Only 500 copies of Alexey Brodovitch’s “Ballet” were printed when it was published in 1945, yet this modest artist’s book would come to have a seismic influence on the course of photography. Like the rarest works in the genre — “The Americans” by Robert Frank (1958) or “Evidence” by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan (1977) — “Ballet” inspired generations of artists and became a touchstone in the history of photography.
For years, “Ballet” has been a coveted treasure for collectors, curators and scholars. Very few copies exist today after a fire in 1956 at Brodovitch’s house in Pennsylvania destroyed his archive, including the photographs and negatives of “Ballet,” and dozens of books. Now, as part of its 80th anniversary, “Ballet” has been republished by Little Steidl in a painstaking reconstruction of the original.
Brodovitch, the art director of Harper’s Bazaar from 1934 to 1958, was a monumental force in visual design, influencing the look of magazines for decades. He had a distinct visual pedigree. Born near St. Petersburg, Russia, at the end of the 19th century, he moved to Paris in the 1920s. There, he took graphic design commissions from the fashion houses of Patou, Poiret and Schiaparelli and designed sets for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Working with Diaghilev, he observed the impresario’s attempt to mix the aesthetically refined Parisian sensibility with the passion of the Russian-born choreographers, dancers and teachers who had found a home in France.
In 1924, he won a competition for innovative design with his poster for the annual Bal Banal, beating out Picasso, who came in second. Despite that victory, Brodovitch would become friends with Picasso, as well as Jean Cocteau, Fernand Léger, Matisse, Stravinsky and the great Ballets Russes dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.
Brodovitch arrived in the United States in 1929, having been “a captive witness and an enthusiastic participant in the symphony of artistic experimentation that was Paris in the 20s,” Kerry William Purcell wrote in his 2002 book about Brodovitch’s life and work. Bringing ideas from those modern art movements with him, Brodovitch turned Harper’s Bazaar into an incubator for original graphic design that reflected the dry philosophical wit of Dada, the canny geometries of the de Stijl movement and the Constructivism that imbued structure and shape with social purpose.
Some of those ideas came from Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, an artistic bellwether of the early 20th century that emphasized collaboration across artistic disciplines. “The Rite of Spring,” commissioned by Diaghilev, with a score by Stravinsky and choreography by Nijinsky, was so provocative that the production caused a riot at its premiere in Paris, in 1913: hostile audience members booed and some walked out. The New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce, reviewing a biography of Diaghilev in 1980, wrote, “It seemed that in that moment art was enormous — globally important, visionary — in a way that it has never been since.”
Brodovitch had absorbed the company’s avant-garde spirit, which is evident in his bold approach to the use of images in Harper’s Bazaar. The magazine page was the photography gallery of the first half of the 20th century, and Brodovitch used his Design Laboratory, the influential class he taught at the New School, as a breeding ground to cultivate new talent. The roster of photographers — among them Diane Arbus, Saul Leiter, Lisette Model and Garry Winogrand — who passed through the lab constitutes the core of the New York School. Included, too, were several studio photographers, notably Richard Avedon and Lillian Bassman.
And Brodovitch took another cue from Diaghilev: “Astonish me!” was the impresario’s directive for dancers and choreographers, and Brodovitch used it too when assigning photographers to shoot for the magazine.
“Ballet,” Brodovitch’s only book, includes 104 pictures — shot in New York in the late 1930s — of the Ballets Russes companies that were formed after Diaghilev’s 1929 death. The poet and dance critic Edwin Denby, whose essay is reprinted in the new edition, wrote, “There are many fine moments that seemed like the bright afterglow of the 30-year-long Diaghilev epic and at the end of an atmosphere in dancing we came to know as Ballets Russes or Russian ballet.”
Denby also describes the artistic ambition with which “Ballet” was conceived. Brodovitch, he wrote, “was trying to catch the elusive stage atmosphere that only ballet has, as the dancers in action created it.” He wanted to render ballet magic in visual terms, Denby added, to show “the unconscious grace and spontaneous animation all through that turns a choreography from a lesson into a dance.”
