Barbara Karinska

Varvara Jmoudsky, better known as Barbara Karinska or simply Karinska (October 3, 1886 – October 18, 1983), was costumer of the New York City Ballet, and the first costume designer ever to win the Capezio Dance Award, for costumes "of visual beauty for the spectator and complete delight for the dancer".^[1]

However, she designed the costumes for a few non-musical films as well, such as the 1953 French adaptation of La Dame aux Camélias. Along with Dorothy Jeakins, she won the 1948 Oscar for the costumes for Joan of Arc, and was nominated in 1952 for the Samuel Goldwyn musical Hans Christian Andersen, starring Danny Kaye. She divided her time between homes in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, and Domremy-la-Pucell, France, the birthplace of Joan of Arc. For the stage, she designed the costumes for George Balanchine's production of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, among others.

Early life

Barbara Karinska was born Varvara Andreievna Jmoudsky (Russian: Варвара Андреевна Жмудская) in Kharkiv, Ukraine ("Little Russia") in 1886, to a successful textile manufacturer. She was the third and eldest female of the ten Jmoudsky siblings. Russian embroidery was an art form filled with detailed shades and colors of varying texture of stitches – some tiny and fine and others broad and rough. This was Karinska's artistic medium as a child. She studied law at the University of Kharkiv and, in 1908, married Alexander Moïssenko, the son of another wealthy Kharkiv industrialist. Moïssenko died in 1909 several months before the birth of their daughter Irina. In 1910, Varvara’s older brother Anatoly, owner of the moderately Socialist newspaper UTRO (Morning), went through divorce proceedings that resulted in Varvara winning custody of his two year old son Vladimir Anatolevich Jmoudsky. Vladimir and Irina were raised as brother and sister.

Varvara soon remarried a prominent Muscovite criminal lawyer, N. S. Karinsky, who was residing in Kharkiv. With his law practice bourgeoning, the Karinsky family of four moved to Moscow in 1915, to a spacious apartment that Varvara had purchased. Karinsky continued to practice criminal law from the apartment on a strictly pro bono basis and gained fame and prestige throughout the Russian Empire. Varvara, meanwhile, became totally engrossed in the arts and hosted her famous salon every evening after the theater or ballet. She developed her own form of painting applying pieces of colored silk gauze to photographs and drawings. Her first subjects were ballet scenes. After much tearing apart and redoing, she exhibited about 12 of her works in a prominent Moscow gallery and was quite successful both financially and critically.

Czar Nicholas II abdicated in March, 1917, to the provisional government, first headed by Prince Lvov and then by Alexander Kerensky. N.S. Karinsky was appointed by Lvov as Attorney General and Presiding Justice of the Court of Appeals of the District of Petrograd, (St. Petersburg).

As Civil War followed the Bolshevik Revolution of October, 1917, The Ministry of the Interior of the White Occupied Southern Territories assigned to N.S. Karinsky several governorships to southern provinces. Varvara, Irina and Vladimir spent the years of the civil war moving between Kharkiv and Crimea reuniting with Karinsky at his headquarters in Simferopol whenever possible. With the fall of Crimea to the Red forces, in 1921, Karinsky was a marked man, yet he stayed at his post until the very end helping others to escape. Unable to find his family, several of Varvara’s sisters and brothers forced him to leave Crimea with them by ship, assuring him that Varvara would soon follow. But Varvara had decided to remain in the "New Russia" and filed a “post card divorce”, legitimate and popular during those years of upheaval.

N. S. Karinsky eventually made his way to New York where, unable to speak English, he undertook a variety of menial jobs, including driving a taxi. Nicholas Karinsky never lost his good nature or optimistic philosophy of life. He continued his intellectual pursuits editing for the Russian American press and authored a number of articles and monographs; most notably a history of aviation in pre-revolutionary Russia. When Varvara arrived to New York in 1939, she and Nicholas Karinsky had many friends in common, yet it appears that neither ever sought the other’s company. They are buried less than ten yards apart; several of Karinska’s siblings between them.

