Léonide Massine

The dancer and choreographer Léonide Massine was one of the most prominent members of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company in the 1920s and subsequently of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, beginning in 1930. During this time, he created several iconic modern ballets, collaborating with writers, artists, and musicians associated with the modern movement. Through his artistic connections, Massine amassed an important collection of Cubist and Futurist works, and himself became the subject of artworks by the avant-garde.

Massine trained at the Imperial Theatre School in Moscow before joining the Ballets Russes as a dancer in 1914. He became a protégé of Sergei Diaghilev, the troupe’s impresario, who instilled in Massine an appreciation for modern art and offered him the chance to become a choreographer in 1915. Through Diaghilev, Massine became acquainted with many important figures of modern art and began incorporating innovative artistic collaborations within the music, sets, and costumes of the ballet productions he choreographed. He worked with the foremost composers and artists of this period, including Léon Bakst, Georges Braque, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, André Derain, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, and Igor Stravinsky. Massine began collecting artworks from about 1916 to 1917, purchasing directly from artists he encountered while living and working in Rome with the Ballets Russes. Among his earliest acquisitions were the works of Futurist painters he had seen exhibited in Rome, such as Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero, and Gino Severini. As early as November 1916, Depero dedicated a drawing entitled Danzanti (Dancing)to Massine who subsequently purchased many of his works, including the large-scale Futurist painting Bird in Motion (1916; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, Italy). Massine also befriended Balla during their collaboration on the ballet Feu d’artifice, acquiring the painting Patriotic Demonstration (1915, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) and a preparatory collage composition with the same subject. For the ballet’s premiere in April 1917, Diaghilev organized the first public exhibition of Massine’s collection in the foyer of the Teatro Constanzi in Rome, where the performance took place.

Diaghilev encouraged Massine to collect and gifted him several works, such as Giorgio de Chirico’s Homesickness of an Engineer (1916; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia). Purchased by Diaghilev from the Galerie Paul Guillaume in Paris in 1917, it entered Massine’s collection almost immediately. While in Rome, Massine also worked closely with Picasso to create the sets, costumes, and curtain of the ballet Parade, written by Jean Cocteau and scored by Satie. Inspired by the aesthetics of Cubism and urban popular culture, Parade was a modernist landmark that engendered the word sur-réalisme, coined by Guillaume Apollinaire for the ballet’s inaugural program notes in May 1917. It also cemented Massine and Picasso’s relationship. They worked together on three other ballets and Massine acquired or was gifted numerous works by Picasso for his collection. Many of these were of a personal nature, such as sketches for Massine’s costume in Parade, sketches of Diaghilev and of Picasso’s wife Olga Kokhlova (also a dancer with the Ballets Russes), and portraits of Massine. One of these was a drawing of the dancer made in Picasso’s apartment in Rome in 1917 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Other significant portraits of Massine include a 1919 sketch made in London by Derain, and two drawings made by Matisse in Monte Carlo in 1920 during his collaboration with Massine for the ballet Le Chant de Rossignol (one of these is Portrait of Léonide Massine, 1920, Art Institute of Chicago).

According to his own account, Massine endeavored to collect as comprehensively as possible, focusing his attention on contemporary avant-garde artistic production. In addition to the artists mentioned above, he also owned works by Bakst, Braque, Salvador Dalí, Robert Delaunay, Goncharova, Juan Gris, André Lhôte, Diego Rivera, Léopold Survage, and many others. Massine’s collection was extensively exhibited throughout his lifetime. From 1934 to 1935, a selection of works went on tour in the United States. The tour began in December 1934 at the Arts Club of Chicago, and continued in 1935 at Toledo Museum of Art, also in Chicago, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Marie Harriman Gallery in New York. The catalogue for the latter was entitled French Paintings: Collection of Léonide Massine, and included thirty-nine works in total by Braque, De Chirico, Derain, Gris, Lhôte, Matisse, Severini, and Survage, with the highest number of works (seventeen) by Picasso. The Picasso works included some of the drawings described above, as well as paintings and watercolors from 1916 to 1920.

Massine relocated to the United States in the 1940s, purchasing a property in Long Beach, New York, where he hung his collection, which consisted of sixty-two works at this time. From around 1958 Massine was impelled by financial difficulties to sell works from his collection, although during a 1965 court case he declared this pained him greatly as they were his “spiritual children.” He engaged New York art dealer Rose Fried of the Rose Fried Gallery (40 East Sixty-Eighth Street), who sold Fernand Léger’s Exit of the Ballets Russes (1914) to the Museum of Modern Art and a further five works by Gris, Balla, and Robert Delaunay to various buyers. Another exhibition was held for this purpose in 1959 at the Seidenberg Gallery (1018 Madison Avenue) in New York. It was followed on July 7, 1971, by a large sale at Sotheby’s in London that contained forty items, including ten works on paper by Picasso and two ink drawings by Léger (one was Le grand escalier, Verdun, 1916; Israel Museum, Jerusalem). The most important lot was Braque’s painting Still Life with Pears (1918), the last of Massine’s impressive Cubist collection. Massine subsequently moved to Germany, where he died in 1979.