Adolescent in ‘Schéhérazade’ 1910 - 1916

Léon Bakst made this costume design for ‘Adolescent in Schéhérazade’ using watercolor, gouache, and pencil, and it’s a riot of color. You can see that the color application isn’t about perfection. There are hard lines, and areas of flat color, it's so playful, which really emphasizes the process of artmaking. It's all about the material stuff here. The way Bakst uses color and pattern, with the reds, yellows, and blues against the pale background, is really something. Look at the hat, and how the artist has rendered the suggestion of jewels on the fabric. And the way the blue sash falls around the dancer's body, creating a kind of flowing, almost liquid movement is fantastic. The physical rendering of the costume really shapes how we understand its emotional context; the way the costume dances, we dance. Bakst’s contemporary Gustav Klimt would have been doing similar things with pattern and color, and of course, thinking about performance, but with painting; it’s all a big conversation!