Léon Bakst and Fashion: Beyond and After the Ballets Russes

Costume ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Djurdja Bartlett
Keyword(s):  
World War ◽  
Textile Design ◽  
Haute Couture ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Commercial World ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Global Discourse ◽  
Changing Times ◽  
First World ◽  
Personal Interests

Shortly after designing costumes for the Ballets Russes' piece Jeux, Léon Bakst collaborated with the couture house Paquin in 1913, and continued to engage with dress and textile design up to his death in 1924, variously embracing oriental, neo-classical and Russian ethnic aesthetic idioms. Due to his symbolist artistic education, personal tastes and financial circumstances, Bakst did not fulfil his dream to design new fashions for the woman of the future within the commercial world of haute couture. Instead, most of his dress designs during the First World War until his death were created as one-off pieces for a group of very rich, extravagant women. Bakst was nevertheless a passionate advocate of modernity, and a skilful manipulator in the field of contemporary media, in which he equally vigorously promoted his own oeuvre, the phenomenon of fashion and the concept of a new emancipated woman. Bakst's retrograde aesthetic and his progressive writings show him as a striving modernist, carefully navigating his personal interests and business opportunities in the rapidly changing times at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article integrates Bakst's dress designs and his thoughts in the global discourse on the concepts of fashion, modernity, feminism and cosmopolitanism.

Socio-political and confessional preconditions of the birth of the Ukrainian Evangelical-Reformed Church in Western Ukraine (20-30 years of the twentieth century)

2000 ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
R. Soloviy
Keyword(s):  
Public Life ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Religious Influences ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Western Ukraine ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Factor ◽  
First World

In the history of religious organizations of Western Ukraine in the 20-30th years of the XX century. The activity of such an early protestant denominational formation as the Ukrainian Evangelical-Reformed Church occupies a prominent position. Among UCRC researchers there are several approaches to the preconditions for the birth of the Ukrainian Calvinistic movement in Western Ukraine. In particular, O. Dombrovsky, studying the historical preconditions for the formation of the UREC in Western Ukraine, expressed the view that the formation of the Calvinist cell should be considered in the broad context of the Ukrainian national revival of the 19th and 20th centuries, a new assessment of the religious factor in public life proposed by the Ukrainian radical activists ( M. Drahomanov, I. Franko, M. Pavlik), and significant socio-political, national-cultural and spiritual shifts caused by the events of the First World War. Other researchers of Ukrainian Calvinism, who based their analysis on the confessional-polemical approach (I.Vlasovsky, M.Stepanovich), interpreted Protestantism in Ukraine as a product of Western cultural and religious influences, alien to Ukrainian spirituality and culture.

Ale na razie tu cisza” – fotografie sprzed katastrofy w wybranych zapisach literackich (Stefan Chwin, Ryszard Kapuściński, Wisława Szymborska)

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Magdalena Strąk
Keyword(s):  
Time Perspective ◽  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
First World War ◽  
General Concept ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
First World

The work aims to show a peculiar perspective of looking at photographs taken on the eve of the broadly understood disaster, which is specified in a slightly different way in each of the literary texts (Stefan Chwin’s autobiographical novel Krótka historia pewnego żartu [The brief history of a certain joke], a poem by Ryszard Kapuściński Na wystawie „Fotografia chłopów polskich do 1944 r.” [At an exhibition “The Polish peasants in photographs to 1944”] and Wisława Szymborska’s Fotografia z 11 września [Photograph from September 11]) – as death in a concentration camp, a general concept of the First World War or a terrorist attack. Upcoming tragic events – of which the photographed people are not yet aware – become for the subsequent recipient an inseparable element of reality contained in the frame. For the later observers, privileged with time perspective, the characters captured in the photograph are already victims of the catastrophe, which in reality was not yet recorded by the camera. It is a work about coexistence of the past and future in the field of photography.

‘A war film with a difference’: Adrian Brunel's Blighty and Negotiation within the British Studio System of the Late Silent Period

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Botting
Keyword(s):  
Silent Period ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
War Films ◽  
Box Office ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Studio System ◽  
To Come ◽  
First World ◽  
War Film

The creation and viewing of war films was one of the elements in the process by which Britain attempted to come to terms with the horrors of the First World War. During the interwar period, war films took two main forms: those which reconstructed famous battles and melodramas set against a wartime backdrop. However, the film Blighty, directed by Adrian Brunel in 1927, took a slightly different approach, focusing not on military action but on those who stayed behind on the Home Front. As a director during the silent period, Brunel trod a stony path, operating largely on the fringes of the industry and never really getting a firm foothold in the developing studio structure. He remains well regarded for his independent productions yet also directed five features for Gainsborough at the end of the silent period. Of these film, his first, Blighty, is perhaps his most successful production within the studio system in terms of managing a compromise between his desire to maintain control while also fulfilling the studio's aims and requirement for box office success. Brunel's aversion to the war film as a genre meant that from the start of the project, he was engaged in a process of negotiation with the studio in order to preserve as far as possible what he regarded as a certain creative and moral imperative.

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