The Garretts were not your ordinary family. When Robert Garrett won the first title in the discus throw– otherwise known as an Olympic Gold Metal – he had defeated the Greek champions. The Greeks had immodestly arrived at the new Olympics lauding themselves as unbeatable. Newspapers described Robert Garrett as a Princeton man.
Robert Garrett who later became a banker, came from a family of bankers, one truly annoying suffragette, bibliophiles, and bird watchers besides. The Garretts were not your typical Gilded Age millionaire robber barons and croquet players. John Work Garrett (named after his grandfather the President of the B&O Railroad) did something truly absurd. He went into government service.
The younger Garrett worked in the embassies in Berlin and Rome where he was advanced to a ministerial rank. He managed prisoners of war during World War I. He later served in the embassies of Venezuela and Argentina.
The Garrett’s home was a mansion located on Charles Street known as Evergreen. The house had been left to John W. Garrett in the will of his grandfather.
Alice and John had no propensity for boredom which may be why they invited Leon Bakst to come home with them to the United States where they assisted him in promoting his art. They may have had other reasons too.
Bakst – born in Russia – had been educated in Saint Petersberg at the Academy of Fine Arts. He was an established painter and book illustrator when he began designing scenes and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev who was directing the Russes Ballet. Tchaikovsky was writing for The Nutcacker, Sleeping Beauty, and Swan Lake for principals such as Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky.
The year of 1910, however, eclipsed the performances of the Russes Ballet, with productions of Sheherazade, Giselle, Firebird, and Le Carnaval. What could possibly have been grander, more elegant, or more sophisticated? Artistically and financially, Leon Bakst was a very successful man.
However, Leon Bakst was a Jew. His real name was Lev Rosenberg. In Imperial Russia, Jews did not have the right to live outside of the Pale of Settlement. The area in Russia where Jews were required to reside comprised 20 per cent of European Russia; Jews were even excluded from residency in many of the cities within the Pale. The Imperial Czarist government had indulged Bakst as an artist by granting him travel privileges. Bakst had taken advantage of his success which enabled him to live in Western Europe where governments like France did not enforce the Imperialist Russian law which was in force in eastern Europe.
It was Alice Garrett who decided to take Bakst home to America where the Garrett(s) promoted his art vogue. His art was greatly influenced by the works of Matisse and Gauguin.
Many Americans describe Leon Bakst as an art-deco designer. Art deco is the style he implemented when designing the theater that Alice and John Garrett built in their basement at Evergreen. He designed sets for their theater stage there as well. Upstairs on the main floor of Evergreen, he designed the Garrett dining room in daring shades of red complemented by Japanese prints. Many of Bakst’s paintings hang in the Evergreen Museum today along with the portraits that he painted of both John and Alice.
Lenin did away with The Pale of Settlement in 1916. He said that Jewish workers were his brothers. He despised rich Jews, though, who he said had consorted with the aristocracy of Imperialist Russia. Leon Bakst remained in America where he died from a lung ailment in 1925.
A lot of people may not be aware that Russian Jews who emigrate today find the word JEW printed on their passport instead of Russian citizen.
John and Alice Garrett were called out of retirement in 1930. Herbert Hoover sent them to Italy where John was given the job of ambassador. Time Magazine dubbed the Garrett couple as “Lord and Lady Bountiful Music”. More likely, though, Hoover sent them to Italy to keep an eye Mussolini and the rise of fascism.
If you wish to know more about the former home of John and Alice, the Evergreen website is www.museums.jhu.edu/evergreen.php
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