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Bakst, Léon [Rosenberg, Lev (Samoylovich)]
(b Grodno, Belarus, 10 May 1866; d Paris, 27 Dec 1924). Russian painter and stage designer of Belorussian birth. Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Bakst was educated in St Petersburg, attending a gymnasium and then the Academy of Arts (1883–6). He began professional life as a copyist and illustrator of teaching materials but quickly moved on to illustration for popular magazines. His tastes were influenced and horizons enlarged when he met Alexandre Benois and his circle in 1890. Bakst travelled regularly to various countries in Europe and North Africa and studied in Paris with a number of notable artists including the French Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Académie Julian and, from 1893 to 1896, the Finnish landscape painter Albert Edelfelt. Returning to St Petersburg, he became active as a book designer and fashionable portrait painter. With Benois and Serge Diaghilev he was a founder and leading member of the WORLD OF ART (Mir Iskusstva) group in 1898 and was largely responsible for the technical excellence of its influential magazine. Later he contributed graphics to such publications as Apollon and Zolotoye Runo (‘The golden fleece’). In 1906 he became a drawing teacher at Yelizaveta Zvantseva’s private art school in St Petersburg, where his pupils included Marc Chagall. The portrait of the dancer Isadora Duncan (Oxford, Ashmolean) in brush and ink, dating from her Russian tour in 1908, is typical of his draughtsmanship in its sensual and flowing movement.
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