Rotislav Doboujinsky-The Daily Ledger

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.

Rotislav Doboujinsky

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”.

Rotislav Doboujinsky

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).

Rotislav Doboujinsky

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.