Early life

Rostislav Mstislavovitch Doboujinsky was born on 3 April 1903 in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire. He was the eldest son of ballet and opera designer Mstislav Valerianovich Doboujinsky, who co-founded the Le Monde de l'art movement - mir iskusstva - with Alexandre Benois and Sergei Diaghilev.^[1] Introduced from childhood to the world of the arts by his father, he took classical secondary studies in Russia and attended the Higher School of Fine Arts in Petrograd. In 1920 he worked as assistant designer at the Gorky theatre in Petrograd, in 1921 received his first stage design credit and in 1922 worked as set and costume designer for avant-garde and research group “Le Jeune Theater”.^[3] In 1924, the family fled to Lithuania where the young Doboujinsky was employed at the Kaunas theatre. A year later Rostislav moved to France with his wife Lydia, where he worked as a set designer and Lydia founded a fashion house which supplied costumes to ballets in Sweden and Monte Carlo. From 1925–27 he also studied at the National School of Decorative Arts and the Faculty of Letters in the Sorbonne.^[3] In 1939, Doboujinsky designed the costumes for Ondine, then worked with Christian Bérard, Leonor Fini, Lila de Nobili, and founded his own set workshop with Lydia.^[1] In 1950, he became a member of Societe des auteurs, compositeurs et editeurs de musique (SACEM).^[3]

The Sleeping Beauty (1968) and Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971)

Lila de Nobili brought Doboujinsky over from Paris to make animal masks for the first act of The Sleeping Beauty at Covent Garden. According to the V&A, Doboujinsky's wolf mask for this ballet was:

"a superb example of animal headdress-making. It was devised by the great mask-maker Rostislav Doboujinsky... Dancing under the heat of stage lights is uncomfortable, and having to wear full head mask is not popular with the performers, so the masks have to be as light as possible and give some ventilation. By the 1960s, new materials allowed Doboujinsky to create heads that were substantial but light enough to be worn for long periods, give as wide an angle of vision as possible and try to ensure that the wearer did not overheat."^[4]

While at Covent Garden, Doboujinsky talked with Richard Goodwin and Christine Edzard, the producer and writers for The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971). In October 1969, he agreed to make a sample mask for The Tales' mouse character 'Hunca Munca', whose face is “perhaps the most appealing in the film”. He remade the mask thirteen times over the winter, working “at his own pace – and to his own standard of perfection” until he was satisfied with the fourteenth attempt in February 1970.^[5] Doboujinsky collaborated with Christine Edzard on the masks “on which much of the picture's success depended”.^[5] His original masks for the film, made of bike helmets, polystyrene, hand-sewn hair and vision holes covered in gauze, had to be recreated for the stage, with a larger field of vision for the dancers. The artist used moulds of the originals, drilling hundreds of holes at the front and covering the mask in nylon hair “using electrostatic charges.”^[6]

Interior Design

A collaboration in the 1960s with Renzo Mongiardino at the International Second World Congress of Man-Made Fibres Gala launched Doboujinsky into interior design, where he worked alongside other outstanding designers including Luchino Visconti, Franco Zeffirelli and Giorgio Strehler.^[7] The Great Gala was held at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 3 May 1962, and was “A Gala Divertimento of music, song and dance and brilliant decor” featuring renowned artists including Yehudi Menuhin.^[8] It was staged by Zeffirrelli with costumes by Lila de Nobili, orchestra conducted by Adrian Boult and design by Mongiardino. Tonton created a 20 ft tall chandelier surrounded by a dozen smaller ones, each piece of 'crystal' created using tiny pastry molds.^[7]

His first work for the Rothschild family was a coming-of-age party at the Château de Ferrières near Paris for which he made a dozen big plastic chandeliers for the ballroom and an enormous candelabra for the roof. Opulent chandeliers became a Doboujinsky trademark. Another project was the refurbishment in 1974 by Mongiardino's team of one of the Rothschild residences – the Hôtel Lambert on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris. Doboujinsky designed a fake cordovan-leather dado and borders to frame a series of 17th century panels depicting David's triumph over Goliath, across the four walls of one room. For Marie-Helene de Rothschild's bedroom he created extravagant wall coverings inspired by a 17th century rug.^[7][3]

