The portrayal of puppets in the works of Alexandre Benois: the intermedial framework

Alexandre Benois established a certain canon of representation of toys from a range of handling scenarios: mental enlivening and theatricalization, collecting and anthropological interest. But his program of introducing toys into the world of the visual was accomplished within the emergence of new visual media: the art postcard, urban photography, and cinema. This intermedial context usually escapes the attention of art historians, but it is what explains the relationship between the pure representation of the qualities of toys and the theatricalization of the world around them. For Benois, the toy does not possess texture so much as it is already taken into play and comes to life against the background of the textures of other toys; whereas the gaze belongs to the toy, not to the playmate, and the nature of the gaze of the toy itself determines the order of its perception. Comparison of Benois's works with other decisions of artists of the Russian “World of Art” movement, such as Mstislav Dobujinsky, suggests the discovery of childhood as a time of propitiation or photographic "punctum", productive for scenic experiments.