Meanwhile, in 1921, Varvara made her way back to Moscow where she met and married Vladimir Mamontov, son of one of Moscow’s wealthiest pre-revolutionary industrialists. Having lost everything, Mamontov remained with nothing except his charm, beautiful piano playing and the delusion that someday his late father’s fortune would be returned to him.

Lenin’s New Economic Policy (1921–1928) provided for limited capitalism to help finance his new regime exhausted and debilitated by three years of civil war. Karinska went way beyond Lenin’s limits. She opened a Tea Salon that became the meeting place of Moscow artists, intellectuals and government officials every afternoon at 5 o’clock. In the same complex she founded an haute-couture and a millinery atelier to dress the wives of the Soviet elite. She opened an antique store and an embroidery school where she taught the needle arts to the proletariat.

Karinska’s reasons for leaving Russia are multifold. First there was the death of Lenin in 1924 and the uncertainty of what was to come; secondly, within weeks after Lenin’s death the new regime nationalized her embroidery school and turned it into a factory to manufacture Soviet flags (In exchange, she was awarded the title of “Inspector of Fine Arts”); thirdly and primarily, Mamontov, a chronic alcoholic and incapable of performing any kind of work was a symbol of bourgeois decadence and his arrest was imminent.

Karinska devised a plan to save Mamontov. Supported by Anatoly Lunacharsky, Minister of Education and long time friend of her father, she proposed to take a large nnumber of embroideries made by her students to exhibit in Western European cities as a “good will” gesture to demonstrate the great cultural advances that the young Soviet regime was making. The proposition was enthusiastically accepted across the high ranks, although Lunacharsky and others knew quite well what she was up to.

With corruption widely practiced throughout the Soviet government, an exit visa was obtained for Mamontov who left immediately for Germany where he had cousins in exile. A few weeks later Karinska, Irina and Vladimir left together from Moscow station on a Berlin-bound train. Irina boarded the train whimpering under the weight of a huge chapeau. “Stop whining!” her mother would scold. Later the girl of 14 learned that the hat was filled with diamonds. Vladimir boarded the train with a suitcase filled with his Soviet school books, American hundred dollar bills, bought on the black market, hidden between the pages. Karinska boarded the train waving and blowing kisses to the crowd that came to bid her bon voyage. But the crates with her student’s embroideries framed under glass had, hidden underneath each, antique embroideries sewn by the ladies in waiting to the Russian Empresses of the past centuries.

Reuniting with Vladimir Mamontov in Berlin, the family of four headed for Brussels where Karinska’s father and several brothers and sisters were living. But Brussels was too quiet for Karinska and after a few months they moved to Paris.

Life in Paris

Costum by Barbara Karinska for the Serge Denham's Ballet Rousse from left – Coppelia (act 2), coppelia (act 1) and Gisele (act 2). Display at Beit Ariela, Tel Aviv-Yaffo.

After two years of luxurious living in Paris, all the treasures brought from Russia were gone. The family was forced to move to a popular quarter of the city of lights and Karinska looked desperately for any and every kind of work using her skills of sewing and embroidery. With her beauty and aplomb she had no difficulty meeting whoever she wanted to meet. It wasn’t long before she made her first costume; a robe for a 1926 motion picture. More single orders followed and then larger and larger ones. All the time Irina and Vladimir worked with her.

A newly formed ballet company, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo requested she make ballet costumes for their first ballet, Cotillon. The sets and costumes were by Christian Bérard and the choreography was by a fellow Russian, George Balanchine. Bérard, who was an artist, set designer and photographer, would provide a general sketch, an idea, but it would be Karinska who expounded upon the concept, modified it, chose the fabric, quality and quantity, and decided how the concept would be implemented. She was their interpreter.

