Measuring a whopping 34 by 38 foot (considerably longer than the London buses which drop visitors off at its home at the V&A East Storehouse), the 1924 stage cloth for Ballets Russes’s Le Train Bleu is known as Picasso’s largest canvas. It’s even signed by Picasso, even if he didn’t actually paint it.

Stage cloths or drop curtains are revealed, hung in front of the stage, after the main curtain has risen, often accompanied by a musical overture to help establish mood inside a theater. The design of the V&A’s supersized specimen captures Le Train Bleu’s invigorating athleticism (sport features heavily in the ballet) and was executed by the designer Prince Aleksandr Konstantinovich Chachba-Sharvashidze (a member of Georgian-Abkhazian royalty) after a 1922 original painting by Picasso.

Two Women Running along the Beach (The Race)—a considerably smaller painting, just 14 by 17 inches—was made by Picasso during a stay at the seaside resort of Dinard on the northern coast of France. Made in the neoclassical style which dominated his work in this period, the painting shows two toga-clad women running hand in hand in front of a cobalt blue sky. Created the year after the birth of his first child, Paulo, The Race came at a positive time in the artist’s life, in the early years of his marriage to Olga Khokhlova, a ballet dancer with the Ballets Russes.

Black-and-white photo of four Ballets Russes dancers performing Le Train Bleu, with two in swimwear and two in tennis outfits striking stylized poses on stage.

Le Train Bleu in performance at the London Coliseum Theatre, 1924. Photo: Fine Art Images / Heritage Images via Getty Images.

Khokhlova worked as a dancer in the Paris-based Ballets Russes during its direction under its founder, the patron and impresario Serge Diaghilev, who oversaw the company from its inception in 1909 until his death in 1929. Le Train Bleu, a one-act ballet choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska based on a story by Jean Cocteau, also fell under his direction and debuted on May 26, 1924. The ballet centered around sporting scenes in the French riviera, with dancers kitted out in sportswear designed by Coco Chanel.

Diaghilev first saw Picasso’s Two Women Running along the Beach in Paris, and commissioned seven artists to work on an enormous version, led by Chachba-Sharvashidze, to be used as the stage cloth for Le Train Bleu. After seeing the humongous homage, Picasso was so impressed by the quality that he decided to sign it himself.

In 2010, the V&A Museum launched “Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909–1929,” an exhibition celebrating the first two decades of the 20th century’s most influential ballet company. The show featured the drop curtain’s long-awaited return to the spotlight, having last been exhibited in the summer of 1939. The stage cloth was billed as the star attraction, having been purchased by the V&A in 1969 and kept in museum storage ever since. When the exhibition closed in January 2011, the curtain was once again rolled up and stashed away.

Large stage backdrop painted by Pablo Picasso for Le Train Bleu, showing two women in white dresses dancing against a vivid blue background, with a person standing in front for scale.

The 1924 front stage cloth for the Ballets Russes production, Le Train Bleu, designed by Pablo Picasso on view at the V&A East Storehouse, in East London. Photo: Henry Nicholls AFP via Getty Images.

V&A East Storehouse opened to the public on May 31, taking over an enormous site previously used during the London 2012 Olympics as its media and broadcast centre. The working archive gives visitors seven-day a week, free of charge access to more than 250,000 objects (plus a further 350,000 books) across its four story mega-complex, which have been stored out of sight, sometimes for more than a century.

The Ballets Russes stage cloth is being heralded as a jewel in the new museum’s crown; a well-deserved moment in the sun for Picasso’s largest canvas, which has spent the majority of its 100-year life tucked away.

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Text by Verity Babbs