Léon Bakst

Léon Bakst born 10 May 1866 (d. 1924)

Léon Nikolayevich Bakst was a Russian painter and scene- and costume-designer who revolutionised the arts he worked in.

Léon Bakst was born as Lev (Leib) Rosenberg in Grodno (currently Belarus) in a middle-class Jewish family. After graduating from gymnasium (school), he studied at St Petersburg Academy of Arts as a non-credit student, working part-time as a book illustrator.

On his first exhibition (1889) he took the name of Bakst based on his maternal grandmother's family name, Baxter -  Rosenburg was considered too Jewish and not good for business. At the beginning of the 1890s he exhibited his works with the Society of Watercolourists. During 1893-1897 he lived in Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian while still visiting St Petersburg often. After the mid-1890s he became a member of the circle of writers and artists formed by Sergei Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois, which later became the Mir Iskusstva art movement.

In 1899, he co-founded with Sergei Diaghilev the influential periodical World of Art. His graphics for the World of Art magazine brought him fame.

He continued easel painting as well producing portraits of Filipp Malyavin (1899), Vasily Rozanov (1901), Andrei Bely (1905) [pictured left], Zinaida Gippius (1906). He also worked as an art teacher for children of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich. In 1902 he took a commission from Tsar Nicholas II to paint Meeting of Russian sailors in Paris.

In 1898 he showed his works in the Diaghilev-organised First exhibition of Russian and Finnish Artists; in World of Art exhibitions, as well as the Secession in Munich, exhibitions of the Union of Russian Artists, etc.

After the end of the decade of the 1900s, Bakst worked mostly as a stage-designer. Bakst designed settings for Greek tragedies, and in 1908 made a name as a stage and costume designer for Diaghilev with the Ballets Russes (Cleopatra 1909, Shakherezada 1910, Carnaval 1910, Narcissus 1911, Daphnis et Chloé 1912). For this work, Bakst was to make a massive contribution in changing the visual vocabulary of theatre and dance.

During his visits to St Petersburg he taught in Zvantseva's school. One of his students was Marc Chagall (1908-1910).

In 1914 Bakst was elected a member of the Imperial Academy of Arts.

In 1918 he severed  his ties with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. He died in 1924 in Paris from lung problems.

Top right: Self-portrait by Leon Bakst. Bottom left: Portrait of Leon Bakst by Amadeo Modigliani


Design by Léon Bakst for Phedre and Theseus in 1923

Oliver Smith

Oliver Smith born 13 February 1918 (d. 1994)

Oliver Smith was one of the most distinguished and prolific Tony Award-winning scenic designers in American theatre history.

Born in Waupun, Wisconsin, Smith attended Penn State, after which he moved to New York City and began to form friendships that blossomed into working relationships with such talents as Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Carson McCullers, and choreographer Agnes de Mille. His career was launched with his designs for Léonide Massine's ballet Saratoga in 1941 and de Mille's Rodeo in 1942.

Smith designed dozens of Broadway musicals, films (Guys and Dolls, The Band Wagon, Oklahoma!, Porgy and Bess, West Side Story, The Sound of Music), and operas. His association with the American Ballet Theatre began in 1944, when he collaborated with Robbins and Bernstein on Fancy Free, which served as the inspiration for On the Town. The following year, he became Co-Director of ABT with Lucia Chase, a position he held until 1980.

Smith also trained young designers for many years, serving on the faculty of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he taught master classes in scenic design.

Throughout his career, Smith was nominated for twenty-five Tony Awards, often multiple times in the same year, and won ten. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Art Direction for his work on Guys and Dolls.

Smith died of emphysema in Brooklyn, New York in 1994.

Pictured: Members of the Artistic Committee of Ballet Theatre in 1947: L-R: Jerome Robbins, Lucia Chase, Agnes de Mille, Oliver Smith and Aaron Copland.
Photo: Cecil Beaton.

Derek Jarman

Derek Jarman born 31 January 1942 (d. 1994)

Derek Jarman was an English film director, stage designer, artist, and writer.

