Michel Larionov
Costume design for the Chief Clown in The Buffoon 1915

The Victoria and Albert Museum, London
© V & A Picture Library
© Michel Larionov, 1915/ADAGP. Reproduced by permission of VISCOPY Ltd, Sydney 1999.

After Larionov was wounded in the First World War, he and his partner Natalia Goncharova went to Switzerland to work with Serge Diaghilev, designing for the Russian Ballet. Larionov's first drawings for the Cubo-Futurist ballet The Buffoon in 1915 show his radical artistic purpose: an interest in two-dimensional reality and flat, abstract patterning. Six years later he collaborated with Thadée Slavinsky in the choreography for the long-delayed premiere of the ballet.