Looking back at the Ballets Russes: rediscovering Serge Lifar.

This month, with the opening of the exhibition, "Design, Dance and Music of the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929," at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum, Serge Lifar returns briefly to the limelight. The last of Diaghilev's leading men, Lifar was one of the great danseurs of the 1930s, an architect of modern French ballet, and a World War II collaborator, whose relationship with the Nazis caused many to revile him. He was also the owner of the nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, and designs that form the heart of the Atheneum's collection of Ballets Russes material--the oldest such collection in the United States and still one of the best. If ever a man had a knack for being in the right place at the right time, it was Serge Lifar.

Born in Kiev in 1905, he came to adolescence in the chaos of Russia's 1917 revolution, when the city changed masters eighteen times, his grandfather was arrested, and Lifar himself roamed the streets like a "wild child." One day in 1920, stumbling on Bronislava Nijinska's Ecole de Mouvement, he was overwhelmed by the sight of dancers at the barre. "I had stepped out of a broken world," he wrote in his 1965 autobiography, Ma Vie, "and [found] order and harmony."

At fifteen, Lifar was long past the ideal age to begin studying dance. But with dogged persistence, he set out to master the fundamentals of ballet. When Nijinska left the Soviet Union in 1921, he continued to work with her student Anna Vorobieva. Two years later, fate again intervened. Ever short of male dancers, Diaghilev invited the Ecole's five best men to join the Ballets Russes. Lifar was not on the list, but since one of the others had disappeared, he stepped into the breach.

A diamond in the rough, he now willed himself to dazzle. He practiced unceasingly--in Monte Carlo, on rocky precipices; in Paris, on the sidewalks of the brothel-lined Rue Taitbout. He danced in the corps of Les Noces, Contes Russes, the Polovtsian Dances from Borodin's Prince Igor, and Aurora's Wedding; he was a Negro in Scheherazade, an eyeglass peddler in Petrouchka, a Neighbor in Le Tricorne, an Egyptian in Cleopatre, a Policeman in Les Facheux. Dance, he said, was his "mistress," but he did all he could to attract Diaghilev's eye. He mastered double tours, cultivated the master's social and artistic intimates, and, finally, announced his intention to enter a monastery. Diaghilev wept, pleaded: "Why bury yourself alive?" Within days Lifar was bundled off to Turin to study with Enrico Cecchetti, whisked to museums, introduced to the beau monde. His teeth and nose were fixed. In 1925 came his first principal role, Boreas in Leonide Massine's Zephire et Flore.

Between 1925 and 1929, Lifar reigned over the Ballets Russes, the star for whom Diaghilev cooked up yearly novelties. He worked with both Nijinska and Massine, but it was Balanchine, who joined the company in 1924, who, transformed the youth from Kiev into a glamorous deco god: sleek of limb, neoclassical in line, athletic in style. As the Young Man in Balanchine's La Chatte, he was a gleaming image of constructivized manhood; in the title role of Apollon Musagete, a handsome contemporary Apollo; in Prodigal Son, an errant child of modernity. The themes of these ballets--romantic, mythological, biblical--branded themselves on Lifar's persona, just as Balanchine's modernism and emergent neoclassicism imprinted themselves on his muscle memory.

Lifar created his first ballet, Le Renard, under Diaghilev's direction in 1929. But only at the Paris Opera, where he was appointed ballet master in 1929, did he come into his own as a choreographer. His first work for that august house was a fluke. Balanchine, commissioned to stage Beethoven's Creatures of Prometheus, came down with tuberculosis. A sanitorium in Switzerland was prescribed, so he turned the project over to Lifar. Reviews were mixed, but Lifar as Prometheus triumphed.

In the 1930s Lifar reached his zenith as a performer. For the British critic Cyril W. Beaumont, he was one of the great dancers of the century: "His movements are as graceful and lithe as those of a wild animal. Equipped with a splendid technique, an unusual elevation, a fine sense of line, and an admirably formed body, he is the personification of manly vigour, while his engaging and striking personality radiates a fire and intensity of feeling which must affect the most unemotional spectator."

In these years, when he dazzled audiences in Giselle and Le Spectre de la Rose, when as Prometheus, Icarus, David, and Alexander the Great he presented himself as a god or hero of antiquity, Lifar was more than a star dancer. He was a celebrity who hobnobbed with le tout Paris, a force to be reckoned with in the corridors of power. He closed the Foyer de la Danse, made ballet nights a regular feature of Opera programming, sent dancers off to study with Russian emigre teachers, and chose many of his collaborators from the ranks of Diaghilev's artists. For the first time since the Romantic era a century before, ballet at the Opera was chic.