Jarman was born in Northwood, Middlesex, boarded at Canford School in Dorset and from 1960 studied at King's College London. This was followed by four years at the Slade School of Art, starting in 1963. He had a studio at Butler's Wharf, London, and was part of the Andrew Logan social scene in the 1970s.

On December 22, 1986 he was diagnosed HIV positive, and was notable for later discussing his condition in public. His illness prompted him to move to Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, near to the nuclear power station.

Jarman's first films were experimental super 8mm shorts, a form he never entirely abandoned, and later developed further (in his films Imagining October (1984), The Angelic Conversation (1985), The Last Of England (1987) and The Garden (1990)) as a parallel to his narrative work.

Jarman first became known as a stage designer getting a break into the film industry as production designer for Ken Russell's The Devils (1970), and later made his debut in 'overground' narrative filmmaking with the groundbreaking Sebastiane (1976) [right], arguably the first British film to feature positive images of gay sexuality, and the first film entirely in Latin.

He followed this with the film many regard as his first masterpiece, Jubilee (shot 1977, released 1978), in which Queen Elizabeth I is transported forward in time to a desolate and brutal wasteland ruled by her twentieth century namesake. Jubilee was arguably the first UK punk movie, and among its cast featured punk groups and figures such as Jayne/Wayne County, Jordan, Toyah Willcox, and Adam Ant.

After making the unconventional Shakespeare adaptation The Tempest in 1979, Jarman spent seven years making experimental super 8mm films and attempting to raise money for Caravaggio (he later claimed to have rewritten the script seventeen times during this period). Finally released in 1986, the film attracted a comparatively wide audience (and is still, barring the cult hit Jubilee, probably his most widely-known work), partly due to the involvement, for the first time, of the British television company Channel 4 in funding and distribution. This marked the beginning of a new phase in Jarman's filmmaking career: from now on all his films would be partly funded by television companies, often receiving their most prominent exhibition in TV screenings. Caravaggio also saw Jarman work with actress Tilda Swinton for the first time.

The conclusion of Caravaggio also marked the beginning of a temporary abandonment of traditional narrative in Jarman's work. Frustrated by the formality of 35mm film production, and the institutional dependence and resultant prolonged inactivity associated with it (which had already cost him seven years with Caravaggio, as well as derailing several long-term projects), Jarman returned to and expanded the super 8mm-based form he had previously worked in on Imagining October and The Angelic Conversation.

The first film to result from this new semi-narrative phase, The Last of England told the death of a country, ravaged by its own internal decay and Thatcher's economic restructuring. '"Wrenchingly beautiful … the film is one of the few commanding works of personal cinema in the late 80s - a call to open our eyes to a world violated by greed and repression, to see what irrevocable damage has been wrought on city, countryside and soul, how our skies, our bodies, have turned poisonous,' wrote The Village Voice.

During the 1980s Jarman was still one of the few openly gay public figures in Britain and so was a leading campaigner against anti-gay legislation and to raise awareness of AIDS.

During the making of The Garden, Jarman became seriously ill. Although he recovered sufficiently to complete the film, he never attempted anything on a comparable scale afterwards, returning to a more pared-down form for his concluding narrative films, Edward II (perhaps his most politically outspoken work, informed by his Queer activism) and the Brechtian Wittgenstein, a delicate tragicomedy based on the life of the eponymous philosopher. It was a later complaint of Jarman's that with the disappearance of the independent film sector it had become impossible for him to get finance. Jarman made a side income by directing music videos for various artists including Marianne Faithfull, The Smiths and the Pet Shop Boys.

At the time when he made the film Blue, he was blind and dying of AIDS-related complications. Blue consists of a single shot of saturated blue colour filling the screen, as background to a soundtrack composed by Simon Fisher Turner featuring original music by Coil and other artists, where Jarman describes his life and vision. When it was shown on British television, Channel Four carried the image whilst the soundtrack was broadcast simultaneously on BBC Radio 3, a collaborative project unique for its time.

His final testament as a film-maker was the film Glitterbug made for the Arena slot on BBC2, and broadcast shortly after Jarman's death. Compiled and edited from many hours of super 8 footage shot with friends and companions throughout his career it is a moving collage of memories, people and moments lost in time, accompanied by a specially commisioned soundtrack from Brian Eno.

