Rolf de Maré

De Maré inherited one of Sweden's great fortunes and spent it on modern art and modern dance. He collected Cubism early — Picasso's Man with a Pipe passed through his hands, along with the bronze Head of Fernande and works by Braque and Léger — and in 1920 he founded a ballet company in Paris, the Ballets Suédois, to rival Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. With the young Swedish dancer Jean Börlin as his choreographer and only star, the company ran for five years at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and staged twenty-four ballets, most of them new commissions.

The commissioning is why he belongs in these pages. De Maré hired the Paris avant-garde to make dance: Fernand Léger designed Skating Rink in 1922 and La Création du monde in 1923, Erik Satie wrote the score for Relâche in 1924, and Francis Picabia supplied its scenario. Relâche carried, between its two acts, René Clair's film Entr'acte — which has a page of its own — so de Maré is the producer behind the one film in which the whole Paris avant-garde can be watched playing. When the company closed in 1925 he turned archivist, founding the Archives Internationales de la Danse in Paris in 1931, an early museum and research centre for dance. He died in 1964, and his art collection was dispersed.