Leon Bakst

Léon Bakst was a scene painter and costume designer under the great director of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev. In 1914, art dealer Martin Birnbaum organized the first American showing of Bakst’s works in New York, featuring watercolors and three-dimensional stage mock-ups, to great success. Mrs. Eliza Radeke must have purchased this wonderfully off-center costume study from that exhibition. Bakst depicted the character of the fiancé from The Blue God (Le Dieu Bleu), a ballet choreographed by Michel Fokine and written by Jean Cocteau. The ballet premiered in Paris in 1912. It tells the story of a girl who tries to dissuade her fiancé from becoming a priest and is thereafter tormented by demons; but she is eventually saved by the Blue God, a part performed by Vaslaw Nijinsky, the greatest male dancer of his time. Fokine’s choreography and Bakst’s costumes drew upon Siamese dance and Hindu sculpture.