The Diaghilev exhibition mounted by art critic Richard Buckle (1916-2001) at Edinburgh's College of Art, Lauriston Place, was a huge success, mounted as part of the 'Homage to Diaghilev' celebrations at the Edinburgh Festival from 22nd August to the 11th September 1954. The exhibition was sponsored by the Edinburgh Festival Society Ltd, who printed the catalogue. Dickie Buckle, as he was known, was a great showman who helped revolutionise ideas about exhibitions, notably in this exhibition in which he obliged visitors to follow a fixed route through dramatic theatrical tableaux.

The exhibition was shown again in London where Alan Bennett saw it and recalled the excitement generated by Buckle's wild colours and designs. Roy Strong remembered how: 'As a schoolboy in the drab world of the early 1950s, I remember being swept away by the glamour of it all. From the moment one entered the now demolished Forbes House, the visitor trod a pathway of fantasy: past a tableau of grand ladies at the ballet before 1914, then the beach at Deauville in the 1920s, on through tented rooms hung with chandeliers, each with its separate theme, ending up ascending a huge staircase on which brooded statues of sentries embowered with greenery leading up to the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. One's ears were filled with the music of the ballet and the air was scented with Diaghilev's favourite perfume. This was magic of a high order, even if Ninette de Valois thought it was like Madame Tussaud's.'