Latest news with #BalletsRusses
Vogue Singapore
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue Singapore
A look inside Gabrielle Chanel's idyllic villa on the French Riviera
Dusk is settling over Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, and little puffs of red dust are flying into the jasmine-scented air as acclaimed dancers Boris Charmatz and Johanna Lenke move fluidly around the clay tennis court at La Pausa, the idyllic villa Gabrielle Chanel had designed according to her exacting specifications in 1929. It's hard to know what her paramour the Duke of Westminster would have made of the cinematic—and supremely physical—duet that unfolded in front of a crowd of artists, curators, collectors, and patrons on Friday evening, but he doubtless observed some more traditional athletic confrontations during his summers spent with Chanel on the French Riviera. The grand hall at La Pausa, Gabrielle Chanel's clifftop retreat overlooking the Bay of Monaco. Courtesy of Chanel The designer made her clifftop retreat La Pausa (meaning 'the pause'), a haven for artists and intellectuals in the 1930s and '40s, inviting the likes of Jean Cocteau, Pierre Reverdy and Luchino Visconti to while away summer evenings among the ancient olive trees and beds of fragrant lavender sloping gently towards the Bay of Monaco. 'After dinner,' reads a Vogue report of a night at La Pausa in the late 1930s, 'the rugs are suddenly rolled up… Salvador Dalí amuses himself with a large borrowed black hat, mimicking a character from the Inquisition. The Duchess of Gramont, draped in brocade, jingles her Indian jewels, while painter Christian Bérard sports an Easter egg on top of his head, and Coco ties wide whimsical ribbons in her hair.' The feminine mirrored bathroom off Gabrielle Chanel's master bedroom has ocean views. Courtesy of Chanel Coco Chanel eventually sold La Pausa in 1953—although not before Dalí had painted his 'The Endless Enigma' on the grounds—but the fashion house she founded acquired it a decade ago in 2015. Now, following a painstaking renovation by architect Peter Marino (who personally nurtured two cactus plants to ensure they reached as tall as those that originally stood sentinel at the foot of the villa's stone staircase), the house looks exactly as it did when Chanel and her circle of high society friends gathered around the piano at nightfall to hear Misia Sert play. 'When I spoke to Peter Marino of his extraordinary five-year renovation, he said that he had meticulously worked to make it feel like Gabrielle Chanel had just left this house,' Yana Peel, president of Chanel Arts, Culture & Heritage, told guests including British filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien, South Korean artist Ayoung Kim, and Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist at the dinner that followed the dancing on La Pausa's opening night. 'And being here in this magnificent setting, it is not very hard to imagine the Roaring Twenties—les Années Folles—in this space where Salvador Dalí painted 11 paintings, where Misia Sert played the piano all night as the Ballets Russes danced.' The dining room opens out onto the central courtyard, complete with an olive tree the designer liked to climb. Courtesy of Chanel Indeed, Marino pored over hundreds of archive photographs in order to restore Chanel's beloved second home to its former glory, from the piano in the living room (where Grammy-nominated singer Alice Smith performed for guests on Friday night) to the books that line the intimate library, the mirrored walls in Coco's magnificent bathroom, to the bronze Giacometti lamp that sits beside her bed. While the property—with its calming sea views, graceful stone staircase and cloister garden—is undeniably spectacular, the decor (with the notable exception of that decadent bathroom) is simple—almost austere, likely inspired by the clean lines and hushed atmosphere of Aubazine Abbey in Corrèze, where the designer spent much of her childhood following the death of her parents, and which was so key to the aesthetic she would later establish at Chanel. François Hugo, Pierre Colle, Audrey James Field, Maria Ruspoli-Hugo and Gabrielle Chanel on the olive tree in the cloister at La Pausa, 1938. Roger Schall © Schall Collection In her speech to guests, Peel noted that she was initially surprised to discover that Gabrielle Chanel did not decorate the walls of La Pausa with artworks, but realized that, 'for her home, she collected artists. And she gave them the ultimate luxury, which is freedom, time, and space.' Chanel Arts Culture & Heritage is reopening La Pausa, which will remain a private residence but serve as a 'seat of creativity, culture and hospitality', with the ambition of extending that tradition, she said. 'The volatility in our world brings us back to the sources of joy that remain everlasting,' said Peel. 'Friendship, art, nature, and truly the primacy of human creativity.' This article first appeared in Vogue US.
