NEW YORK, NY.- When Robinson McClellan was sifting through the Robert Owen Lehman collection of musical manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum in 2019, he came across a concentration of famous ballet scores from the early 20th century. The manuscripts were all connected to the Ballets Russes, the revolutionary dance company founded by impresario Sergei Diaghilev in Paris, in 1909.

McClellan, an associate curator at the Morgan, realized that these scores, which had never been publicly shown together, offered an uncommon perspective on the Ballets Russes productions that defined and transformed a generation of artists. The scores, by Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and others, many heavily annotated, “give a visceral sense of the working process,” McClellan said.

The scores are now the basis of an elegant and edifying new exhibition, “Crafting the Ballets Russes,” at the Morgan through Sept. 22. All autograph manuscripts (that is, written in the composer’s hand), they are displayed next to choreographic documents, photographic records, portraits, letters, set designs, costume illustrations and drawings. Cumulatively, these objects reveal the Ballets Russes’ astounding level of collaboration across artistic mediums, from conception to completed production.

“The company was about this idea of synergy,” said dance historian Lynn Garafola, who consulted on the exhibition. Diaghilev and the artists he worked with dreamed of productions in which music, dance and design, operating equally and at their highest level, would come together to create a triumphal whole. In 1914, choreographer Michel Fokine wrote that he imagined this project as “the alliance of dancing with the other arts.”

McClellan and his team chose objects from other art forms that demonstrated that “visceral sense of a working process” and show the critical place of every discipline, with an emphasis on the creative role of women. Costume design, musical compositions and choreography all receive careful attention, giving behind-the-scenes glimpses into visionary productions such as “Firebird,” “Petrouchka,” “Les Noces” and “Afternoon of a Faun.”

Here are three remarkable objects from the exhibition that capture a sense of music, dance and design at work.

Rodin’s Nijinsky

In 1912, sculptor Auguste Rodin saw Vaslav Nijinsky perform in Paris. Nijinsky, the acclaimed dancer and choreographer who boldly broke with the aesthetics of classical dance, was known for his technical prowess and ability to embody a character.

Rodin saw him star in “Afternoon of a Faun,” set to Debussy, and based on a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé. The performance caused a scandal, as the faun made love to the veil of a nymph onstage, but Rodin was drawn to the excitement. He invited Nijinsky to his studio to pose for him, making a series of sketches for this figure, which was not cast into bronze until 1959.

Rodin’s involvement, McClellan said, “demonstrates how much these ballets were a part of the active cultural conversation at the time.”

Nijinska Coaching ‘Les Noces’

Bronislava Nijinska, like her older brother Vaslav, was an artist, dancer and choreographer. Though often in her brother’s shadow, she was a major force in the modernization of dance. Bronislava Nijinska influenced countless dancers and choreographers, including George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, and worked with many prominent musicians, patrons and painters, like Natalia Goncharova, whose drawings and paintings for “Les Noces” (1923) are also in the exhibition.

This photograph, from 1966, is of Nijinska rehearsing the fourth tableau of “Les Noces” with the Royal Ballet. “One of the things about her choreography that was so interesting compositionally was the way she moved dancers around,” Garafola said. “She looked at the stage analytically and the moving bodies within it as a kind of geometry, as something quite abstract.”

Picasso’s Candid Drawing of Serge Lifar

Pablo Picasso, who is represented by several drawings in the show, spent years hanging around the Ballets Russes, designing for Diaghilev and experimenting with form and line. (The company is also where he met his first wife, dancer Olga Khokhlova.) Like it was for so many artists, the energy of the Ballets Russes was a stimulus for Picasso, helping him to push his work in new directions.

This drawing, from the Morgan’s collection, depicts Ukrainian dancer Serge Lifar at the barre and likely another Ukrainian dancer, who is seated. Picasso made more than two dozen sketches of Lifar and handed him some when he was finished.

The drawings show Picasso’s “sensitivity toward the beauty of the human body, especially at rest,” Garafola said. “And not just at rest because he’s tired, but because he’s been dancing. Diaghilev made sure some dancers were drawn and portrayed, and he used the portraits in the souvenir programs that were a feature of each Ballets Russes season.”

Picasso and other artists in the Ballets Russes orbit, like Mikhail Fyodorovich Larionov and Jean Cocteau, “churned out copious numbers of these sketches, of the people, dancers and scenes of the Ballets Russes,” McClellan said. “In the absence of photographs, these are the candid shots of what it was like to be there. The drawings bring you into the moment.”

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‘Crafting the Ballets Russes’

Through Sept. 22 at the Morgan Library & Museum, themorgan.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.