Russian Ballet (book)

Russian Ballet (book)

Russian Ballet is an artist's book by the English artist David Bomberg published in 1919. The work describes the impact of seeing a performance of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and is based on a series of drawings Bomberg had done around 1914, whilst associated with the Vorticist group of avant-garde artists in London. Centred around Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the movement flourished briefly 1914-1915, before being dispersed by the impact of the First World War. The only surviving example of a vorticist artist's book, the work can be seen as a parody of Marinetti's seminal futurist book Zang Tumb Tumb, using similar language to the Italian's work glorifying war, (Methodic discord startles..), but instead praising the impact of watching the decidedly less macho Ballets Russes in full flow.

'Bomberg was the most audacious painter of his generation at the Slade, proving... that he could absorb the most experimental European ideas, fuse these with Jewish influences and come up with a robust alternative of his own. His treatment of the human figure, in terms of angular, clear-cut forms charged with enormous energy, reveals his determination to bring about a drastic renewal in British painting.' Richard Cork

The book was the last time that Bomberg would work in a vorticist idiom. After witnessing the carnage of the First World War at first hand, he was to lose his faith in modernism and instead develop a looser, expressive style, based predominantly around landscapes.