Russian Ballet (book)
Russian Ballet is an artist's book by the English artist David Bomberg published in 1919. The work describes the impact of seeing a performance of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and is based on a series of drawings Bomberg had done around 1914, while associated with the Vorticist group of avant-garde artists in London. Centred on Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the movement flourished briefly from 1914–1915, before being dispersed by the impact of the First World War. The only surviving example of a vorticist artist's book, the work can be seen as a parody of Marinetti's seminal futurist book Zang Tumb Tumb, using similar language to the Italian's work glorifying war (for example, the phrase "Methodic discord startles ..."), but instead praising the impact of watching the decidedly less macho Ballets Russes in full flow. Bomberg was the most audacious painter of his generation at the Slade, proving ... that he could absorb the most experimental European ideas, fuse these with Jewish influences and come up with a robust alternative of his own. His treatment of the human figure, in terms of angular, clear-cut forms charged with enormous energy, reveals his determination to bring about a drastic renewal in British painting. —Richard Cork The book was the last time that Bomberg would work in a vorticist idiom. After witnessing the carnage of the First World War at first hand, he was to lose his faith in modernism and instead develop a looser, expressive style, based predominantly around landscapes. Vorticism and the English Avant-garde Bomberg had been expelled from the Slade art school in 1913 due to his modernist leanings, and after a brief flirtation with Futurism, had put on a major one-man exhibition of Abstract art at the Chenil Gallery, Chelsea, July 1914. The exhibition included paintings such as The Mud Bath and Ju-Jitsu. The show was enthusiastically reviewed by T. E. Hulme. Visited by Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Brâncuși and Marinetti among others, the exhibition earned 'him the admiration of many experimental artists both in London and abroad. The foreword of the Chenil Gallery catalogue, 1914, contained a defiant text not dissimilar to Wyndham Lewis' Manifesto in Blast 1, and one that could just as easily apply to the drawings done around this time that would serve as the basis of Russian Ballet; I appeal to the Sense of Form. In some of the work I show in the first room, I completely abandon Naturalism and Tradition. I am searching for an Intenser expression. In other work in this room, where I use naturalistic Form, I have stripped it of all irrelevant matter. I look upon nature, while I live in a steel city. Where decoration happens, it is accidental. My object is the construction of Pure Form. I reject everything in painting that is not Pure Form. I hate the colours of the East, the Modern Mediævalist, and the Fat Man of the Renaissance. —David Bomberg, 1914 While usually considered a vorticist, Bomberg had refused to sign the Vorticist manifesto published