The following year, he came to London to study Painting and Stage Design at the Slade School of Fine Art, on a grant from the British Council.
For MacMillan, he designed a great number of ballets, including Noctambules (1956), Romeo and Juliet (1965), Manon (1974), Mayerling (1978), Orpheus (1982) and The Prince of the Pagodas (1989).
He also collaborated closely with Rudolf Nureyev on such works as Sleeping Beauty (1966), The Nutcracker (1968), The Tempest (1982) and Michael Conway Baker's Washington Square (1985).
Sir John Tooley, former General Director of the Royal Opera House (1970–1988), described him as "one of the most outstanding stage designers of the past century ... a giant and a poet amongst designers [who] dominated the second half of the twentieth century in the way that Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois had done in the first part.
He also had a passion for cinema and worked on a number of film projects, the most famous of which is The Trojan Women (1971), starring Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave and Irene Papas.