Portrait of Ida Rubinstein
Valentin Serov (1865 to 1911) · 1910
A naked woman sits sideways on a blue drapery against a bare wall, her long legs folded, her back arched and her head turned toward you with an expression of chilly self possession. She is Ida Rubinstein, the dancer who had just scandalised and enchanted Paris as Cleopatra and Scheherazade in Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Serov paints her as a living Art Nouveau line: thin, angular, with a green scarf trailing from her hand and rings on her fingers, more sign than flesh.
Serov was Russia's finest portraitist and had spent decades painting society women in silks. Here he throws all that away. The picture is done in tempera, thinly, with charcoal outlines left visible, so that the canvas looks like an enlarged drawing. There is almost no modelling; the body is a set of clean contours, the colour is limited to blue, ochre, grey and a flash of green, and the wall behind her is a flat plane. Look at how the pose echoes ancient Egyptian and Assyrian reliefs, which Serov had studied in the Louvre and which fitted the dancer's own exotic persona.
The portrait was painted in Paris in nineteen ten, in a deconsecrated chapel that Rubinstein used as a studio, and when it was shown in Russia it caused an uproar. Repin, Serov's former teacher, called the sitter a galvanised corpse, and others accused the painter of betraying realism. Serov died a year later, so this is one of his last statements and the boldest. The Russian Museum acquired it in nineteen eleven. A memorable detail is the scarf: a single snaking line of green that ties the whole spare composition together.
Did You Know? Ida Rubinstein was so tall and thin that Serov reportedly said she had the elegance of an ancient bas-relief that had come to life.
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