Les Cents Baisers

As dancers spin along the stage in a twirl of tulle, star ballerina Irina Baronova prepares for her entrance, holding a perfect pose en pointe. Photographer Alexey Brodovitch watches this 1935 Ballets Russes production from the wings, setting up a study in contrasts. Bright and dark, hurried and tense, his composition distills the action of live performance; equal parts furor and anticipation. Brodovitch is best known for his pioneering designs for Harper’s Bazaar, where he reigned as art director from 1934 to 1958. But years earlier, as a Russian émigré in Paris, he found one of his first design jobs painting sets and backdrops for the Ballets Russes. This initiation into the dance world, where he worked alongside the company’s circle of eminent artist-collaborators to execute all manner of modernist designs, here informs his photographic approach.


This is one of the 104 photographs Brodovitch made for his 1945 book, Ballet. Like others in the series, it rebukes all conventions of good technique; it is grainy and overexposed, the action is a blur. The layout, too, is experimental. In his magazine work, Brodovitch devised new ways of arranging pictures on a page. His book’s images likewise unfold in fluid sequence, at times colliding into one another or bleeding off the paper’s edge. As the composition here straddles both sides of the stage, in print, the images often run into the gutter. With spine-bending, page-turning editorial nerve, the project achieves its own transgressive choreography.