Boston Globe
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Yuri Grigorivich, giant of Soviet ballet, is dead at 98
The ballet told the story of the enslaved gladiator Spartacus, who led a failed revolt in ancient Rome, a tale that might bring to mind another revolution, one that did not fail: the Russian Revolution of 1917. Compared with earlier Soviet productions set to Aram Khachaturian's 1954 score, Mr. Grigorovich's was streamlined and simplified, with obvious good guys (Spartacus and his wife) and bad guys (the rich Crassus and his courtesan mistress). Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up What made the work most distinctive, though, was the style of dancing: It was big and bold, epic in scale and emotion. Advertisement Masses of men filled the stage, in armor or bare-chested, marching, kicking, jumping. Spartacus and Crassus, in soliloquy-like solos, spun like tornadoes and leaped impossibly high, with slashing, stage-spanning, split-kick jumps. Their climactic battle was a dance-off to end all dance-offs. In its emphasis on dancing -- and dancing as athletic spectacle -- Mr. Grigorovich's choreography departed from the previously dominant style of Soviet ballet: dramatic ballet, or 'drambalet.' To conform to political strictures around art -- under Socialist Realism, abstraction was to be avoided -- drambalet de-emphasized dance steps in favor of gestural storytelling, and favored acting influenced by the school of Konstantin Stanislavsky. (His approach, which stressed the actor's use of lived experience, would become the basis of Method acting.) The height of drambalet was a 1940 production of 'Romeo and Juliet' by Leonid Lavrovsky, the man Mr. Grigorovich replaced as artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet in 1964. Advertisement The attention to male dancers in 'Spartacus' was also new. 'At last the Bolshoi men are allowed to dance,' Barnes wrote, 'and indeed the ballet is as much for them as, say, 'Swan Lake' is for women.' 'Spartacus' was a huge hit, at home and abroad, as was a 1975 ballet film featuring the heroically explosive Vladimir Vasiliev in the title role. The production became the Bolshoi Ballet's signature piece, as well as the model for later Grigorovich works, including his 1975 version of 'Ivan the Terrible.' Mr. Grigorovich's ballets were popular nearly everywhere, and he was considered a genius by most Russian critics. Some Western critics came close to agreeing. Barnes hailed him as 'the most talented Russian choreographer since Mikhail Fokine,' of the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg and the Ballets Russes in Paris. Many Western critics, though, found his choreography lacking in subtlety and taste -- especially those in America, where the Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine set the aesthetic standards. 'What it's designed for is force,' Arlene Croce wrote of 'Spartacus' in a 1975 review in The New Yorker. She called the work relentless and repetitive, describing it as a 'bludgeoning,' yet she praised the passionate dancers. 'Even in trash like 'Spartacus,'' she wrote, 'Bolshoi dancers can impress you with their love of theater, their rage to perform.' Advertisement In his 1982 version of 'The Golden Age,' a tale of Communist youth facing corrupt gangsters, set in the 1920s to a 1930 score by Shostakovich, Mr. Grigorovich provided starring roles for his new protégé, Irek Mukhamedov, and Natalia Bessmertnova, whom he married in 1968 after divorcing his first wife, the esteemed ballerina Alla Shelest. But 'The Golden Age' would be his last new work. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, amid various internal power struggles at the Bolshoi, Mr. Grigorovich faced accusations that he had dried up creatively and was an arrogant, inflexible autocrat who would not allow other choreographers into the company. Prominent dancers, including the aging star Maya Plisetskaya and Mr. Grigorovich's former protégé, Vasiliev, openly criticized him. For years, Mr. Grigorovich had clashed with the Bolshoi management. In 1995, objecting to changes in the hiring of dancers, and to the hiring of Vasiliev as the artistic director of the Bolshoi Theater, Mr. Grigorovich resigned. The day after the announcement, Bolshoi dancers refused to perform. It was the closest thing to a strike in the company's history. To many, he remained a hero. Yuri Nikolayevich Grigorovich was born on Jan. 2, 1927, in the city then called Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). His father, Nikolai, was an accountant, and his mother, Klaudia (Rozai) Grigorovich, was a dancer from a family of dancers and circus entertainers. Her brother, Gyorgi Rozai, was an acclaimed character-style dancer in the Ballets Russes. Yuri trained at the Leningrad Ballet School (later the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet). Upon graduating in 1946, he joined the Kirov Ballet (now the Mariinsky). Short in stature, he performed demi-character roles like the Golden Idol in 'La Bayadère' and a Chinese dancer in 'The Nutcracker.' Advertisement Mentored by choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov -- who advocated a Russian classical approach and had also