Art by Alexandre Benois (1870-1960)

Benois was a Russian painter, stage designer, and critic who, alongside Sergei Diaghilev and Léon Bakst, founded the journal and movement Mir Iskusstva ("World of Art") at the end of the 1890s, laying the aesthetic groundwork for the Ballets Russes. His set and costume designs for productions like Petrushka and Giselle helped define how modern ballet actually looked on stage. Later, as curator of Old Masters at the Hermitage, he secured for the museum a small Leonardo da Vinci Madonna that had belonged to his own family, still known today as the "Benois Madonna," a rare case of a curator's personal history becoming part of a museum's permanent collection.