Illustrious names--Sergei Prokofiev, Fernand Leger, Andre Derain, Darius Milhaud, Natalia Gontcharova--gave artistic prestige to Lifar's work. But they could not hide the fact that his choreography was often self-serving and derivative. Indeed, few were the ballets that did not turn on his own role or on the mythologizing of his own-persona. And, except for Icare (performed to a percussion score rather than to conventional music), none ventured beyond Diaghilev's late style and subject matter.

Far more important were his revivals. In 1931 he mounted Le Spectre de la Rose; and in 1932 Giselle, partnering the last of the great Maryinsky ballerinas, Olga Spessivtseva; and Divertissement, a one-act compilation of dances from The Sleeping Beauty; and in 1935 L'Apres-midi d'un Faune (from which he eventually eliminated the Nymphs). Subsequent seasons brought an abbreviated Swan Lake and new productions of Coppelia and Sylvia.

Lifar's Giselle, his most celebrated revival, exalted Albrecht as the quintessential romantic hero. His debut in the part was brilliant. "Admirably matched, the couple Spessivtseva-Lifar need envy the pair Karsavina-Nijinsky in nothing," wrote critic Andre Levinson. Edwin Denby called Lifar's "ecstatic possession" at the climax of the ballet "magnificent." With time, however, his Albrecht verged on the ridiculous. "There was a piece of business in Lifar's Giselle," wrote Denby in 1950, "which was new to me: Mourning at her tomb he seemed for some time unwilling to part with the flowers he had brought. He held them, snatched them back, looked at them appreciatively. Mastering his emotion, he sacrificed them and fainted. But Giselle, dead as she was, rushed out from the wings with a much bigger bunch and pelted him with it headlong. So prompt, so sweet of her, so fitting. He lay drowned in flowers." Not much was left of the deco god.

If the 1930s was Lifar's decade of triumph, the 1940s was his time of shame. In Ma Vie he takes great pains to justify his collaboration with France's Nazi occupiers during World War II. He speaks of a meeting in the first days of the occupation when a mysterious cabal entrusted him with a secret mission. He was to "preserve under the tidal wave of the Occupation that part of the national patrimony represented by the Opera, its stage, its dancers, its treasures, its archives." And he was to do this by winning the confidence of the Germans. Lifar leapt at the chance to save French honor and French art, even as the Free French in London, unfairly in his view, denounced him as a traitor.

As a public figure, Lifar could not have avoided all contact with the Germans, but he could have kept a low profile--as Picasso did. Lifar, however, cast discretion to the winds. He openly fraternized with high German officials; attended parties with Wehrmacht officers; choreographed the ballet Joan de Zarissa to a score by Werner Egk, who stood high in the Nazi musical establishment; had his bust done by another favored Nazi artist, Arno Brecker; wired his congratulations to the Reich ambassador in Paris on the Nazi "liberation" of his birthplace, Kiev. He also made two trips to Germany, and on the second met with Hitler. Long after the war ended, Lifar spoke of the golden hours he had spent alone with der Fuhrer.

When the Allies entered Paris, Lifar was summoned for trial before one of the many committees that sprang up to "purge" France of collaborators. The Opera's dancers (with the exception of Roland Petit) rallied to his defense. Yvette Chauvire, one of the young stars nurtured by Lifar, took the witness stand in a tutu: "Thanks to the maitre," she testified, "the Paris Opera was saved." Just about everyone else--stagehands, dressers, musicians--spoke against him, however. The trial ended with Lifar banished for life from the Opera.

As it turned out, he spent only a couple of years away from "home." In 1947, after a stint directing the Nouveau Ballet de Monte Carlo, he returned to the Opera, although only in 1949 was he allowed to reappear on its stage. Seven years later he gave his last performance (as Albrecht). In 1958 he left his post as artistic director, having served the Opera almost uninterruptedly for twenty-nine years.

Throughout the years, Lifar made a cult of Diaghilev's memory. In 1939, a decade after the latter's death, he organized a huge exhibition at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, filling the great hall with backdrops and drop curtains and the sketches on which they were based. The effect, wrote Alexandre Benois in a review, was of "truly unexpected magnificence." There were hundreds of items, many about Diaghilev himself--photographs of him as a boy and as the tired barin of later years, issues of Mir iskusstva ("The World of Art"), the journal he founded at the age of twenty-six-the materials, according to Benois, who knew the impresario well, for a "character study." The following year, as if in response, Lifar published his biography of Diaghilev. Not wholly reliable, it ended with a first-person memoir--by Lifar--of life in the Ballets Russes.

