The manner in which Nijinsky’s face changes from role to role is immediately striking. It is enhanced by makeup, but not created by it. In fact, a friend pointed out that the only role in which one recognizes Nijinsky’s civilian face is that of Petrouchka, where he is most heavily made up. There is no mystery about such transformability. People don’t usually realize how much any face changes in the course of a day, and how often it is unrecognizable for an instant or two. Nijinsky seems to have controlled the variability a face has. The same metamorphosis is obvious in his body. The Specter, for instance, has no age or sex, the Faun is adolescent, and the hero of Jeux has a body full-grown and experienced. Tyl can either be boy or man. The Slave in Schéhérazade is fat, the Spector is thin. It does not look like the same body. One can say that in this sense there is no exhibitionism in Nijinsky’s photographs. He is never showing you himself, or an interpretation of himself. He is never vain of what he is showing you. The audience does not see him as a professional dancer, or as a professional charmer. He disappears completely, and instead there is an imaginary being in his place. Like a classic artist, he remains detached, unseen, unmoved, uninterested. Looking at him, one is in an imaginary world, entire and very clear; and one’s emotions are not directed at their material objects, but at their imaginary satisfactions. As he said himself, he danced with love.

To sum up, Nijinsky in his photographs shows us the style of a classic artist. The emotion he projects, the character he projects, is not communicated as his own, but as one that exists independently of himself, in the objective world. Similarly his plastic sense suggests neither a private yearning into an infinity of space nor a private shutting out of surrounding relationships, both of them legitimate romantic attitudes. The weight he gives his own body, the center which he gives his plastic motions, strikes a balance with the urge and rapidity of leaps and displacements. It strikes a balance between the role he dances and the roles of his partners. The distinction of place makes the space look real, the distinction of persons makes the drama real. And for the sake of this clarification he characterizes (or mimes, one might say) even such a conventional ornamental showoff, or “pure dance,” part as that in Pavillon. On the other hand, the awkward heaviness that Faun, Sacre, and Jeux exhibited, and that was emphasized by their angular precision, was not, I believe, an anticlassic innovation. It was an effort to make the dance more positive, to make clearer still the center of gravity of a movement, so that its extent, its force, its direction, its elevation can be appreciated not incidentally merely, but integrally as drama. He not only extended the plastic range in dancing, but clarified it. And this is the way to give meaning to dancing -- not secondhand literary meaning, but direct meaning. Nijinsky’s latest intentions of “circular movement” and the improvisational quality Tyl seems to have had are probably a normal development of his sense of motion in relation to a point of repose – a motion that grew more animated and diverse as his instinct became more exercised. (An evolution not wholly dissimilar can be followed in Miss Graham’s work, for instance.) And I consider the following remark he made to be indicative of the direction of his instinct: “Le grace, le charme, le joli sont rangés tout autour du point central qu’est le beau. C’est pour le beau que je travaille.” I do not see anything in these pictures that would lead one to suppose that Nijinsky’ subsequent insanity cast any premonitory shadow on his phenomenally luminous dance intelligence.

In their stillness Nijinsky’s pictures have more vitality than the dances they remind us of as we now see them on stage. They remain to show us what dancing can be, and what the spectator and the dancer each aspire to, and hold to be a fair standard of art. I think they give the discouraged dance lover faith in dancing as a serious human activity. As Mr. Van Vechten wrote after seeing him in 1916: “His dancing has the unbroken quality of music, the balance of a great painting, the meaning of fine literature, and the emotion inherent in all these arts.”