop. Paris fashion and interior decoration soon took up his colours. He died near Paris in 1924.