To make the pictures for “Ballet,” Brodovitch would lurk behind the scenes shooting rehearsals; he captured performances from the wings. He used a hand-held 35-millimeter Contax camera and relied on available light. He pushed the medium, slowing down the shutter speed for a blurred effect to capture movement, and stretching the exposure for more grain and contrast. In the darkroom, he dodged and burned for extreme highlights in some areas and deep shadows in others. He intended to foreground shape, blur, contrast, gesture and motion — the atmosphere of dance — in the photographs. “The photograph is not only a pictorial report,” Brodovitch said. “It is also a psychological report.”
Brodovitch divided “Ballet” into segments, one for each of the 11 dances, which include Bronislava Nijinska’s “Les Noces,” George Balanchine’s “Cotillon” and Leonide Massine’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” The book, horizontal in format, is designed with two photographs in a spread, each page with a full-bleed picture; when the book is opened, the two images create a single panorama. The sections read like a continuous strip of film, as in a movie, in sequences that flow with their own rhythm and cadence.
The photographs capture at once some combination of the ephemeral and the lapidary, a phenomenon Brodovitch exploited to great cinematic effect with layout and design. The book is an intentional challenge to the stillness of photography. With dance as the subject of “Ballet,” Brodovitch achieved a condition of motion by taking the medium to its limits.
“These pictures totally violated the accepted conventions of good photographic technique, which demanded a sharp rendition of the subject and a wide, smooth total scale,” Gerry Badger wrote in “The Photobook: A History.” “Far from trying to mitigate these shortcomings, Brodovitch deliberately exaggerated them.” When Herman Landshoff, who made the final prints for the photographs in the original book, confessed to Brodovitch that he had accidentally dropped a negative and stepped on it, Brodovitch seemed delighted. “Print it exactly as it is,” he said. “It’s part of the medium, things like that.”
When the book came out in the 1940s, the pictures seemed messy and unresolved compared to standard magazine photography. But Brodovitch’s unconventional exploration of the graphic possibilities in photographs gave license to younger photographers; variations of exposure, movement and blur became characteristic of the work of Ernst Haas, Leiter and William Klein in the 1950s and ’60s.
Brodovitch, working with J.J. Augustin, the publisher of the original “Ballet,” used grained gravure plates to print the book’s photographs, a process that yields luscious print quality with deep blacks and velvety gray tones; the ink viscosity, however, is not stable so it is hard to maintain consistency through a print run. That was a choice Brodovitch made, said Nina Holland, who runs Little Steidl, a boutique imprint of Steidl, specializing in distinctive printing techniques. Holland, who oversaw the new edition’s production, also edited it with Joshua Chuang, a photography director at Gagosian.
Brodovitch, Holland said, was curious “about harnessing an industrial machine as a direct means of making an artistic work.” For the new “Ballet,” Holland invented a printing process that required scanning the gravure pages from several copies of the 1945 book — the closest source to the original photographs that remains — and using offset lithography to print the copies.
Brodovitch had the instincts of an artist. While he was visionary at transforming the magazine page in his day job, “Ballet” was his single attempt to make a work of art that reflected not only his deeper cultural values but also his truer sensibility. “As far as I know, Brodovitch did not talk to anyone about how he made the book,” Holland said. “He simply handed it out, and with great pride.”
For Brodovitch, the Ballets Russes companies brought back impressions of his boyhood in Russia, Denby wrote, “the memories of family theater parties and of poignantly butterfly-brilliant creatures on a magic stage.” While “Ballet” was a fully resolved experiment with photography and design that tapped the imagination of generations of artists, it was, equally, a homage to art making — in this case ballet, which was so close to Brodovitch’s heart. “He was not photographing strangers,” Denby wrote, “he was photographing his family; and that is why his pictures have so intimate a tone.”
Philip Gefter is the author of “What Becomes a Legend Most: The Biography of Richard Avedon.”
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