Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [49]
Sergei Diaghilev’s father was a cultivated provincial aristocrat who had become a bankrupt. His son learned to convert several vital elements—the collapse of his family, his sexuality and the loss of his homeland through revolution—into an evangelical blurring of all present boundaries. Diaghilev had early flaunted his homosexuality—then a dangerous thing to do in Russia—and established himself as a cosmopolitan dandy with deeply antiestablishment sentiments. If he lacked the essential talent to become an artist, nonetheless, Diaghilev’s remarkable ability to innovate and transform the world of art itself would be carried out with an extraordinary degree of creativity. He loved the tension caused by all that was contradictory: “He loved the friction, the struggle and the fire that was engendered by the new but not necessarily . . . for its own sake.”6
Diaghilev had founded an influential art journal in Russia, had mounted highly successful exhibitions and gradually had come to believe that only the ballet exemplified the ideal, which was that all art forms should be united into one. By 1909, he had formed his own company. The Ballets Russes de Diaghilev caused a sensation across Europe. The colors and boldness of the sets and costumes and the foreignness and exoticism of the company’s Russian and oriental themes became all the rage. But while Diaghilev’s aim was a totality of art, it was as much about liberation of all kinds, including sexuality. And sexuality became a vehicle of rebellion against bourgeois values and one of the central themes of the modern movement.
Audiences were awed by Diaghilev’s lover, the extraordinary dancer Nijinsky, whom Debussy called “a perverse genius . . . a young savage.” It had been Nijinsky’s elemental faun simulating orgasm in Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune that broke all traditional rules of good taste and brought the underlying eroticism of much of the Ballets Russes’ work blatantly to the fore. Women, and men, were left in a heightened erotic state; Faune had caught the imagination of a generation. Privately, homosexuality, too, was a powerful element of the rebellious theme pervading the Ballets Russes; Stravinsky noted that Diaghilev’s entourage was “a kind of homosexual Swiss Guard.” While each new success encouraged Diaghilev to blur yet more boundaries and become still more daring, any disquiet at his company’s work was outweighed by the loud approval.
By 1912, Diaghilev had turned to more introspective and expressionistic music. Without any overarching philosophy of art, he was a master of a powerful strand in modern artistic thought. This was the belief that art delivered people from the constraints of morality and convention to recover a spontaneous life of the emotions. A man constrained by morality would never be free to create. In this way, art was seen as a life force greater than the individual and, eventually, a substitute for religion.
Thus it was only natural that Diaghilev should become one of the standard-bearers for this developing attitude to life and art. Emotions and intuition had just as much validity as all that was rational and objective, and an element of shock was necessary to provoke experience. Art would no longer teach. Its aim was to excite, provoke and inspire, to unlock experience. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was a success because the spirit behind it was already in the air.
However, in 1913, at the first performance of The Rite of Spring, Diaghilev and his colleagues’ daring was to unsettle even