Sergei (also Serge) Diaghilev

Sergei Diaghilev was a Russian editor, curator, and ballet impresario who played a central role in establishing collaborations between modern artists in Russia and the rest of Europe in the early twentieth century. As the founder of the Ballets Russes, he championed conversations among the visual, performing, and applied arts, staging interdisciplinary spectacles that catered to avant-garde cognoscenti as well as popular audiences in urban centers across Western Europe and the Americas.

Born into an aristocratic family, Diaghilev befriended the Russian painters Alexandre Benois and Léon Bakst while studying law in Saint Petersburg during the early 1890s. Together they founded the art magazine Mir Iskusstva in 1899, with Diaghilev serving as editor in chief; at the same time, he assisted the director of the Russian Imperial Theater, Prince Sergey Volkonsky, with producing several operas and ballets. Mir Iskusstva reflected Diaghilev’s multidisciplinary interests, circulating criticism about dance and music alongside articles on the visual arts. In its design and contents, the magazine embraced vernacular sources and a style akin to Art Nouveau in an effort to shape a Russian counterpart to Western European modernisms. Although the magazine folded in 1904, it became synonymous with an autochthonous modern art movement that bridged progressive cultural circles in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, involving artists such as Ivan Bilibin, Yevgeny Lansere, and Konstantin Somov.

The same aspirations that animated Mir Iskusstva prompted Diaghilev to showcase the works of his compatriots in Paris, a beacon of modern experimentation. He moved there in 1906 and secured funds from Russian aristocrats and the Tsarist government to organize art exhibitions and concerts that highlighted the accomplishments of Russian artists and composers. One such event was the mammoth Exposition de l’art russe that opened at the Grand Palais in conjunction with that year’s Salon d’automne, displaying objects ranging from religious icons to the futurist paintings of Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov. Another was the lavish production of Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov at the Paris Opéra, featuring ornate stage sets by Benois and Bakst, and costumes by Bilibin. These endeavors fostered a taste for Russian culture among Parisian audiences, simultaneously inflating the foreign, even exotic, qualities of Diaghilev’s motherland and affirming Russia as a cutting-edge cultural force on equal footing with Western countries.

It was primarily in ballet, however, that Diaghilev saw an opportunity to bring to the limelight Russia’s rich national heritage and advances in the arts. In 1910 he founded the Ballets Russes, an enterprise that mobilized emerging talents in the realms of choreography, dance, music, stage design, and costuming. The company debuted in Paris that year with, among other works, three brand-new ballets: Schéhérazade, Les Orientales, and L’Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird), the last of which was choreographed by Diaghilev’s longtime associate Michel Fokine and featured dazzling set and costume designs by Goncharova. The score by Igor Stravinsky launched the composer’s career and inaugurated his collaborations with some of the most radical participants in the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Although members of the troupe were mostly dancers on temporary leave from the Russian Imperial Theater, Diaghilev also surrounded himself with international associates. Throughout the lifespan of the company, they helped him expand the repertoire of the Ballets Russes to encompass genres that transcended Eastern European traditions, appropriating and reimagining cultural forms as diverse as Spanish flamenco and Italian commedia dell’arte.

In the 1910s and 1920s, Diaghilev recruited choreographers of the highest caliber, such as Léonide Massine, Bronislava Nijinska, and Vaslav Nijinsky. He commissioned stage sets and costume designs from renowned modern artists in Russia, France, and beyond, including Giacomo Balla, Sonia Delaunay, André Derain, Naum Gabo, Marie Laurencin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Nicholas Roerich. Composers like Claude Debussy, Manuel de Falla, Francis Poulenc, Maurice Ravel, and Eric Satie wrote music for Ballets Russes productions, in which dancers such as George Balanchine, Serge Lifar, Lydia Lopokova, Nijinsky, Ida Rubinstein, and Anna Pavlova performed. The fashion designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel designed costumes for two of Diaghilev’s productions. To many of these figures, the Ballets Russes provided unique opportunities to reach mass audiences and produce dramatically scaled works suitable for the stage.

The Ballets Russes barely survived the First World War and the Russian Revolution, which forced Diaghilev to cut ties with funders in his homeland andleft him and many of his collaborators virtually stateless. He secured the company by touring it from Paris to London, Rome, Monte Carlo, and other European cities, extending the reach of his projects. In 1916 and 1917, the Ballets Russes left behind war-torn Europe for the Americas, embarking on two transcontinental tours that brought them to New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo, along with dozens of other urban centers. Even after Diaghilev’s death in 1929, the company’s performances continued to serve as a model of creative collaboration that blurred the boundaries between artistic disciplines and geopolitical regions.