The Art Of Nijinsky Exhibit Features Dancer’s Troubled Drawings, Mementos Of His Famous Career

In 1919, separated from his mother by war, tumbling into the depths of manic depression as his dancing career lay in shambles, Vaslav Nijinsky sought solace in another art form.

The preeminent ballet artist of his day, known for soaring leaps in which he seemed to hover in midair, Nijinsky had made disquieting, mostly abstract drawings with colored pencils, crayons and pen and ink for years as part of his psychotherapy. Now the work was more intricate, intersections of curves within curves within curves, series after kaleidoscopic series.

A more simple, representational sketch done with plain pencil on paper shows the head of a child looking out with troubled expression from a shaded circle with another circle overlapping.

“Series VIII: Mother and Child No. 2” is among 54 drawings on display at the Frye Art Museum, along with 91 other artifacts - photographs and paintings of the dancer in midair, posters by Jean Cocteau for his Ballet Russe performances, original costumes and reconstructions.

“The Art of Nijinsky” runs through Nov. 16. The next stop is Jan. 26 to March 14 at the Philharmonic Center for the Arts in Naples, Fla. Negotiations are pending for showings in New England and Australia.

Nijinsky’s drawings were largely dismissed by critics of the day such as American painter Marsden Hartley, who called them “psychological charts.”

A more sympathetic contemporary, the great Russian abstractionist Vasily Kandinsky, hailed them as inspired “outsider art.”

Among those at the opening Friday was Nijinsky’s granddaughter, Kinga Nijinsky Gaspers, 51, of Phoenix, a church organist and director of the Nijinsky Foundation.

Born on March 12, 1889, the son of Polish dancers in Kiev, Ukraine, Nijinsky vaulted to fame at age 20 as the protege of Sergei Diaghilev in the Ballet Russe. Diaghilev, 36 at the time, also made Nijinsky his lover.

“I lived with Diaghilev for five years,” Nijinsky wrote years later. “I loved him sincerely and, when he told me that the love of a woman was a terrible thing, I believed him.”

That ended in 1913, the year Nijinsky’s complex, sensual choreography for “Le Sacre du Printemps” by Igor Stravinsky caused a riot at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris and revolutionized ballet.

Subsequently, on the company’s first South American tour, Nijinsky married the Hungarian dancer Romola de Pulszky and was immediately fired from the company.

In 1914, Nijinksy unsuccessfully attempted to form his own company in London. Later that year, his daughter, Kyra, was born.

With the subsequent outbreak of World War I, he was interned in Hungary as an enemy alien. The earliest of his works on display, including the intense, heavy-lined “Series IV: Transections and Intersections,” and the unsettling Dracula-like imagery of “Series II: The Faces of War,” were drawn in that year.

Through 1914-15 he prepared choreography for the Richard Strauss tone poem “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks,” developing a dance notation that forms the basis for the Laban system used in choreography to this day.

Unable to arrange financing for a North American tour without Nijinsky, Diaghilev persuaded him to return to the company with an unconditional surrender of artistic control in 1916.

With the end of the tour in 1917, Nijinsky’s professional stage career came to a close.

Living in St. Moritz, Switzerland, cut off from his mother and bereft from his beloved dancing by the war, he turned increasingly to his sketchpad.

The 16-part “Series V: Equilibrium and Opposition” was completed in 1919, shortly before he was confined to an asylum, one of several where he was treated before his death April 8, 1950.

Most of those drawings were made “at the onset of his illness, before he was really ill,” Gaspers said. “Something was wrong, and he knew it and the family knew it.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: EXHIBIT “The Art of Nijinsky” runs through Nov. 16 at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle.