Rotislav Doboujinsky

Rotislav Doboujinsky (April 3, 1903 - June 23, 2000) was a Russian designer of costumes, masks, sets and interiors, and a painter and illustrator. He belonged to the second generation of Russian artists who developed the tradition of the 'Ballets Russes' in Western Europe. He was noted for his work on Ondine by Jean Giraudoux in the 1930s, Max Ophul's film Le Plaisir in 1951,  The Sleeping Beauty ballet at London's Covent Garden in 1968, The Tales of Beatrix Potter in 1970, and an adaption of Balzac's Peines de Coeur d'une Chatte Anglaise in 1977.

Personal and early life
Rotislav Mstislavovitch Doboujinsky was born on April 3, 1903 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. He was the eldest son of ballet and opera designer  Mstislav Valerianovich Doboujinsky, who  co-founded the Le Monde de l'art movement  -  mir istkusstva - with Alexandre Benois and Sergei Diaghilev. 

Introduced from childhood to the world of the arts by his father, he took classical secondary studies in Russia and attended the Higher School of Fine Arts in Petrograd. In 1920 he worked as assistant designer at the Gorky theatre in Leningrad, in 1921 received his first stage design credit and in 1922 worked as set and costume designer for avant-garde and research group “Le Jeune Theater”.

In 1924, the family fled to Lithuania where the young Doboujinsky was employed at the Kaunas theatre. A year later Rotislav moved to France with his wife Lydia, where he worked as a set designer and Lydia founded a fashion house which supplied costumes to ballets in Sweden and Monte Carlo.
In 1939, Doboujinsky designed the costumes for Ondine, then worked with Christian Bérard, Leonor Fini, Lila de Nobili, and founded his own set workshop with Lidia. He created the mouse masks and costumes for Rudolf Nureyev's  The Nutcracker (1967), the costumes for  Sleeping Beauty at Covent Garden (1968) and the animal masks for The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1970). He achieved international success with his masks for The Heartaches of an English Cat by  Alfredo Arias (1977).  

Lila de Nobili had brought Doboujinsky over from Paris to make animal masks for the first act of  Sleeping Beauty at Covent Garden, where he talked with Richard Goodwin and Christine Edzard, the producer and writers for The Tales of Beatrix Potter. In October 1969, he agreed to make a sample mask for the mouse character 'Hunca Munca' of 'The Tales, whose face is “perhaps the most appealing in the film”. He remade the mask thirteen times over the winter, working “at his own pace – and to his own standard of perfection” until he was satisfied with the fourteenth attempt in February 1970.

The “master designer”, with Edzard, made the masks “on which much of the picture's success depended”. Doboujinsky's original masks for the film, made of bike helmets, polystyrene, hand-sewn hair and vision holes covered in gauze, had to be recreated for the stage, with a larger field of vision for the dancers. The artist used moulds of the originals, drilling hundreds of holes at the front and covering the mask in nylon hair “using electrostatic charges.”

A modest man, Doboujinsky referred to himself as a “jack of all trades”, “only an amateur, only a dabbler” and was referred to by the entire profession as 'Tonton' ('uncle'). Actress Marilu Marini, who played the English cat 'Beauty'  in  Arias's Heartbreak of an English Cat said of him: 

 Alfredo Arias and René de Ceccatty paid homage to Doboujinsky in Les Peines de coeur d'une chat française (1999) in the guise of a big bear named Djinsky.

At the age of eighty, and in collaboration with Sabine Dutilh, he designed the sets, costumes and masks for Arias and Kado Kostzer's Sortileges in 1983, which were “a great strength of the production”. His design work featured “many exquisite details” such as ermine tails along the hem of the red curtains, and an “especially fanciful” Jester's costume in which the “egg-like bald head was balanced in front by a pear-shaped belly”, creating an effect of “delicate grotesqueness.”

During his long life in France, Doboujinsky  maintained his status as Lithuanian political refugee. He applied for, and obtained, French nationality a few months before he died in Paris on June 23, 2000.

Design Work

1920s

1920: Assistant designer –  Gorky Theatre, Leningrad

1922:  Set and costumer designer - “Le Jeune Theater.”

1924: Designer - Theatre de Chambre, Riga, Latvia.

Assistant to   Mstislav Doboujinsky (father), Kaunas, Lithuania.

1925: Set designer - The Queen of Spades (Tchaikovsky), Kaunas theatre, Lithuania.

1925-27: Studied at the  National School of Decorative Arts and the Faculty of Letters in the  Sorbonne.

1925: Designer –  Theatre de la Chauve-Souris, Paris.

Set and costume model creator – Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre, Compagnie Georges Pitoeff, "Ballet National Suedois" and Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

Cinema poster models - Luna Film; leaflets and advertising board models - Loubok, Paris; designer for games and toys - Vera.

Creator animations, sets – Cine Service and Dessins Animes Associes.

1930s-1940s

1939: Costume designer -  Louis Jouvet's  Ondine by Jean Giraudoux, the first performance of Ondine opened on April 27, 1939 at the Theatre de l'Athenee. 

Set and costume creator – Boris Knyazev company, Theatre Russe, and the Ballets du  Marquis de Cuevas.

