RECENT AQUISITIONS
Big haul for Dansmuseet in London
The other week Dansmuseet, Stockholm, hit the big time in the London auction rooms, with Museum Director Erik Näslund successfully bidding for more than 20 costumes from the legendary Ballets Russes in Paris, which in the 1910s and 1920s made ballet the height of fashion and impacted on all aspects of contemporary decorative art from interior furnishing to haute couture.
The Museum already has one of the world’s finest collections of Ballets Russes costumes, and a generous grant from the Friends of the Dance Museum now made possible the addition to it of costumes, for example, by Henri Matisse (for “Le Rossignol”), Léon Bakst (for “Schéhérazade”) and José-Maria Sert (for “Cimarosiana”).
The new acquisitions
will be put on display in 2009 
when the Museum is planning a major exhibition to mark the centenary of Serge Diaghilev’s Parisian début with the Ballets Russes.
New additions to the collection of costumes from Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes
Dansmuseet has today one of the world's foremost collections of costumes from the Diaghilev era (1909–29). The foundation was laid in the late 1960s at the now legendary Sotheby's sales in London, when the often spectacular, colourful costumes attracted a great deal of attention. The museum's director, Bengt Häger, wisely bought a substantial amount of costumes, from Cléopâtre, Schéhérazade, The Firebird, Narcisse, Daphnis et Chloë, Sadko, Le Sacré du printemps and other famous ballets. A beautiful exhibition was arranged in the museum in 1971.
Erik Näslund, the museum's present director, has been able to enlarge the collection substantially, not least at the Sotheby's sale in December 1995, and the results of these purchases were presented in an exhibition called The Art of Extravagance in 1996. Further additions have been made almost annually.
In the fall of 2002 the museum could purchase two more costumes, thanks to a contribution from the Friends of the Dance Museum. Both costumes are designed by the master Léon Bakst (1866–1924); one is from Cléopâtre and one from Daphnis et Chloë.
Cléopâtre belonged to the great hits of Diaghilev's very first season in Paris in 1909 when Bakst's sensuous exoticism was a knock-out and became the height of fashion in the west. This costume for the title part is of a somewhat later date and is inscribed “Eleonora Marra", the name of an Irish dancer trained by Cecchetti, married to Léonide Massine fron 1924 and for a while a member of the Diaghilev enterprise.
The costume from Daphnis et Chloë is for one of the Brigands and, with its saffron-yellow colouring with decorations in red and green, typifies the bold colour schemes and patterns Bakst excelled in for Fokine's ballet to Ravel's music, seen for the first time in 1912 in Paris. The museum has about ten costumes from this ballet.
yotr Ilyich 
