Images from the Ballets Russes

Museum of Russian Icons

Opens November 15

Russian ballerina Lubov Tchernicheva, pictured here for a 1920 production of Cleopatra, was ballet mistress of the Ballets Russes in the latter 1920s, and played a vital role in promoting groundbreaking dance movements until her death in 1976. (Her papers are held at Harvard’s Houghton Library.) This sensual shot is among the 73 platinum prints in Emil Hoppé: Photographs from the Ballets Russes, at the Museum of Russian Icons. Also featured are the legendary dancers Vaslav Nijinsky, Adolph Bolm, Michel and Vera Fokine, and Tamara Karsavina—and others who orbited impresario and Ballet Russes founder Sergei Diaghilev.

Hoppé, an internationally renowned photographer of the 1920s and ’30s, fit right in. His London studio drew artists, intellectuals, couturiers, celebrities, literary stars, and members of the royal family. Thus, as the exhibit notes, he captured creative forces and dance performers that “shocked the senses and seduced the world into the modern era.”

Read more articles by: Nell Porter Brown

You might also like

Harvard College Admits Class of 2028

A smaller undergraduate applicant cohort—the first since Supreme Court ended affirmative action 

Studying ChatGPT Like a Psychologist

Cognitive science helps penetrate the AI “black box”

Reparations as Public Health

A Harvard forum on the racial health gap

Most popular

Harvard College Admits Class of 2028

A smaller undergraduate applicant cohort—the first since Supreme Court ended affirmative action 

Diagnosis by Fiction

The “Healing Quartet,” by “Samuel Shem,” probes medicine—and life.

AWOL from Academics

Behind students' increasing pull toward extracurriculars

More to explore

Darker Days

The current disquiets compared to Harvard’s Vietnam-era traumas

Making Space

The natural history of Junko Yamamoto’s art and architecture

Spellbound on Stage

Actor and young adult novelist Aislinn Brophy