Over the years, too, he progressively disposed of the collection he had acquired. Some items he came by legitimately, as gifts from Diaghilev before his death; others he pillaged from the apartment in Paris where Diaghilev had kept his art collection and library. Because Diaghilev had died without a will, the apartment was sealed to prevent its contents from disappearing before the estate was settled--either put up for public sale or inherited by heirs who, in Lifar's words, "were not only ignorant of his essential genius but were also unaware of his dearest tastes and closest friendships, that is to say of everything that was his soul and life. We thus saved a remarkable collection of autographs, manuscripts, rare books, scores, and inestimably valuable documents of all sorts."

The collection served Lifar well. In 1933, when Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, the sponsor of his first U.S. tour, "mysteriously forgot her obligations" (as he put it), leaving him almost without fare for his return to Paris, he was persuaded by gallery owner Julien Levy to sell the nearly two hundred items on exhibit in New York City to the Wadsworth Atheneum, for what then seemed to the museum trustees the extravagant sum of $10,000. Included in the collection were drawings by Picasso, many works by Leon Bakst, designs by Giorgio de Chirico (mainly for Le Bal), Andre Derain (mainly for Jack in the Box), Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Juan Gris, Pavel Tchelitchew, Natalia Gontcharova (for Les Noces), Alexandre Benois (for Petrouchka and other works), and Georges Rouault (for Prodigal Son).

That such a remarkable collection ended up in Hartford, better known as an insurance center than an art capital, is a tribute to A. Everett "Chick" Austin, Jr., the director of the Atheneum from 1927 to 1945. Under his aegis, the Atheneum became an exciting showplace for modern art, a center for modernism in its many guises. It was to Austin, a long-time friend, that Lincoln Kirstein first turned in 1933 when seeking a sponsor for Balanchine, and it was Austin who produced the opera Four Saints in Three Acts, which had music by Virgil Thomson, a libretto by Gertrude Stein, choreography by Frederick Ashton, and an all-black cast. And in 1936, for the First Hartford Festival, it was Austin himself who had Gontcharova's sets copied from designs in the Lifar collection for a concert version of Les Noces.

As it turned out, this was only a fraction of what Lifar owned. In 1974, in Monte Carlo, he put Diaghilev's book collection up for sale. Ten years later, in London, he put Diaghilev's music library up for sale, along with numerous other rarities, including Debussy's manuscript for Jeux, Satie and Cocteau's annotated manuscript for Parade, Lady Ripon's scrapbooks, Diaghilev's death mask, and a drawing by Balanchine of Lifar in Prodigal Son. This auction, which like its predecessor was conducted through Sotheby's, grossed more than a million dollars. Then, in 1985, yet another Lifar collection, this one exceptionally rich in programs, letters, and clippings, was given to the archives of the city of Lausanne.

Over the years selective additions were made to the Atheneum collection. Then, in 1995, it was significantly augmented by the purchase of twenty-seven costumes formerly in the collection of Castle Howard, where Brideshead Revisited was filmed. Included in the sale were costumes designed by Matisse, Braque, and Picasso, most last seen in the United States in 1988-89, when they were exhibited at San Francisco's M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. According to The New York Times, the Atheneum spent $66,125 on the purchase, a hefty investment for a collection that was seldom displayed. Obviously, something was afoot.

Like most Connecticut cities, Hartford suffered hard times in the late 1980s, buffeted by layoffs and takeovers in the insurance industry. To attract suburbanites and boost revenue as well as morale, the city fathers have embarked on an ambitious program of cultural tourism. "Design, Dance and Music of the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929" is their most ambitious effort yet. Complementing the show are a number of related events--a festival of Russian films, concerts of Diaghilev-era music by the Hartford Symphony, and "Fire and Ice: A Tribute to Russian Ballet" by the Hartford Ballet. For this homage to Diaghilev, HB's artistic director Kirk Peterson is mounting new versions of The Rite of Spring and L'Apres-midi d'un Faune. Balanchine's Prodigal Son and another Peterson piece, La Danse Neva, a tribute to Mathilde Kschessinska, the prima ballerina assoluta of the Russian fin de siecle, complete the program. It's the kind of grand gesture that Diaghilev would have appreciated.

Lynn Garafola is a senior editor of Dance Magazine and the author of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.