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When Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes first appeared in London in 1911, an artist of the name Laura Knight travelled from her cottage at Lamorna in Cornwall, to see them. It was the consummation of a love affair with ‘show-business’ that had begun in the childhood funfairs of Nottingham and taken her and her mother to watch the performances of Adeline Genée at the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square. Yet the Ballets Russes and its artists (which that season included Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Kasarvina), were entirely novel. In the words of the Daily Mail’s critic of the time, ‘the spectacle which the Russians provide at Covent Garden…is little less than a revelation.’ And so it was for Dame Laura Knight, who for the next eighteen-years (until the Ballets Russes’ final London appearance in 1929) watched, painted, drew this extraordinary and visionary company at every one of its London seasons.
Karsavina in L'Oiseau de feu (Firebird) 1919-20 oil
© Reproduced with permission of The Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2008. All Rights Reserved.
Carnaval 1920, oil
© Reproduced with permission of The Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2008. All Rights Reserved.
Her pictures – which form the basis of an exhibition, Laura Knight at the Theatre, now showing at the Lowry galleries in Salford, before touring to Nottingham Castle in the summer – offer an unusual and often intimate insight into the world of Diaghilev’s troupe. They chart not least its changes in choreography from the ideals of Fokine’s Sylphides and Carnaval (painted by Knight in 1920, in lustrous colour that evokes Bakst’s bold designs) to those of Massine (crayon sketches from 1921 show himself and Tamara Karsavina in Le Tricorne – and it is interesting to see the similarities between Massine’s plastique and that of the Spanish Flamenco dancers, also on display). They show its changes in design – see how Bakst and Golovin’s costume for Karsavina, in Knight’s 1919 painting of The Firebird, is a dusky orange, her head a mass of fiery feathery plumage, and not the vivid red we know from Natalia Goncharova’s later revisions. They offer us glimpses of ballerinas known only on the page: Lubov Tchernicheva, Olga Spessivtseva, (who came to London to dance Aurora in Diaghilev’s sumptuous, though financially crippling staging of The Sleeping Beauty, in design by Benois); and we see the fragility of an artist such as Anna Pavlova. One portrait (c.1920) shows her strong Roman profile somehow strained, gaunt, other-worldy; another shows her in class, seeming to collapse under the exhaustion. This frailty is most remarkably seen again in a much later painting, from 1956, when Knight (then in her eighties) was invited backstage to draw the Bolshoi company, then making its first appearance in London since the Revolution. Here the corps girls appear withdrawn, sickly almost and it is a frightening insight into the conditions of Soviet performers at that time.
Anna Pavlova
© Reproduced with permission of The Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2008. All Rights Reserved.
Behind the scenes/In the Coulisses c 1920 oil
© Reproduced with permission of The Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2008. All Rights Reserved.
It is these qualities that Knight was unafraid of presenting and this honesty appears to have won her the dancers’ admiration. As her familiarity with Diaghilev’s company developed, she was invited backstage, first to the wings (as can be seen in the 1920 oil painting Behind the scenes/In the Coulisses, which sees her peeking from behind the drop curtain) and then, thanks to a friendship she made with Lydia Lopokova one of the company’s brightest ballerinas, into the recesses of the dancers’ dressing rooms. There, Knight explained, ‘her room should be my studio…there was to be no conversation it was to be as if I did not exist’ and she spent her hours drawing Lopokova dressing, tying her shoes, preparing her make-up. One dancer in a 1926 painting is shown entirely nude, putting on her tights. Yet there is nothing dirty about it, nothing voyeuristic (as we have recently seen in Mary McCartney’s photographic studies of the Royal Ballet backstage); Knight sees her as a worker and paints her as such. These are not princesses and queens, but girls and women and Knight’s pictures strive to achieve that de-mystification.
Putting on tights 1926 etching hand colour
© Reproduced with permission of The Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2008. All Rights Reserved.
A Ballet Dancer aka Study for Ballet Girl and dressmaker 1932
© Reproduced with permission of The Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2008. All Rights Reserved.
If the paintings and drawings on display are almost entirely of women, it is never with overtly Feminist intentions, more so with naturally feminine ones. After the departure of Nijinksy from the company, Diaghilev’s focus shifted towards the female dancers, and Knight’s works reflect this. (It is also likely to suppose that only the female dancers would have been comfortable with Knight’s presence in their dressing rooms). As memories have faded, as steps have been lost, it is in contemporary accounts and in works of art that we begin to remember the glories of the troupe. Laura Knight’s works are an important part of that heritage, taking us onto and through the stage, offering us wafts of the heady perfume that scented Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
The end of the dance, 1920 oil
© Reproduced with permission of The Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2008. All Rights Reserved.
Laura Knight at the Theatre is on at the Lowry in Salford until July 6th and at Nottingham Castle from 19th July – 28th September
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