Ida Rubinstein en Scheherezade (Ida Rubinstein in Scheherezade)

Written by Cristina Santa Cruz

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ETERNAS AUDIOGUIDE Ida Rubinstein in Scheherezade (Spanish audio)Cristina Santa Cruz

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Ida Rubinstein en Scheherazade (Ida Rubinstein in Scheherezade)

Jorman

Oil on canvas

200 × 170 cm (approximately 78.7 × 66.9 in)

2025

Eternas Collection

Category: Portrait · History · Literature · Ballet · Imagination

She does not dance—she enchants. She does not plead—she seduces. She does not surrender: she tells a story.

 

Adorned in stones and velvets that seem to sing, Ida Rubinstein becomes here a mirror of all possible Scheherazades. In this work, Jorman does not merely portray a character—he summons a myth, an era, a sensibility. And he does so with the visual power of an enchantment.

The background—vibrant and shadowed, in impossible greens and violets—pays tribute to the theatrical worlds of Léon Bakst, painter of oriental atmospheres and one of the great visual architects of the Ballets Russes. Within that context, Rubinstein—a singular figure of the Belle Époque—embodies Zobeida, the tragic and sensual odalisque of the ballet Scheherazade.

But there is no empty ornamentation here—there is soul. Jorman takes an archival photograph and transforms it into a symbol. Ida’s pose—curved, alert, barefoot, her gaze fearless and defiant—is that of a woman who knows her narrative, physical, and emotional power. At once proud and guarded, like Scheherazade herself, she conjures her fate not with weapons, but with words, with presence, with a beauty that never yields.

The colours form a symphony woven in oil: indigo and amethyst speak of inner kingdoms; peacock green, of hidden secrets; gold, of the eternal; and deep blue, of the slow rhythm of stories that save lives…

Each brushstroke caresses the canvas as would a weaver of ancient silks. The reflections, the textures, the beads glimmering with jewel-like precision… all evoke not only the costumes of the era, but oriental tapestries, illuminated manuscripts, and dancing bodies cloaked in shadow.

And at the heart of it all—music. The music of Rimsky-Korsakov, who composed his Scheherazade imagining the violin as the feminine voice that leads and transforms. That violin is the fine line in this painting. It is the curve of her back. It is the breath in her fingers. It is the mystery of her loose hair, unafraid of desire or history.

Cristina Santa Cruz

April 2025

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Ida, Zobeida and Scheherezade in context

Ida Rubinstein (born in 1885 and departed this world in 1960) was far more than a muse. Orphaned at an early age, she inherited an immense fortune—but also a fierce independence of spirit. Far from settling for the privileges of the bourgeois world, she embraced the life of art with an intensity befitting myth. And like all myth, she lived between light and shadow, between stage and exile, between desire and renunciation.

She was an actress, a dancer, a philanthropist, a producer, and a patron. This unconventional ballerina—languid in figure, aristocratic, with a proud and melancholic gaze, and an almost mystical energy—captured the imagination of an entire age.

She joined Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, becoming the lead in emblematic productions such as Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (with music by Debussy) and Scheherazade (with music by Rimsky-Korsakov), in sets and costumes designed by Léon Bakst, the great architect of theatrical exoticism during the Belle Époque.

She revered beauty, art, and risk. She did not limit herself to performance; her creative impulse extended beyond the stage. She conceived, funded, produced, and curated. During the Great War, she founded a military hospital in France and enlisted as a volunteer nurse.

She was both muse and life partner to the painter Romaine Brooks, who portrayed her with devotion and mystery in multiple versions—as goddess, as nurse, as sphinx. It was she who commissioned (and inspired) Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, a hypnotic hymn to repetition that would become one of the most celebrated compositions of the twentieth century.

Within her coexisted dance and thought, fragility and resolve, the imagined Orient and the real West. Rubinstein was many women at once—and perhaps for that reason, the perfect contemporary incarnation of Scheherazade.

Here, she embodies Zobeida, a character from the ballet based on One Thousand and One Nights, but she is also Scheherazade herself: a woman who survives by telling stories, who saves others through narration. Her life is a testament to storytelling as resistance, to art as a subtle weapon, to beauty as intelligence in motion.

And like the tales that inspire her, this painting is nourished by many cultures: Persia, India, Arabia, Egypt, Byzantium… and by the Paris that once dreamed of the Orient. At its core, Scheherazade is not a place, but an idea—one that lives on in every voice that speaks to defy silence, in every artist who transforms fear into desire, threat into form.

 

One Thousand and One Nights

The stories that defy death.

The collection of tales known as One Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa Layla) is a narrative tapestry woven over centuries, nourished by Persian, Arab, Indian, and Egyptian traditions. It bears no single authorship and offers no definitive text: its richness lies in the act of constant telling, transforming, and reimagining.

At the heart of this compendium stands Scheherazade, the wise narrator who, to save her life from Sultan Shahryar—who executed each wife after the wedding night—chooses to tell him a story every night, leaving each tale unfinished. In doing so, for one thousand and one nights, she prolongs her life, transforms him, and proves that words can overcome power, that the beauty of narrative can be stronger than violence.

There is something profoundly revolutionary in this act: Scheherazade does not flee, does not confront, does not bow. She tells a story. And within her voice live Sinbad, Aladdin, Ali Baba, and countless women who have used wit, knowledge, humour, and art as instruments of survival and love.

Jorman’s choice to depict Ida Rubinstein as Scheherazade is likewise a gesture that weaves together eras and meanings: the twentieth-century artist becomes the voice of antiquity; the European dancer becomes the icon of an Eastern storyteller.

And thus, the canvas becomes night,

the body becomes language,

and the painting becomes a tale...

Cristina Santa Cruz

April 2025

Ida Rubinstein in Scheherezade, by Jorman · Oil on canvas · 200 x 170 cm (approximately 78.7 × 66.9 in) · 2025 · Eternas Collection

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