Bakst – Des Ballets Russes à la Haute Couture

The exhibition Bakst – Des Ballets Russes à la Haute Couture, presented at the Institut Français du Portugal in Lisbon in 2018, offered Portuguese audiences a rare window into the extraordinary creative universe of Léon Bakst (1866–1924). A painter, stage designer, and theoretician, Bakst was known above all as the principal collaborator of the Ballets Russes and the Paris Opera, and the creator of stage designs and costumes for masterpieces such as Shéhérazade, The Spirit of the Rose, The Afternoon of a Faun, and Daphnis and Chloe. The Lisbon presentation brought this landmark retrospective — originally conceived jointly by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Opéra national de Paris — to a new audience, as part of the Institut Français du Portugal's longstanding mission of fostering Franco-Portuguese artistic dialogue. The West first discovered Bakst through the earliest seasons of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and the stage designs and costumes he created for Cleopatra (1909) and especially Shéhérazade (1910) immediately established his reputation as an avant-garde designer and "magician of colours," a title bestowed on him by Gabriele D'Annunzio. The exhibition traced this meteoric rise, illustrating how Bakst drew on Orientalism, ancient Greek mythology, and a deeply personal theory of colour and symbolism to create works of ravishing visual intensity. He articulated his belief that every colour of the spectrum carries a gradation capable of expressing emotions ranging from frankness and chastity to sensuality, pride, and despair — a philosophy he put into vivid practice in productions like Shéhérazade. Beyond the stage, the exhibition highlighted Bakst's sweeping influence on the broader world of art and fashion. His feverish creations, marked by the eroticism of the body and conceived in dialogue with composers such as Debussy and Ravel and choreographers like Nijinsky, earned the admiration of Proust, Cocteau, and Nabokov and went on to inspire later generations of designers, including Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld. His work revolutionised not only theatrical stage design but also fashion and the decorative arts — a legacy the Lisbon exhibition celebrated by bringing together costume sketches, set designs, and archival materials that demonstrated how one artist's vision could reshape an entire cultural era.