Programme des Ballets Russes. Paris 1917. Les Ballets Russes à Paris Représentations Exceptionnelles avec le gracieux concours des Artistes de M. Serge Diaghilew, Mai 1917

Les Ballets Russes à Paris Représentations Exceptionnelles avec le gracieux concours des Artistes de M. Serge Diaghilev, Mai 1917
First edition of the most important Ballets Russes program, announcing the Parade ballet, and in which appears the first mention of the word “sur-realism” by Apollinaire.

Cover illustrated with a vignette by André Marty, without the overcover that is present on some copies.

A very beautiful and unique copy enriched with 20 handwritten signatures of the artists collected at the time, including those of the creators of Parade: Picasso (who has signed twice), Cocteau, Léonide Massine, and Léon Bakst, and the Ballets Russes dancers: Nicolas Zvereff, (two illegible names), Lydia Lopokova [three times], Alexander Gavrilov, Giuseppina Cecchetti, Zygmunt Novak, Stanislas Idzikowski (twice), Elena Antonova, Lubov Tchernicheva (twice), Maria Chabelska (who plays the little American girl in Parade and who was Cocteau's fake lover.) and Maximilian Statkevitch.

The program contains the repertoire of the season in three shows: 11, 14, 16 May; 18 May; 21, 23 May, with the detailed program and themes from L'Oiseau de feu (The Firebird); Les Femmes de bonne humeur (The Good-Humored Ladies); Contes russes (Russian Tales); Les Danses polovtsiennes du Prince Igor (Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor); Les Sylphides; Parade; Pétrouchka (Petruska) and Soleil de nuit (Midnight Sun).

The preface by Guillaume Apollinaire, Parade and the New Spirit, which introduces the expression “sur-réalisme” (sur-realism) for the first time, formalizes a new transversal and radical conception of Art: “From this new alliance, because up to now the sets and the costumes on the one hand, and the choreography on the other hand, had only a fictitious link between them, there is a resulting sort of sur-realism in Parade, where I see the starting point of a series of manifestations of this New Spirit, which, finding today as the time to reveal itself, will not fail to seduce the elite and promises to modify from top to bottom the arts and customs in universal joy because common sense wants them to be at least equal to the scientific and industrial progress [...] Picasso's cubist sets and costumes testify to the realism of his art. This realism, or this cubism, as you wish, is what has most deeply agitated the Arts over the last ten years.”

The other texts are signed by Léon Bakst and Michel Georges Michel. The magazine is illustrated with two lithographs and color pochoirs by Pablo Pi
casso, one color pochoir by Larionov, several drawings in color and in black and white by Picasso and Léon Bakst and reproductions of photographs of dancers and artists.

While the world war is raging, the Ballets Russes put on six exceptional performances at the Théâtre du Châtelet in aid of facially disfigured soldiers and during one of which Parade was premiered, 18 May 1917, the result of a musical, visual and poetic collaboration between Cocteau, Satie and Picasso.
Going down in modern history, this scandalous avant-garde music-hall show enchanted Marcel Proust and outraged the crowds. Our copy belonged to one of the few spectators who immediately grasped the importance of this masterful work.

The signatures of the artists are dated 1917, some more precisely 25 May 1917, and sometimes with the mention “Théâtre du Châtelet”. Cocteau added: “Souvenir de Paris”.
Picasso, for his part, signed once under his portrait by Léon Bakst and a second time on the photograph taken by Cocteau showing him with Massine in the middle of the Pompeii ruins. It is significant that this discovery of one of the masterpieces of ancient Art was reproduced in the Parade program. The ballet rehearsals took place in Rome. Picasso left for Italy in February 1917 with Cocteau and Léonide Massine. There, he met his wife, Olga Khokhlova, as well as the futurists and artists of the Secession, and he was greatly inspired by his visits to Pompeii and Naples: “this Arabian Montmartre, in this enormous disorder of a bazaar that never closes” (Jean Cocteau, Lettres à sa mère, 3 March 1917). This initiatory journey to one of the treasures of ancient art inspired him with the inimitable visual signature of Parade, a curtain painting marking the beginnings of his neo-classical period, spanning seventeen metres in length, preserved today at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris.
The ballet remains “one of the greatest scandals in the history of music” and an aesthetic masterpiece admired by Marcel Proust, out from his confinement for an enchanting evening:
“I would like to tell you – and for Mr. Picasso – the sneezes and the melancholy that tirelessly provoke in me the blue Sunday with the white astragali of the misunderstood acrobat, dancing “as if he were addressing reproaches to God”. The acrobat “with the white astragali” who conquered Proust is illustrated in the program with a superb watercolor by Picasso, enriched in our copy with the signature of the dancer, Nicolas Zvereff.
This exceptional document brings together the signatures of a true constellation of young artists in the midst of the “time of change”, between cubism, futurism and neo-classicism, which marked the history of art, music and the living spectacle of their innovations.