Jarman's work broke new ground in creating and expanding the fledgling form of 'the pop video' in England, and as a forthright and prominent gay rights activist. Several volumes of his diaries have been published.

Jarman also directed the 1989 tour by the UK duo Pet Shop Boys. By pop concert standards of the time this was a highly theatrical event with costumes and specially shot films accompanying the individual songs.

He is also remembered for his famous shingle cottage-garden, created in the latter years of his life, in the shadow of the Dungeness power station. The house was built in tarred timber. Its beach garden was made using local materials and has been the subject of several books. At this time, he also began painting again.

Jarman was the author of four books: Dancing Ledge, The Last of England, Modern Nature, and At Your Own Risk.

Derek a new documentary on Jarman's life and work, premiered on More4 on 19 February 2008.

Against the tide - Punk Britain, gay Britain, Thatcher's Britain - film-maker Derek Jarman tackled the lot. Jon Savage hails the resurrection of an irrepressible artist - The Guardian

Cecil Beaton

Cecil Beaton born 14 January 1904 (d. 1980)

Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was an English fashion and portrait photographer and a stage and costume designer for films and the theatre.

When Beaton was growing up his Nanny had a Kodak 3A Camera, a popular model which was renowned for being an ideal piece of equipment to learn on. Beaton's nanny began teaching him the basics of photography and developing film. He would often get his sisters and mother to sit for him. When he was sufficiently proficient, he would send the photos off to London society magazines, often writing under a pen name and ‘recommending’ the work of Beaton.

Schooled at Heath Mount School (where he was bullied by Evelyn Waugh) and St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, he went on to Harrow and finally St John's College, Cambridge, which he left without a degree. At the end of his college career in 1925, he set up his own successful photography studio. One of his earliest clients and, later, best friends was Stephen Tennant; Beaton's photographs of Tennant and his circle are considered some of the best representations of the 'Bright Young Things' of the twenties and thirties.

He was already taking photographs for the British edition of Vogue in 1931 when George Hoyningen-Huene, who was a photographer for the French Vogue travelled to England with his new friend Horst. Horst himself would begin to work for French Vogue in November of that year. The exchange and cross pollination of ideas between this collegial circle of artists across the Channel and the Atlantic gave rise to the look of style and sophistication for which the 1930s are known.

Beaton is best known for his fashion photographs and society portraits. He worked as a staff photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue in addition to photographing celebrities in Hollywood.

Beaton was never known as a highly skilled technical photographer, and instead focused on staging a compelling model or scene and looking for the perfect shutter-release moment.

Beaton often photographed the Royal Family for official publication. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother was his favorite Royal sitter. Beaton took the famous wedding pictures of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. During World War II, he worked for the British Ministry of Information, as a documentary photographer.

Beaton had a major influence on and relationship with two other leading lights in British photography, Angus McBean and David Bailey. McBean was arguably the best portrait photographer of his era - in the second part of McBean's career (post-war) his work is clearly heavily influenced by Beaton, though arguably McBean was technically far more proficient in his execution. Bailey was also enormously influenced by Beaton when they met whilst working for British Vogue in the early 60's.

After the war, Beaton tackled the Broadway stage, designing sets, costumes, and lighting for a 1946 revival of Lady Windermere's Fan, in which he also acted.

His most lauded achievement for the stage was the sets and costumes for Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady (1956), which led to two Lerner and Loewe film musicals, Gigi (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964), both of which earned Beaton the Academy Award for Costume Design.

His last work for Broadway was sets and costumes for Coco (1969) starring Katharine Hepburn.

In 1972, he received his knighthood, but suffered a stroke two years later. This hindered him from photographing for five years. He picked up the camera again for a short while in 1979, but died the following year.

Though primarily homosexual — the great love of his life was the wealthy art collector Peter Watson - he did have relationships with women. Beaton also claimed to have had an affair with the American actor Gary Cooper, who was a close friend of his for many years.

