The Sacharoffs
Two dancers within the Blaue Reiter circle
The fame of most dancers fades even while they are still alive, or at
best shortly after their deaths. What remains is usually only a trail of
paper in the form of photos, programmes and critics' reviews (and in case
of the second half of the 20th century: perhaps some few film documents).
This is not the case with the Sacharoffs, who were world famous, and whose
fame has been preserved in portraits in museums and private art collections,
since many of their friends were important artists of the day. The most
famous work, Alexej von Jawlensky's 1909 Portrait of the Dancer Sacharoff,
has been featured on dust jackets, printed on postcards and posters, used
to decorate a station on the Munich underground and for the face of a wrist
watch. In memoirs, diaries and collections of letters, one finds many traces
of Alexander and Clotilde Sacharoff and the manifold cultural ties they
maintained with their contemporaries.
Nevertheless, the information we have on Alexander Sacharoff and Clotilde
von Derp, who were married in 1919, is for the most part quite vague. Since
a short publication in conjunction with an exhibition in the 1960s, there
has been only one other monograph on the Sacharoffs, and that was in Italian.
Dance researchers have not had an easy time of it, since the wide-ranging
bequest-despite sizeable losses resulting from an artistic life marked
by continual travel-was dismantled by Clotilde during her own lifetime,
by giving away some items and selling others. Hence, the Dansmuseet
in Stockholm, then the only public collection of this kind in Europe, received
numerous costumes, photos and original press clippings, and the Musée
de l'Opéra in Paris received other costumes and documents. Clotilde
gave other works of art and most of her husband's remaining notebooks,
which were written in Russian, to the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus
in Munich. Financial problems forced her to sell quite a few of the works
by Jawlensky that she owned, including the famous portrait from 1909, to
museums and at auctions. This was also true of all the letters she received
from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (now at Yale
University)-after they had been purged of anything all too personal.
An entire exhibition on the Sacharoffs was sold by a gallery owner in a
highly unscrupulous transaction-i.e. without the knowledge of the owner
or her heirs (now at the Archives
de la Ville de Lausanne). Most of the other private effects remained
at Clotilde Sacharoff's residence in Italy. Other documents can be found
in the Harvard
Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, and in the Jerome
Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library.
It is therefore not surprising that researchers have had such a difficult
time, and that the Sacharoffs have not been honoured to the extent that
would seem appropriate. The fact that a book about Munich's Schwabing district
in those days includes a chapter on dance as an art form that fully ignores
Clotilde von Derp and Alexander Sacharoff, yet discusses Rudolf von Laban
and Mary Wigman using numerous illustrations from Ascona and the Lago Maggiore,
is really quite absurd and is undoubtedly a result of the what has heretofore
been a dearth of sources. This situation has dramatically improved since
the Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln (German Dance Archive Cologne, or DTK) purchased the remaining bequest at the end of 1997 with the generous support of the Kulturstiftung
der Länder (Cultural Foundation of the States), the Stiftung
Kunst und Kultur des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (The Foundation for
Art and Culture of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia) and the SK
Stiftung Kultur der Stadtsparkasse Köln (Foundation for Culture
maintained by the Commercial and Savings Bank Cologne). The inventory consisted
of roughly 65 costumes, sketches and drawings for over 300 set and costume
designs, more than 500 dance photographs-some of them by Hugo Erfurth,
Sasha Stone, Brassaï, Hoppé or d'Ora-as well as countless programmes,
reviews, autographs and a collection of books.
The recently published monograph is dedicated, on the one hand, to aspects
of the dancers' work with a specific focus on dance research, particularly
in the early years, before their marriage in 1919. That was a time at which
Munich was the creative centre in which both of them worked, a place where
Alexander Sacharoff aroused attention as the first man to perform in solo
at concert venues, thereby clearly demonstrating an androgynous manner
that became the talk of the town, and when a young girl began to make her
contribution to the development of modern dance and was greeted with thundering
applause. On the other hand, this publication also examines their connections
to the many artists with whom they were befriended for the first time.
Alexander began by studying art in Paris and had come to Munich on the
advice of his friend Moissey Kogan in 1905. He became a close friend of
other Russian artists, such as Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin,
Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Mogilewsky and Wladimir von Bechtejeff and
joined the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in 1909. It was out
of this group that the Blauer Reiter was ultimately to go forth. In a process
of direct artistic exchange with almost all of the prominent members of
this group, he found his calling as a dancer within their circle. As Jawlensky
remembered in 1937: "In those days we were always together and he visited
us almost every day. We discussed his entire training together. I always
watched how he danced. He also knew and understood my art very well." Kandinsky
reports on a period in which both of them collaborated with the composer,
Thomas von Hartmann, on a synaesthetic work of art: "The musician chose
a series of works from among my water colours that seemed to him to be
the clearest in terms of their musicality. Before the dancer joined us,
he played this watercolour. When the dancer joined us, the piece of music
was played for him, and he transformed it into dance, he was then supposed
to guess which of the watercolours it was, that he had danced."
Clotilde also had close contacts to artists. The sculptor Georg Kolbe
wrote to her in 1916: "To me you are undoubtedly the foremost female dancer
in Germany. Up until today I could not have imagined that there were any
such dancers among us." She also served as a model for the sculptor Hermann
Haller, and concerning her friendship with Jawlensky she wrote in her unpublished
memoirs that "Jawlensky enjoyed putting make-up on me. He painted a red
circle on my forehead and a heavy brown line down the length of my nose.
I resembled one of his famous heads."
The publication of the new book, the exhibition staged in Bremen, Cologne and Munich, the forthcoming development of the Sacharoffs' bequest at the Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln / SK Stiftung Kultur and the websites should aid dance scholars in documenting the lives, work and artistic milieu of these two fascinating dancers, and to make them well-known to the posterity. |