The Ballets Russes was founded by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris in 1909. It was not a conventional ballet company: Diaghilev assembled the most advanced creative talent of his generation and applied it to theatrical spectacle in a way that had no direct precedent. Igor Stravinsky composed the music; Léon Bakst and later Coco Chanel, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque designed the costumes and sets. The dancers included Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova. The productions were unlike anything that had been seen on the European stage.
The visual language of the Ballets Russes drew heavily on sources outside the Western European decorative tradition. Bakst's costumes for productions such as Schéhérazade (1910) and Thamar (1912) used jewel-toned colours, rich pattern, and Orientalist reference that had no connection to the pale naturalism or geometric restraint of contemporary French fashion. The colours were intense: deep greens, burning oranges, violent blues, acid yellows. The forms were stylised and flat rather than historically detailed.
Impact on Parisian Decorative Arts
The Ballets Russes arrived in Paris at the same moment that the Art Nouveau movement was fading. Art Nouveau's curvilinear forms and naturalistic motifs had dominated the decorative arts of the late nineteenth century, but by 1909 they were already beginning to seem exhausted. What Diaghilev's company offered was a visual vocabulary that was entirely different: bold, geometric in its way, saturated in colour, and drawing on Eastern sources that the Orientalist tradition had made fashionable but that no one had used with such intensity.
The effect on fashion and the decorative arts was swift and pervasive. Couturiers adopted the colours. Jewellers reconsidered their palettes. Furniture, textiles, and interior decoration all showed the influence within a few years of the Ballets Russes' first Paris seasons.
The Cartier Connection
Cartier's design direction shifted noticeably in the years after 1909. The white-on-white palette of the Garland Style, with its diamond lacework on platinum, gave way to bolder colour combinations: coral with lapis lazuli and diamonds, jade with onyx and emeralds, the high-contrast black-and-white of Art Deco combined with sudden bursts of colour. Charles Jacqueau, the designer who worked most closely with Louis Cartier from 1909 onwards, was deeply engaged with the visual language of the Ballets Russes.
The influence was not direct copying but absorption. The same general atmosphere of intense colour, Orientalist imagery, and rejection of Victorian-Edwardian restraint that had produced the Ballets Russes' aesthetic was feeding every area of Parisian design simultaneously. Cartier's move towards colour, towards Egyptian and Persian motifs, and towards the polychrome aesthetic that defines the firm's 1920s production, is inseparable from this broader transformation.
Endurance
The Ballets Russes continued performing until Diaghilev's death in 1929. Its influence on Western design extended far beyond its active years. The vocabulary it established, of rich colour, stylised form, and cultural cross-referencing, remained current in the decorative arts through the 1930s and shaped the visual assumptions of the Art Deco period in ways that are still being traced.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 2 (“Louis, 1898–1919”) and ch. 5 (“Stones Paris: Early 1920s”)
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 131, 135 et al.
- Wikipedia: The Ballets Russes
