Hubert Stowitts: The Painter Who Partnered Pavlova.

HUBERT Julien Stowitts earned his letter in track at UC Berkeley, and at his father's insistence dutifully prepared to pursue an advanced degree at Harvard, but found himself sidetracked into a performing career. During the course of the next four decades that choice led to six years with Anna Pavlova's company (1915-1921), cabaret work, musicals, movies, and finally, serious study of theosophy. Along the way he sketched and painted, first recording the leading dancers of his day, among whom were Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Ida Rubinstein, Michel Fokine, Adolf Bolm, and Vaslav Nijinsky, and finally, the brilliant mandalas of theosophic meditation.

Born in Nebraska in 1892, he grew up in California, where his parents had moved because of his father's tuberculosis. Always a good student, he was encouraged by his parents to attend college. He was admitted to Berkeley, where he continued to do well academically. What proved to be the most important part of his education, however, lay across the bay in San Francisco. There he discovered Asian art, artifacts, and theater on what had been the Barbary Coast (now North Beach). In his sophomore year Stowitts saw the Danish ballerina Adeline Genee partnered by Alexander Volinine on a variety program at the Valencia Theater. It was his first exposure to ballet, and he was determined to study it seriously.

During the summer Berkeley offered dance classes taught by a former Paris Opera dancer improbably named Louise La Gai. The course was designed for women only, so she accepted Stowitts, her first male pupil, for private classes. A year later he made his first public appearance in Berkeley's historic Greek Theater dancing a solo based on the mythical figure Hermes. As male ballet dancers were in short supply even a beginner such as Stowitts found a sufficient number of paid performing opportunities to drop his day jobs on campus. When Pavlova appeared on tour early in 1915 he auditioned for her. She encouraged him to continue to study but had no opening in her company at the time. After graduation that summer, while preparing to head east and enter Harvard, he received a telegram from her offering him a position. He accepted enthusiastically and began his career in the company of the most famous ballerina of the day.

Stowitts was tall, blond, blue-eyed, and as physically handsome as a statue of a mythic classical hero. His ballet training was rudimentary but he had a gift for plastique thanks to his ideal proportions. His artistic talent was eclectic, initially influenced by his childhood familiarity with American design and dance. This, combined with his appreciation of Asian art and performance, made him an ideal dancer in the exotic repertory of the Pavlova company. Alexander Volinine, whom he had seen partner Genee previously, was now partnering Pavlova when Stowitts first joined. He would later assume a similar role, but for now he was dancing in the corps, limited by his less polished technique.

He appeared in modest roles in Coppelia, The Sleeping Beauty (as the Oriental Prince), Orfeo, Raymonda, and Walpurgis Night (as one of the revelers). When Volinine was injured, he became Pavlova's partner in the latter. In La Peri he shared choreographic credit with the company's resident choreographer Ivan Clustine and also designed decor and costumes for it as well as his own Indo-Chinese solo. For a Syrian ballet he boldly substituted his own version of a character solo instead of the one Clustine had choreographed. His press reception during a European tour was enough to embolden him to leave the company and strike out on his own.

His career in popular theater and cabaret began with the first of the English producer Charles Cochran's annual reviews in 1921. They set standards of excellence and were a mainstay of the London stage for the next two decades. Stowitts designed sets and costumes and performed with enough success to be cast in Irving Berlin's Music Box Review on Broadway along with Ruth Page, another former member of the Pavlova company. His paintings received their first solo showing in the prestigious Knoedler Gallery, where he had the satisfaction of seeing his first sales. At the end of the musical's run, he returned to Paris and performed at the Folies Bergere for two seasons while devoting considerably more time to painting.

With the proceeds of a very remunerative silent film (The Magician, 1926) in which he choreographed and danced a bacchanal scene, he re-channeled his life into a decade of travel and painting. He established himself first as a portrait painter in Italy, where Mussolini was one of his subjects, then as an amateur anthropologist and painter in Java and India. Everywhere he went, he studied the indigenous dances, collected artifacts, and painted a record of life he saw vanishing with the advance of technology.

When he returned to the United States in 1932, he reunited with his family in Los Angeles. Chester Hale, an old friend from the Pavlova company and the man who had recommended him to Irving Berlin, found him parts in several movies, one of which was The Painted Veil starring Greta Garbo. At forty-two he still looked splendid in his solo as the Sun God. A year later, as Prometheus, he made his first stage appearance at the Hollywood Bowl. His final show of paintings was at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. It was a popular attraction with the public until Nazi authorities closed it down because of the presence of black and Jewish athletes. He crated and shipped the paintings back to the United States. To cover his expenses and passage home he made his last movie appearance in Fanny Elssler, the 1937 UFA film biography of the Viennese Romantic ballerina with Lilian Harvey. He designed the set and costumes and choreographed the Javanese sequence.

Back in the United States he retired to a studio in the Redondo Beach home of some fellow Berkeley graduates, where he was the caretaker, and devoted himself to paintings revealing the ancient wisdom he had encountered in India. He also lectured on the life and crafts he had seen during his years in Java and India. He had ended the estrangement with his father that had begun when he "ran off with that Russian woman and threw away his education." His death in 1953 went unnoticed by the press.