Fabric, theatre costume, mask and accessories for:  Compagnie Charles Dullin (Les Oiseaux), Jean Vilar at Theatre National Populaire  (Nuclea), Compagnie Jean-Louis Barrault (Julius Cesar, Tete d'Or, The Rape of Lucretia, The Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco), Paris Opera (Carmen,   La Dame aux Camelias), Comedie-Francaise (Ruy Blas).

1950s
1950:   Costume designer – Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths at Theatre de l'Oeuvre, in collaboration with Sacha Pitoeff.

Became member of Societe des auteurs, compositeurs et editeurs de musique (SACEM).

1951: Mask creator -  Max Ophuls's film Le Plaisir. Doboujinsky created the mask worn by Ambroise, played by Jean Galland, to disguise his aged appearance.

1957: Set and costume designer -   Witches of Salem (film) by Raymond Rouleau in collaboration with Lila de Nobili.

Design model maker – Christmas windows - The Snow Queen - for Galeries Lafayette, in collaboration with Lila de Nobili.

1960s

1962: Designer – Raoul Levy's   Marco Polo (film). Created sculptures for clothes and caparacons for men, horses and elephants – living figures of a chess game.

1963: Costume designer, manager of costume design workshop – Cyrano de Bergerac, Comedie-Francaise.

1965: Costume designer – Numance, Jean-Louis Barrault,  Odeon. 

Maker of sculptures for masks and accessories – Contes d'Offmann, Opera-Comique.

Creator of models, sculptures and masks, and costume designer – The Merchant of Venice, Teatro Valle, Rome.

1966: Head of Specialist Design Department –  The Taming of the Shrew (film) by Franco Zeffirelli - winner of Nastro d'Argento Award for Best Costume Design, nominee Academy Award for Best Costume Design.

1967:  Maker of set and costume design models – L'Orfeo, Amsterdam in collaboration with Jean-Marie Simon.

Creator of mouse mask and costumes -  The Nutcracker, Stockholm, by Rudolf Nureyev.

1968: Costume designer, mask maker – The Sleeping Beauty, Covent Garden, London, in collaboration with Lila de Nobili.

Costume design models – Blood Wedding, Lyon.

1970s

1969-1970: Mask maker, assistant costume design – The Tales of Beatrix Potter (film) by Christine Edzard, London.

Creator of patterns and painted decorations for costumes – Malatesta, Comedie-Francaise.

Creator costume models and masks –  Rashomon, Lyon and Spoleto (Festival dei Due Mondi).

Sculptor of heads for animals – Christmas windows - The Public and Private Life of Animals by  J. J. Grandville - for Galeries Lafayette.

Costumes and masks - Reportage sur un squelette ou Masques et bergamasques film, directed by Michel Mitrani, in collaboration with Leonor Fini.

1971: Set and costume model maker – L'Histoire du Soldat, Cartoucherie de Vincennes.

Sculptures and models, armour and breastplates -  Don Quichotte, Festival de Carcassonne1973: Creator costume models - Liliana Cavani's film  Milarepa. 

Creator, sculptor and model maker for ball masks –  Bal Masque, La Scala.1974: Modelling, sculpting, painting and creation work for framing of The Triumph of David, Hotel Lambert.1977: Creator of masks - Peines de Coeur d'une Chatte Anglais by  Alfredo Arias with Marilu Marini in the title role, based on the story by Honore de Balzac in The Public and Private Life of Animals, illustrated by  J. J. Grandville.  Doboujinsky was nominated for Broadway World's Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Costume Design 1980.1978:  Designer of Egyptian tomb – Agatha Christie's  Death on the Nile (film) directed by John Guillermin.

Mask creator – Alice in Wonderland, Holiday on Ice.1979:  Costume models and painting for the Ballet de Legumes in Little Ida's Flowers - Christine Edzard's film Stories from a Flying Trunk and later designed as costumes for the ballet Pas de legumes by Frederick Ashton.

1980s1980: Creator of cat masks and costumes - L'enfant et les sortilèges, Metropolitan Opera.1981-1982: Creation of various decorative interior panels - a 'gothic-Indian' decoration for the tea room of an English residence; fabric paints for the walls of a dining-room in New York; the walls of a living room, Quai Voltaire (Paris).1982: Drawings and sculptures for bas-relief on 'the Palace'– Luisa Miller,  Theatre de la Monnaie.

Designer of table top – Biennale des Antiquaires, Paris.

Design models, creation of animated nightingales –  The Nightingale (film) by Christine Edzard for Sands Films, London.1983:  Mask creator, set and costume design -  Sortilèges by  Alfredo Arias and Kado Kostzer.

Interior design – New York apartment1984-1985:  Costume and set design work for inuagural exhibition –  Musee des Arts de la Mode et du Costume, Paris.1985: Set models, parrot sculpture – Christine Edzard's film   Little Dorrit, London.1986-1987: Design of decorative panels and hangings for villa entrance and staircase – Madrid.

Design of canvas panels, including “a band of Grotesques”, bed cover and panels for a villa – Los Angeles.1987'':  Wall decorations and panels for a drawing room – Place Iena, Paris.

External links
 V&A Collections - Theatre Costume (made)
Internet Broadway Database 

  Holiday on Ice 1978, Alice in Wonderland - Watch on YouTube

References

1903 births
2003 deaths
Russian designers