mentored Balanchine in the 1920s, but whose work had been classified as 'formalist,' a taboo in the Soviet Union -- Mr. Grigorovich began presenting his choreography in 1956. The following year, the Kirov debuted 'The Stone Flower,' his remake of a drambalet with the addition of abstract dancing. It received the official sanction of being remounted at the Bolshoi. His 1961 work, 'Legend of Love,' was also a success. Soon after, during the upheaval over the Kirov star Rudolf Nureyev's defection to the West, Mr. Grigorovich became the chief ballet master at the Kirov. Then, at 37, he moved to Moscow to lead the Bolshoi. After resigning from the Bolshoi in 1995, Mr. Grigorovich moved to the southern Russian city of Krasnodar to start a new ballet company under his own name. He headed juries at several international ballet competitions, including the Benois de la Danse in Moscow. In 2005, Alexei Ratmansky, then the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, brought Grigorovich's 'The Golden Age' back into the repertory, and Mr. Grigorovich visited the company as an honored guest. Mr. Grigorovich has no immediate survivors. His wife, Bessmertnova, died in 2008, and he had no children. After Ratmansky's resignation from the Bolshoi in 2008, Mr. Grigorovich returned to the company as a choreographer and ballet master, a position he retained until his death. This article originally appeared in Advertisement
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Yuri Grigorovich, choreographer who ruled the Bolshoi Ballet for decades with his brazen, macho style
Yuri Grigorovich, the Russian choreographer, who has died aged 98, was artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet for more than 30 years, its defining choreographer and the single most influential figure in Russian dance. His ballet Spartacus became a world hit, a cultural landmark redolent of Soviet might and masculine force, and contains probably the most demanding male lead role ever choreographed. Grigorovich was a forceful representative of Russia's traditional adherence to iron dictators, whether in politics or culture – fearless, devious and impermeable to challenges either to his rights as leader or the artistic merit of his choreography. To some observers, his exceptional talent as a choreographer excused, or at least explained, his style. To others, he was an appalling example of the most old-fashioned kind of Russian chief – self-absorbed, repressive, and damaging to the country's progress. A little over 5ft tall, like many of Russia's leaders, he ruled the Bolshoi Ballet through the Cold War and into the post-communist mid-1990s, when a combination of dancers' mutinies and Western audiences' coolness caused his removal. But it told of his formidable nature, and the failure of more democratic modern ideas of leadership in his successors as Bolshoi director, that at 81 he was back in de facto charge of the company, his autocratic style suiting Putin's era quite as well as it had suited Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's. Grigorovich assessed his own position in a potted biography: 'Yuri Grigorovich is considered to be the greatest living choreographer in the world of ballet today.' This opinion was widely held in Russia and, even if it was hubristic, many European and US ballet watchers could agree that he was a major creative figure in dance history. He moulded a vision of late 20th-century Russian ballet that for all its faults proved remarkably durable for modern audiences – glamorous, slick, acrobatic and powered by a stereotypical sexuality, in which men are muscled and women are florid courtesans or pliant, docile flowers. The brazen style, though it lacked musical or expressive sensitivity, strongly appealed to Russia's most beautiful ballerinas and most macho male dancers, and ensured that on Bolshoi world tours, even if the ballets were harshly criticised, the dancers looked amazing. Born on 2 January 1927 in Leningrad, Yuri Nikolaevich Grigorovich came from a dancing family: his uncle was a character dancer with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and his mother had ballet training. Others in his family were circus artists, and acrobatic fearlessness was a given in Grigorovich's ballets, often including hair-raising lifts in the duets. He trained at Leningrad's great ballet academy; during the siege of Leningrad by Hitler's forces, the school was evacuated to Perm, along with many of Leningrad's leading artistic figures. He joined the depleted Kirov Ballet in 1946; there, due to his small, athletic build, he was categorised as a 'character grotesque dancer', excelling in high jumps and flexibly distorted body shapes. For 15 years he performed classical ballet's character roles such as the bravura Golden Idol in La Bayadère, Puss in Boots in The Sleeping Beauty and one of the Chinese dancers in The Nutcracker, as well as sturdy parts in Soviet folk-ballets. 