Anna Pavlova the ballet Les Sylphides. 1909

Description of the painting "Anna Pavlova" by Valentin Serov

Valentin Alexandrovich Serov was born and raised in a creative environment. His parents formed a famous musical tandem: his father a composer and his mother a pianist. People of all kinds of art gathered in their home. Noticing her son’s interest in the fine arts, his mother sent him to study in Paris. There, the famous Russian painter Ilya Repin became Serov’s mentor and close friend. He later recommended Serov to study in St. Petersburg. However, he did not complete his studies and gave himself up to free creativity. Valentin Alexandrovich paints pictures on a variety of subjects. Critics and viewers favorably accept his work, distinguished by lightness and airiness, relaxed and deep philosophy.

While teaching at the Moscow School of Painting and Architecture, the artist created magnificent paintings and even managed to write posters for theatrical productions. Valentin Alexandrovich was routinely close to both theatrical and musical communities. This was conditioned by the environment in which he grew up and inherent in the time in which he lived. At that time, at the end of the 19th century, the main appeals in art were the blurring of boundaries between its separate kinds and forms.

Originally conceived not as a painting but only as a sketch for the main poster for S. Diaghilev’s theater, the drawing made Serov and his craftsmanship famous. The poster depicted ballerina Anna Pavlova. Graceful dancer, frozen in pas on a rough canvas of deep rich blue hue. Her silhouette is chalked, fragile and crumbling, just like the whole faintly charming image of the ballerina. Except for the head and face all other details of the image are barely outlined, the dancer’s figure is illusory. She is like a beautiful vision entailed by her immortal movements. The posters were made full-length and created a real furore during the show of the Russian Seasons in France. It was rumored that Anna Pavlova’s portrait generated even more discussion and reviews than the ballerina herself. The poster brought fame to both its author and the dancer, making her famous far beyond the country’s borders and awarding her the honorary title of "dancing diamond.

Anna Pavlova was inimitable and became a symbol of early twentieth-century Russian ballet. Her strength lay in her fragility and virtuoso performance of dance. Valentin Serov portrayed her as light as a feather, immortalizing in her portrait the "silhouette of the Silver Age" - the convergence of the classics and the modern at the turn of the century. Without bright colors, superfluous lines and details the artist created an immortal sophisticated and refined image of the great ballerina, which even now seems ready to whirl in a warm, playful flame, like a white feather in the wind.