Press releases

MINSK, 19 January (BelTA) – Works by world-famous artist, stage set and costume designer Leon Bakst and his contemporaries will be displayed at the National Art Museum of Belarus, BelTA learned from the museum.

The art project will be running from 10 February till 17 April. It will mark the 150th anniversary of Leon Bakst’s birth. There will be more than 40 works of different genres on display, from paintings to costume and set designs. The exposition will feature seven works by the artist from the collection of Belgazprombank, the owner of the largest private collection of Leon Bakst’s easel works in Eastern and Central Europe. One of the most famous exhibits will be the painting “Bathers on the Lido, Venice” bought from an English collector. There will also be three lithographic printings from the holdings of the National Art Museum. The set and costume designs will be brought from the Saint Petersburg State Museum of Theater and Music. Among the exhibits there will be sketches created for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

Visitors to the museum will see watercolor drawings by another eminent artist Napoleon Orda. Twelve drawings depicting Grodno of the second half of the 19th century will be brought from the National Museum in Krakow.

Two playbills by French writer, artist and film director Jean Cocteau will also be showcased in Minsk as part of the project.

Among the paintings on display there will be works by Leon Bakst’s contemporaries Maximilian Voloshin, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, and Konstantin Bogaevsky. The Lithuanian Art Museum will provide paintings by Mikalojus Ciurlionis whose original works were showcased in Minsk for the last time more than a hundred years ago.

The exhibition will open the first stage of the international project devoted to Leon Bakst. After its initial Minsk run, it will move to Vilnius and Riga. The tour will finish in Grodno, the artist’s birthplace.

Leon Bakst (Lev Rosenberg) was born in Grodno in 1866. He was a co-founder of the World of Art artistic movement and the journal of the same name. Leon Bakst made a name for himself as a scene painter for Sergei Diaghilev with the Ballets Russes. He produced scenery for Cleopatra (1909), Scheherazade (1910), Narcisse (1911), Daphnis et Chloe (1912). Today his works are displayed at the world’s most prestigious museums.