'To every role he brought a psychological and emotional nuance,' wrote the Leningrad ballet critic Igor Stupnikov. This fusion of physical and emotional extroversion became a characteristic of Grigorovich's own ballets. His first two full-evening productions for the Kirov, The Stone Flower (1957) and The Legend of Love (1961), both later staged for the Bolshoi, revealed, according to the country's senior choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov, a new master of ballet. They remain for many his most original works and are still regularly performed in Russia. The composer Dmitri Shostakovich (whose sister had been Grigorovich's music teacher) exclaimed that the inner spirit, emotional complexity and gymnastic expressiveness of Grigorovich's choreography heralded a new era for dance-theatre. In the disciplinary fall-out within the Kirov from Rudolf Nureyev's sensational defection in 1961, Yuri Grigorovich was elevated to chief ballet-master. In 1964 he was headhunted by the Kremlin for the directorship of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, the USSR's flagship company in political and social terms. For the next 31 years, from 1964 to 1995, Grigorovich was the exclusive creator and artistic dictator of the Bolshoi. He made few ballets, but he did them on a monumental Soviet scale, and they became iconic Bolshoi events, as much politically intended as artistic. The bold, melodramatic Spartacus in 1968 remains his enduring masterpiece, its title role giving rise to a special Bolshoi superhero type of male dancer, notably Vladimir Vasiliev, considered by Russians the greatest male dancer of all time; Irek Mukhamedov, who later joined the Royal Ballet; and more recently the remarkable Ivan Vasiliev. Subsequent performances by Western stars such as the Royal Ballet's Carlos Acosta and Paris Opera Ballet's Nicolas Le Riche exposed an unexpectedly universal humanity in the work, proving Grigorovich's art to be something more than simply Soviet propaganda. Other Grigorovich ballets travelled less well, such as his beetling study of Ivan the Terrible (1975); Angara (1976), a ballet about Siberian land pioneers; and The Golden Age (1982), set to Shostakovich's rip-roaring Twenties score, in which good Soviet footballers trounced decadent Western ones. He filled the Bolshoi repertoire with his idiosyncratic versions of the classics: The Sleeping Beauty (1963), The Nutcracker (1966), Swan Lake (1969), Romeo and Juliet (1979), Raymonda (1984), La Bayadère (1991), Don Quixote and Le Corsaire (both 1994). Their dominance at the Bolshoi remained for many the chief stumbling-block to the company's artistic revival, but groomed the 'big' style for which it was world-renowned. As head of the Leningrad ballet academy's choreographic faculty (1974-88), Grigorovich also wielded total control over the emergence of other native choreographers. Constant mutinies rose in the Bolshoi over lack of variety in repertory, and his casting preferences – usually favouring his wife, the ethereal ballerina Natalia Bessmertnova – kept many a dissident ballerina out of view. Most vocally hostile was the Bolshoi's senior superstar Maya Plisetskaya, whose vast home popularity enabled her to maintain her own loyal group of performers within the Bolshoi, with the power to commission her own ballets (such as the celebrated Carmen) in rare defiance of the Grigorovich monopoly. She wrote scathingly of him in her autobiography: 'Our servile, and later semi-servile life, gave rise to many a little Stalin. The mortar of Soviet society was fear... And there were plenty of reasons for fear at the Bolshoi.' In the 1980s glasnost period, even Grigorovich's own greatest protégé, Vladimir Vasiliev, began to openly attack his cumbersome ballets, and dancers demonstrated against the monolithic repertory and the favoured status of foreign tours (the only opportunity make money and get outside critical feedback). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's more commercially sensitive political masters also listened to the Western impresarios who felt that the Bolshoi's artistic reputation and box office appeal were being damaged, and they dismissed Grigorovich in 1995. Undaunted, he founded a new young company in Krasnodar, Siberia, and consolidated his standing as ballet's elder statesman by chairing the juries of leading ballet competitions. Meanwhile, he frequently commented on the inability of the Bolshoi to find a choreographer or director equal in force to himself. His loyalist coaches and dancers within the Bolshoi stirred dissatisfaction with subsequent directors, most significantly Russia's only other truly gifted choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, who found the vicious internal politicking on Grigorovich's behalf impossible. When Ratmansky resigned in 2008, the 81-year-old Grigorovich was reinstalled as the Bolshoi's main choreographer and ballet-master. Yuri Grigorovich was much decorated by Soviet and post-communist governments, notably by Leonid Brezhev and Mikhail Gorbachev. He won the Lenin Prize in 1970 and 1986, the Order of Lenin in 1976 and the USSR State Prize in 1977 and 1985, as well as several lifetime awards from post-Soviet governments and a host of honours from Eastern European countries. He was married twice: first to the Kirov ballerina Alla Shelest, whom he divorced; then in 1965 the Bolshoi ballerina Natalia Bessmertnova, who died in 2008. He said: 'I married my first wife for her intelligence, and my second wife for her beauty.' He had no children. Yuri Grigorovich, born January 2 1927, died May 19 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
BRB2 review — a homage to the Ballet Russes from Birmingham's finest
Young talent claims the spotlight in BRB2, Birmingham Royal Ballet's ensemble of recent dance graduates. Don't go expecting to see Carlos Acosta in action. Now in his sixth year as BRB's high-profile director, the Cuban-born ballet superstar is an overseer of the company's junior group. The youth company's touring showcase this year, optimistically titled Carlos Acosta's Ballet Celebration, pays tribute to modern ballet history. The touring programme launched at the Birmingham Hippodrome consists of excerpts from five classic dance works, all first seen more than a hundred years ago thanks to the artistic nous of the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and the famed Ballets Russes. All but one of the dances on view were choreographed by Mikhail Fokine. Les Sylphides, dating from 1909, is
New York Times
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Magic of Ballet Captured by a Master's Camera
Only 500 copies of Alexey Brodovitch's 'Ballet' were printed when it was published in 1945, yet this modest artist's book would come to have a seismic influence on the course of photography. Like the rarest works in the genre — 'The Americans' by Robert Frank (1958) or 'Evidence' by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan (1977) — 'Ballet' inspired generations of artists and became a touchstone in the history of photography. For years, 'Ballet' has been a coveted treasure for collectors, curators and scholars. Very few copies exist today after a fire in 1956 at Brodovitch's house in Pennsylvania destroyed his archive, including the photographs and negatives of 'Ballet,' and dozens of books. Now, as part of its 80th anniversary, 'Ballet' has been republished by Little Steidl in a painstaking reconstruction of the original. Brodovitch, the art director of Harper's Bazaar from 1934 to 1958, was a monumental force in visual design, influencing the look of magazines for decades. He had a distinct visual pedigree. Born near St. Petersburg, Russia, at the end of the 19th century, he moved to Paris in the 1920s. There, he took graphic design commissions from the fashion houses of Patou, Poiret and Schiaparelli and designed sets for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Working with Diaghilev, he observed the impresario's attempt to mix the aesthetically refined Parisian sensibility with the passion of the Russian-born choreographers, dancers and teachers who had found a home in France. In 1924, he won a competition for innovative design with his poster for the annual Bal Banal, beating out Picasso, who came in second. Despite that victory, Brodovitch would become friends with Picasso, as well as Jean Cocteau, Fernand Léger, Matisse, Stravinsky and the great Ballets Russes dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Brodovitch arrived in the United States in 1929, having been 'a captive witness and an enthusiastic participant in the symphony of artistic experimentation that was Paris in the 20s,' Kerry William Purcell wrote in his 2002 book about Brodovitch's life and work. Bringing ideas from those modern art movements with him, Brodovitch turned Harper's Bazaar into an incubator for original graphic design that reflected the dry philosophical wit of Dada, the canny geometries of the de Stijl movement and the Constructivism that imbued structure and shape with social purpose. Some of those ideas came from Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, an artistic bellwether of the early 20th century that emphasized collaboration across artistic disciplines. 'The Rite of Spring,' commissioned by Diaghilev, with a score by Stravinsky and choreography by Nijinsky, was so provocative that the production caused a riot at its premiere in Paris, in 1913: hostile audience members booed and some walked out. The New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce, reviewing a biography of Diaghilev in 1980, wrote, 'It seemed that in that moment art was enormous — globally important, visionary — in a way that it has never been since.' Brodovitch had absorbed the company's avant-garde spirit, which is evident in his bold approach to the use of images in Harper's Bazaar. The magazine page was the photography gallery of the first half of the 20th century, and Brodovitch used his Design Laboratory, the influential class he taught at the New School, as a breeding ground to cultivate new talent. The roster of photographers — among them Diane Arbus, Saul Leiter, Lisette Model and Garry Winogrand — who passed through the lab constitutes the core of the New York School. Included, too, were several studio photographers, notably Richard Avedon and Lillian Bassman. And Brodovitch took another cue from Diaghilev: 'Astonish me!' was the impresario's directive for dancers and choreographers, and Brodovitch used it too when assigning photographers to shoot for the magazine. 