Costume design for Liturgie

This design demonstrates a recurring theme in painter Natalia Goncharova’s work: a referencing of traditional Russian religious iconography that led to her censure in 1914 by the Ecclesiastical Censorship Committee, which labeled her an artistic anti-Christ. She designed this costume for a Ballets Russes commission that was never produced. The company’s artists who remained with founder Sergei Diaghilev at the outbreak of World War I in 1914 decamped to Switzerland. Though safe, they found funding hard to secure, and so had to abandon this ballet, which would have marked Russian dancer Léonide Massine’s debut as a choreographer. Massine would be the third choreographer in the history of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and later a seminal figure in establishing the initial repertory of the Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre).