Imagine being able to enjoy, in the very same evening, both Russia’s famed Kirov Ballet performing an opulent production of Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” and the legendary Rudolf Nureyev at his full intensity and magnificence.
The more ballet-knowledgeable of you might opine that that would be quite a trick, given that, while the Kirov is enjoying one of its best seasons, the legendary Nureyev arabesqued from our midst some nine years ago.
Which of course he did. But, in some 35 paintings and drawings dating back to 1977, the artist Jamie Wyeth captured Nureyev’s spirit, talent and (if you will) soul, and these remarkable pictures have just gone on display in a new exhibition at the capital’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where the Kirov is holding forth this month.
The Wyeth pictures are in the Kennedy Center’s terrace-level gallery — precursor to what is planned as a major national museum here dedicated to the performing arts.
It has always struck me as a perverse oddity that such a gulf should exist between the performing and what are called the visual arts. Modest Mussorgsky penned a lively little musical number called “Pictures at an Exhibition,” and Edgar Degas was a trifle nuts about ballet dancers, but all too seldom have these twain met in our nation’s cultural institutions.
Theater connections
There are, after all, strong connections. The great Russian artist Casimir Malevich was a theatrical designer, too, and Pablo Picasso designed the sets for Erik Satie’s daft ballet “Parade,” which featured among its instrumentation a typewriter, fire engine siren, airplane engine and a gun.
Edward Hopper was positively gooney about the theater, and, as a recent exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum pointed out, many of his canvasses greatly resemble stage sets.
Visual art can perform a great service for the performing arts by capturing and preserving those elusive but brilliant theatrical moments that otherwise would diminish in memory and eventually vanish. Paintings of great Shakespearean scenes and performers on the order of England’s Ellen Terry and Fanny Kemble enjoyed a considerable vogue in the 19th Century. And who can forget Aubrey Beardsley’s eerily decadent “Salome”?
There ought to be museums dedicated to such works and, as part of a new building and expansion program, the Kennedy Center is planning to have one.
“One of the things this [Nureyev] exhibition does is make a case for the importance and the abilities of the visual arts and museum exhibitions to add to the appreciation of the performing arts,” said Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser at the Wyeth show opening.
High hopes
“We hope people will leave with the feeling that the museum we hope to build is one that would really add to the cultural landscape of the country,” Kaiser said.
Certainly these Wyeth pictures do.
“Nureyev . . . had a sense of energy and passion even when he was standing still, and you never knew what he was going to do next, except that it would be spectacular,” Kaiser said.
“That’s what James has captured in these paintings and drawings. You almost feel that he is going to come out of the frame.”
Wyeth always likes to let his pictures speak for themselves, but what he had to say about their subject would make for illuminating and enjoyable recorded commentary at a museum:
“I saw Nureyev dance and then met him at Elaine’s restaurant — a sort of bistro in New York — and asked him would he pose, and he said, `OF COURSE NOT! I HAVE NO TIME!'”
“That was it. Then I met him at a mutual friend’s house a year and a half later and he said, `Are you still interested?’ And I said, `Yes. Of course. But are you?’ So for the next year and a half we had an extraordinary experience. It was very exhilarating but also very draining.
“One night in his dressing room he was sitting there putting makeup on and I was drawing one of his feet. His feet were pretty ugly. He’d flattened the toes from years of pounding the boards and I was drawing very carefully and he leapt up and came around and looked at my drawing and said: `NO! MY FOOT MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN THAT!’ “But we then became friends and went on and then, of course, he died. I then revisited the early works I’d done, of which there are hundreds of drawings, and sort of brought Nureyev back to life in my studio.”
Two exhibitions
These Wyeth pictures will be on view at the Kennedy Center through March 10. Wyeth’s pictures will be on display at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue from March 22 to May 25.
New York critic Clive Barnes, who also knew Nureyev, described the paintings’ importance: “A dancer’s life is a short one — a brief explosive flash across a stage darkened by memory. Its preservation and its documentation are enormously precious. Photographs can give something — but perhaps only the painter can reveal the skull beneath the skin, the soul behind the image.”
