MAURICE CHARPENTIER-MIO | TAMARA KARSAVINA AND VASLAV NIJINSKY IN 'LE SPECTRE DE LA ROSE'

M le Comte Ed. de Fels, Paris, 1922

Martine Kahane, Nijinsky 1889-1950, exh. cat., Paris, Musee d'Orsay 2000-2001, p.147 

This balletic bronze represents the legendary dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, and the ballerina Tamara Karsavina, in the avant-garde piece Le Spectre de la Rose (The Spirit of the Rose). Choreographed by Michel Fokine for the Ballets Russes in 1911, the ballet was conceived by the writer Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, based on a verse by Théophile Gautier, and set to music by Carl Maria von Weber. In a short, dream-like sequence, a young girl who falls asleep after a ball and imagines a romantic encounter with a personification of the rose she has dropped. The piece won both acclaim and notoriety for Nijinsky's spectacular leap through a window at the ballet's conclusion, dressed in his magnificent rose petal costume.

Charpentier-Mio brilliantly captures the sense of romance and movement in the girl's imagined dance with her rose. The present bronze is listed in the Nijinsky exhibition catalogue entry (op. cit.) on the cast of the same model in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which provides a dating for each of the numbered casts.

Danny Katz has a passion for dance, with a particular interest in Nijinsky and the early 20th-century Russian Ballet. In 2009 the Gallery held an exhibition dedicated to Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.