Doboujinsky‘s technique was a combination of “unorthodox materials” and “painstaking craft”. For the dado at Hôtel Lambert he made a shallow mould, adding latex to it to make sheets of embossed “leather’ which he gilded and glazed using centuries-old methods. Designer Claudio Briganti described Doboujinsky as “enormously inquisitive”, exploring “scores of craft techniques” rather than relying simply on stencils and “faux-marbre”. For Marie-Helene de Rothschild’s bedroom wallcoverings he took inspiration from a very old, “enormous” and “very worn” Persian rug whose weave could not have been reproduced. Instead Doboujinsky combined painting methods, using pigments of oil paints and gouache applied to the back of canvas which seeped through to the front to evoke the colours and motifs of the original and “suggest its lovely threadbare quality”.^[7]

In 1981-82, Doboujinsky worked on the design for Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza's New York dining room – inspired by the floral pattern of an 18th century Turkish rug.^[7][3] Doboujinsky used silk-screen and textile-printing methods on a variety of suitable materials – silk, velvet, terrycloth and burlap - to produce a “correspondence” of colour and motif to the original ancient rug, rather than a precise copy. According to Briganti, Doboujinsky’s painting and sculpting talents were “rarely allied in one so ingeniously inventive person” and is what made him “uniquely valuable”.^[7]

Peines du coeur d'une chatte anglaise (1977) and later years

Doboujinsky received international recognition for the masks he created for Alfredo Arias' 1977 production of Peines du Coeur d'une chatte anglaise, based on the story by Honoré de Balzac in Scenes from the Private and Public Life of Animals, illustrated by J. J. Grandville.^[1][2] The play was produced for the Shiraz festival and toured France from 1977 to 1983. In March 1980 it went to Broadway at the Theatre Anta, as Heartaches of a Pussycat. Costumes were designed by Claudie Gastine and animal masks by Doboujinsky.^[9][10]

Walter Kerr, reviewing the Broadway show for the New York Times in March 1980, wrote :

“There are whiskered tomcats in frock coats, beribboned dachsunds in tea-party finery. Birds with beaks you'd do well to shy away from...I can't believe that anyone has ever designed masks – they're full, three-dimensional heads, really - more persuasive than those here provided by R. Doboujinsky.” ^[11]

At the age of eighty, and in collaboration with Sabine Dutilh, he designed the sets, costumes and masks for Arias and Kado Kostzer's Sortileges in 1983, which were “a great strength of the production”. His design work featured “many exquisite details” such as ermine tails along the hem of the red curtains, and an “especially fanciful” Jester's costume in which the “egg-like bald head was balanced in front by a pear-shaped belly”, creating an effect of “delicate grotesqueness.”^[12]

Personal life and legacy

A modest man, Doboujinsky referred to himself as a “jack of all trades”, “only an amateur, only a dabbler” and was referred to by the entire profession as 'Tonton' ('uncle').^[7][1]

Actress Marilù Marini, who played the English cat 'Beauty' in Arias's Peines de Coeur d'une Chatte Anglaise said of him: “He was a great artist who remained like a child who goes to the theater for the first time and wants to know what is behind the scenes."^[1] Journalist Jean-Louis Perrier wrote in Le Monde: "He never exhibited his immense culture or science. Every time, he was inventing something new. Everything for him was a bridge to the imagination. And there was this baroque, expressive, fantastic, Russian side in all his creations.”^[1]

Alfredo Arias and René de Ceccatty paid homage to Doboujinsky in Les Peines de coeur d'une chat française (1999) in the guise of a big bear named Djinsky.^[1]

Although Doboujinsky was so detailed in his work and obsessed by craftmanship, he lived in minimalist surroundings, spending most of his time in a cluttered studio in the working class quarter of Belleville in Paris. He said “I’ve never planned a décor for myself”, as a child “I lived among pictures and furnishings of immense worth that provided the groundwork for my visual education…..Now I’d rather devote my days to doing interiors for others.”^[7]

In 1983 he joined forces with Sabine Dutilh who, until then, had been his assistant. The two collaborated on development and creation of works.^[3]

During his long life in France, Doboujinsky maintained his status as Lithuanian political refugee. He applied for, and obtained, French nationality a few months before he died in Paris on 23 June 2000.^[1]