Oliver Messel

Oliver Messel born 13 January 1904 (d. 1978)

Oliver Hilary Sambourne Messel was an English artist and one of the foremost stage designers of the 20th century.

Messel was born in London, the second son of Lieutenant-Colonel Leonard Messel and Maud, the only daughter of Linley Sambourne, the eminent illustrator and contributor to Punch magazine. He was educated at Hawtreys, a boarding preparatory school in Kent, Eton — where his classmates included Harold Acton, and Brian Howard — and at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College.

After completing his studies, he became a portrait painter and commissions for theatre work soon followed, beginning with his designing the masks for a London production of Serge Diaghilev's ballet Zephyr et Flore (1925). Subsequently, he created masks, costumes, and sets — many of which have been preserved by the Theatre Museum, London — for various works staged by C. B. Cochran's revues through the late 1920s and early 1930s. He socialised with London society's most glamorous and celebrated figures, including Noel Coward, Peter Watson and his one-time love rival Cecil Beaton.

In 1953, he was commissioned to design the decor for a suite at London's elegant Dorchester Hotel, one in which he would be happy to live himself. The lavishly ornate Oliver Messel Suite combines baroque and rococo styles with modernist sensibility and a considerable dose of fantasy. The suite, along with other suites that he designed in the Dorchester, are preserved as part of Britain's national heritage. It was restored in the 1980s by many of the original craftsmen, overseen by Messel's nephew, Lord Snowdon (Anthony Armstrong-Jones), the former husband of Princess Margaret.

Oliver Messel came from a wealthy, well-connected family and when his nephew, Anthony Armstrong-Jones married HRH Princess Margaret, a life-long relationship with the British royalty began. Messel was later to design Princess Margaret’s home on Mustique Island in The Grenadines. In 1959, Messel, exhausted by a demanding theatre season and recurring arthritis, retreated to Barbados and the lush beauty of the eastern Caribbean. He was 55 and at the peak of a career in which he had dazzled three decades of theatre-goers with his fantastic, romantic and inspired stage sets and costumes. The warmth, colour and vibrancy of the tropics seemed to liberate new sources of energy and imagination, leading him to what would eventually become a whole new career in designing, building and transforming homes. Not content to rest there, he also designed many furnishings for these homes, particularly for outdoor use.

Messel bought an existing house called Maddox, a simple bay house perched above a small beach on the St James coast. With the help of his companion Riis-Hansen and a Barbadian staff, he gradually transformed it using all the trademarks of his theatrical design: slender Greek columns, flattened arches, white-on-white interiors splashed with bright spots of colour, elaborate plaster mouldings - an easy mix of baroque and classical. It was his use of the materials and traditions of island architecture that was truly innovative. Wealthy friends clamoured for Messel to design houses for them, both on Barbados and Mustique He designed and supervised the renovations of many houses. He designed and built Mango Bay from scratch and was commissioned by the Barbados government to restore the old British officers' Garrison headquarters in Queens Park, creating an elegant adaptation of it to a theatre and art gallery.

He would probably have gone on to do much more on Barbados, but was lured away by his friend Colin Tennant, Baron Glenconner and his private island home, Mustique. Glenconner commissioned Messel to design all the houses built on the island. Between 1960 and 1978 Messel created some 30 house plans, of which over 18 have so far been built - a tangible and lasting tribute to his genius. But Barbados remained his first island love and his home, and he died there in 1978, at the age of 74.

One lasting legacy is that his preferred light sage green shade of paint, now known as 'Messel Green' by paint companies in the Caribbean, has been immortalised as many property owners choose this colour for the it’s quintessential Caribbean-ness.

Pavel Tchelitchew

Pavel Tchelitchew born 21 September 1898 (d. 1957)

Pavel Tchelitchew was a Russian-born surrealist painter.

Tchelitchew was born near Moscow on the estate of his aristocratic family. He was educated by a series of French, German, and English governesses, who encouraged his interest in the arts.

His father, a follower of Tolstoyian principles, supported his desire to become a painter. In spite of his father's liberal views, however, the family was expelled from its property in 1918 following the revolution of 1917.