'Ballet,' Brodovitch's only book, includes 104 pictures — shot in New York in the late 1930s — of the Ballets Russes companies that were formed after Diaghilev's 1929 death. The poet and dance critic Edwin Denby, whose essay is reprinted in the new edition, wrote, 'There are many fine moments that seemed like the bright afterglow of the 30-year-long Diaghilev epic and at the end of an atmosphere in dancing we came to know as Ballets Russes or Russian ballet.' Denby also describes the artistic ambition with which 'Ballet' was conceived. Brodovitch, he wrote, 'was trying to catch the elusive stage atmosphere that only ballet has, as the dancers in action created it.' He wanted to render ballet magic in visual terms, Denby added, to show 'the unconscious grace and spontaneous animation all through that turns a choreography from a lesson into a dance.' To make the pictures for 'Ballet,' Brodovitch would lurk behind the scenes shooting rehearsals; he captured performances from the wings. He used a hand-held 35-millimeter Contax camera and relied on available light. He pushed the medium, slowing down the shutter speed for a blurred effect to capture movement, and stretching the exposure for more grain and contrast. In the darkroom, he dodged and burned for extreme highlights in some areas and deep shadows in others. He intended to foreground shape, blur, contrast, gesture and motion — the atmosphere of dance — in the photographs. 'The photograph is not only a pictorial report,' Brodovitch said. 'It is also a psychological report.' Brodovitch divided 'Ballet' into segments, one for each of the 11 dances, which include Bronislava Nijinska's 'Les Noces,' George Balanchine's 'Cotillon' and Leonide Massine's 'Symphonie Fantastique.' The book, horizontal in format, is designed with two photographs in a spread, each page with a full-bleed picture; when the book is opened, the two images create a single panorama. The sections read like a continuous strip of film, as in a movie, in sequences that flow with their own rhythm and cadence. The photographs capture at once some combination of the ephemeral and the lapidary, a phenomenon Brodovitch exploited to great cinematic effect with layout and design. The book is an intentional challenge to the stillness of photography. With dance as the subject of 'Ballet,' Brodovitch achieved a condition of motion by taking the medium to its limits. 'These pictures totally violated the accepted conventions of good photographic technique, which demanded a sharp rendition of the subject and a wide, smooth total scale,' Gerry Badger wrote in 'The Photobook: A History.' 'Far from trying to mitigate these shortcomings, Brodovitch deliberately exaggerated them.' When Herman Landshoff, who made the final prints for the photographs in the original book, confessed to Brodovitch that he had accidentally dropped a negative and stepped on it, Brodovitch seemed delighted. 'Print it exactly as it is,' he said. 'It's part of the medium, things like that.' When the book came out in the 1940s, the pictures seemed messy and unresolved compared to standard magazine photography. But Brodovitch's unconventional exploration of the graphic possibilities in photographs gave license to younger photographers; variations of exposure, movement and blur became characteristic of the work of Ernst Haas, Leiter and William Klein in the 1950s and '60s. Brodovitch, working with J.J. Augustin, the publisher of the original 'Ballet,' used grained gravure plates to print the book's photographs, a process that yields luscious print quality with deep blacks and velvety gray tones; the ink viscosity, however, is not stable so it is hard to maintain consistency through a print run. That was a choice Brodovitch made, said Nina Holland, who runs Little Steidl, a boutique imprint of Steidl, specializing in distinctive printing techniques. Holland, who oversaw the new edition's production, also edited it with Joshua Chuang, a photography director at Gagosian. Brodovitch, Holland said, was curious 'about harnessing an industrial machine as a direct means of making an artistic work.' For the new 'Ballet,' Holland invented a printing process that required scanning the gravure pages from several copies of the 1945 book — the closest source to the original photographs that remains — and using offset lithography to print the copies. Brodovitch had the instincts of an artist. While he was visionary at transforming the magazine page in his day job, 'Ballet' was his single attempt to make a work of art that reflected not only his deeper cultural values but also his truer sensibility. 'As far as I know, Brodovitch did not talk to anyone about how he made the book,' Holland said. 'He simply handed it out, and with great pride.' For Brodovitch, the Ballets Russes companies brought back impressions of his boyhood in Russia, Denby wrote, 'the memories of family theater parties and of poignantly butterfly-brilliant creatures on a magic stage.' While 'Ballet' was a fully resolved experiment with photography and design that tapped the imagination of generations of artists, it was, equally, a homage to art making — in this case ballet, which was so close to Brodovitch's heart. 'He was not photographing strangers,' Denby wrote, 'he was photographing his family; and that is why his pictures have so intimate a tone.'
