Rostislav Doboujinski

Rostislav Doboujinsky (3 April 1903 – 23 June 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 Louis Jouvet's Ondine by Jean Giraudoux in the 1930s and Max Ophul's film Le Plaisir in 1951, for the mouse masks and costumes he created for Rudolf Nureyev's The Nutcracker, the costumes for The Sleeping Beauty ballet at London's Covent Garden (1968) and the animal masks for The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971). He achieved international success with his masks for Alfredo Arias's adaption of Balzac's Peines de Coeur d'une Chatte Anglaise (1977).

Biography

Early life

Rostislav Mstislavovitch Doboujinsky was born on 3 April 1903 in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire. He was the eldest son of ballet and opera designer Mstislav Valerianovich Doboujinsky, who co-founded the Le Monde de l'art movement - mir iskusstva - 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 Petrograd, 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 Rostislav 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. From 1925–27 he also studied at the National School of Decorative Arts and the Faculty of Letters in the Sorbonne.

While at Covent Garden, Doboujinsky talked with Richard Goodwin and Christine Edzard, the producer and writers for The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971). In October 1969, he agreed to make a sample mask for The Tales mouse character 'Hunca Munca', 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. His 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.”

Interior Design Chandeliers: Great Gala, May 1962. Courtesy Royal Albert Hall Archive ref: RAHE/3/1962/1

A collaboration in the 1960s with Renzo Mongiardino at the International Second World Congress of Man-Made Fibres Gala launched Doboujinsky into interior design, where he worked alongside other outstanding designers including Luchino Visconti, Franco Zeffirelli and Giorgio Strehler. It was staged by Zeffirrelli with costumes by Lila de Nobili, orchestra conducted by Adrian Boult and design by Mongiardino. Tonton created a 20 ft tall chandelier surrounded by a dozen smaller ones, each piece of 'crystal' created using tiny pastry molds.

Walter Kerr, reviewing the Broadway show for the New York Times in March 1980, wrote :

“There are whiskered tomcats in frock coats, beribboned dachshunds in tea-party finery. Birds with beaks you'd do well to shy away from...I can't believe that anyone has ever designed masks – they're full, three-dimensional heads, really - more persuasive than those here provided by R. Doboujinsky.”, said Walter Kerr.

At the age of eighty, working in collaboration with Sabine Dutilh, Doboujinsky 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.”

Personal life and legacy

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'). Design model maker Christmas windows – The Snow Queen – for Galeries Lafayette In collaboration with Lila de Nobili. Costume design models Blood Wedding, Lyon. 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 Private and Public 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.

Set and costume model maker L'Histoire du Soldat, Cartoucherie de Vincennes Sculptures and models, armour and breastplates Don Quichotte, Festival de Carcassonne

Creator costume models Liliana Cavani's film Milarepa. Academy Award Best Costume Design Nominated 1980''' Heartaches of a Pussycat'' play Alfredo Arias Broadway World's Drama Desk Award Outstanding Costume Design Nominated