Karinska, Balanchine, and Bérard would study the dancer and collaborate on the concept; however, it would be left to Karinska alone to reduce the image, the concept, their agreed vision to reality. Karinska became in Paris, the premiere interpreter of the costume for the ballet. Bérard prepared covers for Vogue often.

During Karinska’s brief career in Paris she collaborated with André Derain, Joan Miró, Balthus amongst a long list of painters and designers. She costumed the plays of Jean Cocteau and Louis Jouvet. In 1933, Karinska costumed Les Ballet 1933 Balanchine's six ballets in Paris before he left for New York.

Life in London

In 1936, and free of Mamontov for several years, a series of circumstances led Karinska to make the decision to leave Paris. Her daughter remained and the business was reopened under the name “Irene Karinska” (Irene with the French spelling). Barbara Karinska and Vladimir, sponsored by Mrs. Hayworth of Ascot Gowns, settled in London. The partnership was short lived and, after a second short lived partnership with another prestigious London dress firm, Karinska and Vladimir rented the Sir Joshua Reynolds House where they each took an upper floor for their respective flats while the spacious lower floors housed the costume making facilities.

The London years were far more prosperous than Paris. They costumed ballet, musical comedy, lyric opera and cinema while still attending to Louis Jouvet back in Paris. Together with Bérard, Karinska and Vladimir experimented very successfully with new materials never before used in theater. Here Karinska began her long lasting collaborative relationship with Cecil Beaton.

But war was in the making and in early 1939, Karinska, on two days notice, left for the United States on the Queen Mary, leaving her nephew to close the business with honor; evacuate Reynolds’s House and liquidate his aunt’s accumulation of costume sketches and antiques. Irene came to London immediately to sign all release documents in her mother’s place.

England and France declared war on Germany in September, 1939, and Vladimir, feeling greater allegiance to France than to England, returned to Paris and enlisted in the French army. Wounded, captured and escaping from a German prison camp, he made his way to the South of France where Karinska’s sister, Angelina, was living. Angelina, who had just received Karinska’s address in New York from Irene in Paris, by way of the underground, put mother and adopted son in touch once more.

America

Balanchine, who had relocated to the United States, had given Karinska an unused room at the fledgling School of American Ballet in New York City for her to work. From this space she collaborated with Salvador Dali on Dream of Venus for the Spanish Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Through Dalí, Karinska made friends with the Spanish Consul and confided to him her nephew’s case. Vladimir received instructions to make his way to the Spanish border where he would be provided safe transit to a ship leaving Lisbon for Havana. Emaciated and sickly, he arrived to New York in January 1941 where he was smothered by his aunts hugs and kisses. His new apartment awaited him at the mansion that Karinska was renting on E. 56th Street.

Karinska at that time was ridding herself of her partners, “The Princess and the Baron”, from a fly by night haute-couturier venture. She kept the mansion; the name Karinska Inc. and the parquet floor that the Baron had had brought to New York from a family castle in Egypt.

Shortly after Vlady's arrival they began executing the designs of Karinska's arch rival Irene Sharaff for Gypsy Rose Lee. Gypsy believed that Karinska understood the impact of her performance and enhanced her ability to deliver her unique style of burlesque to the audience. Vladimir hit it off well with Irene and made it possible for the two rivals to work together.

But rivalry soon ensued between Vladimir and Kermit Love who designed Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo of Serge Denham, newly arrived to New York. Vladimir and Love were both mask makers. But the rivalry was short lived as Vladimir was called to enlist in the American Army.

Since the German occupation of Paris, Karinska had lost contact with her daughter, Irene, who was living in Sarthe at the family residence of her husband, Xavier François. It was Vladimir the soldier who found Irene days before the liberation of Paris and from his nearby barracks wrote to Karinska special delivery informing her that she was a grandmother twice over. Vladimir entered the American Army in 1942 as Private Vladimir Jmoudsky and returned to civilian life in 1945 as Lieutenant Lawrence Vlady.

