VALERIA BILINSKY

COLORED MUSIC: THE PICTORAL TRANSCRIPTIONS OF BORIS BILINSKY

Among the many Russian and East European artists that Paris wel- comed in the 1920s, there was a young Ukrainian painter by the name of Boris Bilinsky.' For three years he had lived in Berlin working for the Blaue Vogel and other cabarets before arriving in Paris in 1923, where he was soon receiving wide acclaim for his many artistic endeavors: posters, costume and set designs for the major movie producers of the time (Epstein, Tourjansky, Malikoff, Volkoff, Fescourt, Litvak et al.), and scenographies for the several Russian ballet troupes, including those of Bronislava Nijinska, Boris Romanov, and Prince Alexei Tseretelli (Zereteli). He worked for the Arc en Ciel Theater and in 1925 receieved a Gold Medal for his contribution to the "Exposition Internationale des Arts De- coratifs." Indeed, for cinema historians the name of Soris Konstantinovich Bilin- sky (born 1900 in Benderi, near Odessa; died 1948 in Catania. Sicily) is linked inextricably with the great movies of that era-Casanova, Metropo- lis, Le tion des Mogols, Scheherazade, Tarakanova, Monte Cristo, le Dia- bie Blanc, l'Equipage-in fact, with more than thirty films manufactured in France. Balletomanes also associate Bilinsky with the luxurious produc- tions of the Russian companies such as 's Ruslan et Liud- mila, 's "Danse rituelle du feu" from 1'Amour Sorcier (Fig. 206), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Swan Princess, 's Pelleas

1. For further information on Bilinsky, see A. P-V, «B.K. Bilinsky," Teatr i iskusstvo (Paris), No. 2 (1924), p. 10; E. Znosko-Borovsky, 'A propos de quatre artistes (Larionov, Leon Zak, Modzaelvsky, Bilinsky),' La Revue de "l'Oeuvre" (Paris), No. 1 (Nov. 1927), pp. 24-26; S. Lissim, 'Boris Bilinsky," Mobilier et decoration theätrales (Paris), Annee 11 (1931), pp. 425-28; S. Lissim, "Boris Bilinsky; decoration th6ätrales et cinematographiques," Art et /es artistes (Paris), Dec. 1937, pp. 101-04; Boris 8ilinsky. Cinema, Teatro, Musica . Catalog of exhibition at the Casa d'Arte Bragaglia, Rome, 1940; Scenografia e balletto. Acquart-Iii e tempere di Bilinsky. Catalog of exhibition at the Capannina di Porfori, Rome, 1955; Boris Bilinsky. Catalog of exhibition at the Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York, May-June, 1975; Boris Bilinsky (1900-1948). Catalog of auction at Hotel des Ventes, Bayeux, France, 25 April, 1993; O. Medvedkova, "Borisu Belinskomu [sie] s voskhishcheniem," Russkaia mysl (Paris), June 18-24, 1993, p. 14. et Melisande, Alexander Borodin's Prince /gor, and ' Symphonie Fantastique (Fig. 207). From 1939 onwards Bilinsky was based in Italy, working for the Titanus Film Corporation and La Scala in Milan, but illness struck just as he was embarking on an ambitious sceonography for the French movie of La Dame de Pique and a brilliant career was cut short by his death in February 1948. Today Bilinsky is best known for his "commercial" designs, especially the movie posters, but few realize that he was an artist drawn to the most diverse cultures and that he was preoccupied with complex reli- gious, philosphical, and metaphyical issues. Bilinsky pursued these inter- ests in his researches for two of his major pictorial themes, i.e., the cycle of forty watercolors representing the Apocalypse according to St. John and his "music in colors"-investigations into the synthesis of music and image. For Bilinsky music was the supreme art, a universal vector for attaining the spiritual plane and the "cosmic mystery" and one that had so en- grossed Alexander Scriabin. If Bilinsky was unable to realize his dream to compose musical studies or become the conductor of an orchestra, he expressed his passion, nevertheiess, in a number of theatrical designs. In- deed, writing in the journal Musique et Theätre for December 1925, one critic mentioned that there was "something musical in the idea of the pro- ject for luminous decor,,"2 while another observer, reviewing Bilinsky's de- signs for Ruslan and Ludmila for the journal Beaux Arts, emphasized their "lyrical decor."3 Words such as "music," "light," and "color" return con- stantly in the critical appreciations of Bilinsky's art at that time. From the late 1920s onwards Bilinsky explored the possibility of ren- dering the "sentiments experienced when one hears this or that piece of music" in visual or color translation.4 The originality of Bilinsky's particular idea lies in his desire to combine architectural severity with impressionism, a concept that he tried to explain to Italian reporters in 1942 eager to discover how exactly he would be conducting his experiments: "... all the notes in a piece of music can be assembled in a line, the continuity of which results in a diagram. lf one takes a unit of measure in order to de- termine the length of the lines that assemble the notes together, then it is equally possible to make a graphic representation of the duration of these notes. The longer the note, the longer the line. In this way, one ob- tains a physical image peculiar to each musical form.q5 This is the "archi-

2. A. Tessier in Musique et Theatre (Paris), Dec. 1, 1925. 3. G. Hilaire in Beaux Arts (Paris), Nov. 3, 1933. 4. B. Bilinsky, Notes (undated). Collection of Valeria Bilinsky, Paris. 5. G. Maselli, "La cromofonia. Si puö vedere la musica?" Sapere (Milan), April 30, 1940.