Costumes by Karinska -- Excerpt 1
When George Balanchine was asked by the Ford Foundation in 1963 what was the thing he most needed for his work he answered with one word: "Karinska!" It was the supreme compliment of one artist to another. At the time Madame Barbara Karinska was seventy-seven years old, and her subsequent fourteen-year exclusive association with Balanchine’s New York City Ballet marked her final glorious ascent in that mysterious land where ballet costumes are made. It is a place where she ruled without peer with, as she said of herself with characteristic grandeur, “the courage of a man and the heart of a woman.”
The “Karinska” label in the waistband of a costume (tutus have no necks) is, quite simply, to a dancer the indication, like “Cartier,” like “Teuscher,” like “Rolls Royce,” of the best. “To the New York City Ballet I gave my heart,” said Karinska while Balanchine said of her, “I attribute to her fifty percent of the success of my ballets that she has dressed.” In the course of their long collaboration Karinska clothed over seventy-five of them. While Balanchine was giving American dance its own line, its own svelte elegance, its own unique kind of glamour, its own classical tradition, Karinska was alongside him smoothing that line, enhancing that elegance, coloring that glamour and framing that tradition with silk and satin imported from France.
Karinska’s association with Balanchine was her longest and most deeply satisfying, but he was by no means the only dance choreographer whose visions she dressed. In a career spanning forty-five years she costumed ballets of Marius Petipa, Michel Fokine, Léonide Massine, Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, Bronislava Nijinska, Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins as well as Balanchine, often working simultaneously for rival companies with equal devotion. She rendered three-dimensional, functional and portable the imaginings of such artists as Christian Bérard, André Derain, Pavel Tchelitchew, Salvador Dali, Isamu Noguchi, Balthus and Marc Chagall. Karinska’s ageless hands can be seen, like those of a benign Madame LaFarge, weaving a delicate but indestructible thread that connects and clothes ballet in our century.
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