Tchelitchew joined the White army, and the family fled to Kiev, which was not yet under Communist control. While in Kiev he continued his studies and produced his first theatre designs.

By 1920 he was in Odessa, escaping the advancing Red armies. He went on to Berlin via Istanbul. There he met Allen Tanner, an American pianist, and became his lover. In 1923 they moved to Paris and Tchelitchew began painting portraits of the avant-garde and homosexual elite. His work was much admired and bought by Gertrude Stein.

In addition to becoming an accomplished painter, he also became one of the most innovative stage designers of the period and designed ballets for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in Paris.

His first US show was of his drawings, along with other artists, at the newly-opened Museum of Modern Art in 1930.

In 1934, he moved from Paris to New York City with his then partner, writer Charles Henri Ford. He and Ford were at the centre of a social world of wealthy, artistic homosexuals, such as Lincoln Kirstein, for whom he also designed ballets. He also designed for Balanchine's fledgling American Ballet.

From 1940 to 1947, he provided illustrations for the Surrealist magazine View, edited by Ford and writer and film critic Parker Tyler.

Tchelitchew's critical reputation declined in the 1950s and 1960s along with the decline of interest in figurative art.

In 1952 Tchelitchew became a US citizen, but shortly afterwards moved to Frascati, Italy. He suffered a heart attack in 1956 and died on July 31, 1957 in Rome, with Ford by his bedside.

[Centre picture: Charles Henri Ford reads as Tchelitchew paints Peter Watson's portrait]

John Minton

John Minton born 25 December 1917 (d. 1957)

Francis John Minton was a British painter and illustrator of landscapes, portraits, and figures, as well as a theatrical designer. He was born in Cambridge.

Minton was a boarder at Reading School from 1932 to 1935. He studied art at St John's Wood School of Art from 1935 to 1938, served in the war, but was demobbed in 1943, whereupon he worked full-time as a painter, illustrator, and teacher of art. He painted scenes of Britain, both its attractive countryside and its decayed cities, and later travelled overseas for new subjects.

During the 1940s and early 1950s he become a central figure within the Soho art scene. He enjoyed early success as a painter and was associated in the 1940s with the English Neo-Romantics. By the early 1950s he had become the most admired and influential illustrator of his day.

The increasing popularity of abstract painting at the expense of figurative work exacerbated his personal problems. He took his own life, in 1957, with an overdose of drugs.

Minton is perhaps best remembered today by the portrait of him painted by Lucian Freud [pictured above right].

Minton's illustrations can be seen in a number of works by Elizabeth David.

He was also a talented musician during the jazz revival.

[pictured Rotherhithe from Wapping, 1946 by John Minton]

Charles Ricketts

Charles Ricketts born 2 October 1866 (d. 1931)

Charles De Sousy Ricketts was an English artist and designer, best known for his work as a book designer and typographer from 1896 to 1904 with the Vale Press, and his work in the theatre as a set designer.

He was born in Geneva to a French mother and an English father. He grew up mainly in France and Italy. He began his studies in art at the City and Guilds Technical Art School in Lambeth, in 1882, after both his parents had died.

There he met Charles Shannon, painter and lithographer, who would be his lifelong partner in both his artistic and personal life. Choosing to settle in England rather than abroad, they founded The Dial, a magazine, which had five issues from 1889 to 1897, and the Vale Press, named after their house, The Vale in Chelsea, London.

Ricketts was one of two illustrators of Oscar Wilde's work, the other being Aubrey Beardsley who worked on Salomé. He and Shannon were friends and supporters of Wilde.

It was in the work of the Vale Press that Ricketts would find his talents were best employed.

After 1902, he became a more serious painter and sculptor. He also wrote on art, was a collector, and became a member of the Royal Academy in 1928. He designed sets for plays by Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Cecil Lewis; and also the revived Savoy Operas of the 1920s.

In January 1929 Shannon fell while hanging a picture. He never completely recovered his health or senses and remained an invalid until his death in 1937. Charles Ricketts died of heart failure in 1931.

[Painting of Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon by Jacques-Emile Blanche]