Barbara Karinska
Varvara Jmoudsky, better known as Barbara Karinska or simply Karinska, was the Oscar-winning costumier of cinema, ballet, musical and dramatic theatre, lyric opera and ice spectacles. Over her 50-year career, that began at age 41, Karinska earned legendary status time and again through her continuing collaborations with stage designers including Christian Bérard, André Derain, Irene Sharaff, Raoul Pêne du Bois and Cecil Beaton; performer-producers Louis Jouvet and Sonja Henie; ballet producers René Blum, Colonel de Basil and Serge Denham. Her longest and most renown collaboration was with choreographer George Balanchine for more than seventy ballets — the first known to be “The Celebrated Popoff Porcelain,” a one act ballet for Nikita Balieff's 1929 La Chauve-Souris with music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky for which Karinska executed the costumes design by Sergey Tchekhonin. She began to design costumes for Balanchine ballets in 1949 with Emmanuel Chabrier's “Bourrèe Fantasque,” for the newly founded New York City Ballet. Their final collaboration was the 1977 "Vienna Waltzes.” Balanchine and Karinska together developed the American tutu ballet costume which became an international costume standard.
With Dorothy Jeakins, she won the 1948 Oscar for color costume design for Joan of Arc, and was nominated in 1952 for the Samuel Goldwyn musical Hans Christian Andersen, starring Danny Kaye. She was the first costume designer to win the Capezio Dance Award, in 1962, for costumes "of visual beauty for the spectator and complete delight for the dancer".
Karinska divided her time between homes in Manhattan, Sandisfield, Massachusetts, and Domrémy-la-Pucelle, France, the birthplace of Joan of Arc.
Early life (From the memoirs of Lawrence Vlady)
Barbara Karinska was born Varvara Andriivna Jmudska in 1886, in the city of Kharkiv, Russian Empire. She was baptized in the Orthodox Church. Her father was a wealthy wholesaler of cotton goods, philanthropist and city father. She was the third and eldest female of the ten Jmoudsky siblings. Karinska learned Victorian embroidery as a child from her German and Swiss governesses. She studied law at Kharkiv Imperial University. In 1907, she married Alexander Moiseenko, the son of another wealthy Kharkiv merchant. Moiseenko died in 1909 several months before the birth of their daughter Irina. In 1910, Varvara's older brother Anatoly, owner of the moderately Socialist Kharkiv newspaper Utro, went through divorce proceedings that resulted in Varvara winning custody of his two-year-old son, her nephew, Vladimir Anatolevich Jmoudsky. Vladimir and Irina were raised as brother and sister.Varvara remarried a prominent lawyer, Nikolai Sergeevich Karinsky, from Moscow, who was residing in Kharkiv. With his law practice burgeoning, the Karinsky family of four moved to Moscow in 1916, to a spacious apartment that Varvara had purchased. Karinsky continued to practice criminal and political law and gained fame and prestige throughout the Russian Empire. Varvara, meanwhile, became totally engrossed in the arts and hosted her famous salon every night 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. In May, 1917, under the Provisional Government, Nikolai Karinsky was appointed Prosecutor of the St. Petersburg Court of Justice. He and Varvara resided in the capital several months, leaving the children in the care of their governess in Moscow.
Following the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, Varvara, Irina and Vladimir spent the years of the Civil War moving between Kharkiv and Crimea. Karinsky who held posts off and on as prosecutor under the White government of the South joined them sporadically.
As 1920 began, Varvara and the children were living in Yalta. In February Karinsky was appointed Deputy Minister of the Interior of the South Russian Government with headquarters in Novorossiysk. With the fall of Crimea to the Red forces in October of that year, Karinsky was a marked man. 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 Crimea.
Even as Karinsky made his way from Constantinople to New York, Varvara made her way back to Moscow leaving the children in Yalta for close to a year under the care of the faithful governess. In 1921, Varvara 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 provided for limited capitalism to help finance his new regime exhausted and debilitated by three years of civil war. Karinska opened a Tea Salon that became the meeting place of Moscow artists, intellectuals and government officials every afternoon at five 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 RSFSR are multiple: the death of Lenin in 1924 and the uncertainty of what was to come; within weeks after Lenin's death the new regime nationalized her embroidery school and turned it into a factory to manufacture Soviet flags ;, importantly Mamontov, a chronic alcoholic was incapable of performing any kind of work and thus seen as a symbol of bourgeois decadence; 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 number 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
After two years of luxurious living in Paris, all the treasures brought from home 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; an elaborately embroidered robe designed by Boris Bilinsky for the 1927 motion picture The Loves of Casanova. 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, directed by Colonel de Basil and René Blum requested she make costumes for their first season. The costumes were designed by Christian Bérard, André Derain, and Joan Miró, and the choreography was by George Balanchine and Leonide Massine, both choreographers with whom she had worked previously. Bérard, Derain, and Miró 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. During Karinska's brief career in Paris she also collaborated with Balthus, Cassandre, Soudeikine, and Vertès, and other painters and designers. She costumed the plays of Jean Cocteau and Louis Jouvet. In 1933, Karinska costumed Les Ballets 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 “Irène Karinska”. Barbara Karinska and Vladimir, sponsored by Mme. Hayward Court Dressmaker, 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 revue, Shakespeare, 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 collaborative relationship with Cecil Beaton.
But war was in the making and early in 1939, Karinska abandoned her London empire, on short notice, and moved permanently to the United States, leaving her nephew to close the business with honor; evacuate Reynolds's House and liquidate his aunt's accumulation of costume sketches and antiques. Irène came to London immediately to sign all release documents in her mother's place.
Karinska appeared in New York early in 1939 of her own volition and quickly resumed work that began in London with the New York manifestation of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo directed by Serge Denham who helped her to immigrate and provided working space where she launched her American career with BRMC's “Ghost Town,” with costumes designed by Raoul Pêne de Bois and Salvador Dalí's “Venusberg” from “Tannheuser” — both presented in New York in the fall of 1939.
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 POW camp in August 1940, made his way to the South of France where he received the Croix de Guerre for Bravery. Karinska's sister, Angelina, was living near the military base where Vladimir was billeted. She had just received Karinska's address in New York from Irène in Paris and put aunt and nephew in touch.