Back to work with Karinska, Vlady brought to the great costumer something she had never known: American military order, discipline and administration. The 56th Street mansion was immediately abandoned, Karinska Inc. was liquidated and the partnership between Karinska and Vlady was consolidated as Stage and Art Inc. that made its debut in a rather unsightly loft on W. 44th Street where Karinska’s costumes, always delivered at the last moment, could be walked over to the theaters if needs be. The affordable rent of the dingy loft permitted Karinska to purchase a townhouse on E. 63rd St. (where the Egyptian parquet floor was installed); a house in Joan of Arc’s home town, Domremy-la-Pucell, in the Lorraine region of Eastern France and a George Washington period house that she named "Saint Joan Hill" in Sandisfield, Massachusetts.

During the war years, while Karinska took extensive leaves to supervise costume production for motion pictures in Hollywood, she would rent her 56th St. mansion and her staff to ballet and theater companies, ventures that always ended in misunderstandings. With Vlady permanently settled in New York, he would run the business while Karinska worked in Hollywood. Under this arrangement she won her Oscar for Joan of Arc and her Oscar nomination for Hans Christian Andersen. These were the “Golden Years”. The label “Karinska Stage and Art” was sewn into costumes for Ice Shows, Musicals, legitimate theater, motion pictures, lyric opera and the most important for the Lady from Kharkiv –Ballet.

At the end of the German occupation of Paris, Irene Karinska reopened her costume atelier and worked successfully until retirement in the 1970s. Due to the fact that Irene’s work was often credited as "Costumes par Karinska", researchers have credited her work to her mother. Costumes designed by Raoul Dufy, Georges Braque and Yves St. Laurent (for Roland Petit) are the work of Irene Karinska.

Aunt and nephew parted ways in 1964, at which time Karinska was invited by Balanchine to join the New York City Ballet, newly injected with generous grants from the Ford Foundation; when later asked by the foundation what he considered indispensable to his work at City Ballet, he replied, "Karinska".^[2]

The "Powder Puff" Tutu

With a large assembly of dancers on stage – as was often preferred by Balanchine—the traditional "pancake" tutu with its stiff wired layer would bob and dip when the dancers' skirts brushed up against one another and this bobbing and dipping would reverberate long after the steps were complete.

Karinska solved this problem by devising the "powder puff" tutu, with a shorter skirt made of six or seven layers of gathered net, each layer a half inch longer than the preceding layer. The layers were tacked together for a fluffier, looser appearance than the stiff "pancake" tutu. Because the shorter layers are self-supporting, no wire hoop is needed in the "powderpuff" tutu, aka the Balanchine-Karinska tutu.

This tutu design has become standard in ballet companies all over the world since it first appeared in 1950, in the ballet Symphony in C. Balanchine said, "I attribute to [Karinska] fifty percent of the success of my ballets to those that she has dressed."

Karinska collaborated with Balanchine on seventy-five ballets in all, starting with Bouree Fantasque in 1949. In 1956, for Balanchine's Allegro Brillante, Karinska created the knee-length chiffon ballet dress, which has also become a standard design for ballet costumes.

Notes

1. ^ Sunday NY Times article by John Martin, December 31, 1961
2. ^ Fourth Ring Discussion, Saturday matinee, February 12, 2011

External links

• Costumes by Karinska by Toni Bentley, Lincoln Kirstein Publisher: Abrams, Harry N., Inc. 192 pages, 242 illus. (including 78 in color) September 1995 ISBN 9780810935167 ISBN 0810935163
• Memories of Madame Karinska by Allegra Kent Dance Magazine October 1, 2003
• New York City Ballet website
• NY Times obituary by Anna Kisselgoff, October 19, 1983
• Barbara Karinska (1886–1983) IMDB

Persondata
Name	Karinska, Barbara
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1886
Place of birth
Date of death	1983
Place of death