Some of My Lives

by Rosamond Bernier

  One time—I was as usual sitting on the bed opposite them—they had a conversation in Russian, which I do not understand. They clearly had a plan of some sort. Larionov fished under the bed and brought out a large early gouache by Goncharova. “For you,” he said. There were great hugs all around. “You must sign,” he said to her, and brought out an ordinary pen. She looked up at him like a schoolgirl for guidance. He dictated in a strong Russian accent: “Pour Madame Bernier, très charmante.”

  She carefully wrote this out and signed and handed me the gouache.

  The following year I went to see the largely and unjustly forgotten Constructivist sculptor Antoine Pevsner. He and his betterknown brother, Naum Gabo, designed the sets and costumes for La Chatte, Diaghilev’s last ballet.

  He was living modestly with his wife in a walk-up apartment on the rue Jean Sicard in Paris. He was a small, slight man with very firm opinions, which he was happy to impress on me.

  Most of his remarks began “Moi et Gabo.” The main point to be emphasized was that the two of them were the only Constructivists (forget Tatlin, Rodchenko). The important thing was to destroy the mass.

  I tried to get him to tell me what other sculptors he thought, besides “moi et Gabo,” had made a contribution. I tried Rodin. “He brought nothing.” Brancusi? “Someone I respect, but he brought nothing new.” Did he feel that the Renaissance brought nothing new to sculpture? “Nothing. While Giotto and Masaccio brought new concepts to painting, sculptors continued in the same direction as Praxiteles. Always the same way of treating material, always the same block of marble, that eternal cube.”

  Michelangelo? “Just another Greek.”

  At this point Madame Pevsner brought in a very substantial cake, bolstered by a bulwark of icing. I couldn’t resist asking, “May I destroy the mass?” Nobody smiled.

  Wifredo Lam

  I had met the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam in New York some time before I went off to Paris the first time for Vogue (1946). He was one of the Surrealists, along with Breton, Matta, and Tanguy, who had immigrated to America during the war.

  He was beautiful: his father was Chinese; his mother Afro-Cuban. He inherited from the former his delicate build, his bronze coloration from the latter.

  He never learned a word of French, although he had lived in Paris before the outbreak of World War II. He had been received as something of an exotic bird of paradise. His paintings and drawings, alive with haunted jungle spirits, interested Picasso, with whom he could speak Spanish, albeit with a strong Cuban accent. And he interested André Breton, who welcomed him as a true Surrealist.

  At the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, he returned to Cuba. At the end of the war he came up to New York en route to France. He didn’t speak any English.

  André Breton, who also didn’t speak a word of English in spite of having spent the war years in exile here, had filled him with dire warnings about the rough treatment he could expect in America for being dark skinned. He lived in a state of terror. Mutual friends, remembering that I spoke Spanish, put me in charge of him.

  I was working at Vogue at the time and would emerge from my office in the Vogue uniform of silk dress and flower-laden hat (it was full summer) to take him to lunch. To my shame, I discovered he would not be accepted at any midtown restaurant. I solved that by sticking to Chinese restaurants.

  We became great friends and kept in touch. By 1956, we were both in Paris. I was sitting at my desk in the L’ŒIL office, snowed under with work, when Wifredo appeared, sat down, and showed no inclination to leave. He pulled out a batch of unopened letters. They were love letters from various stricken ladies, usually Scandinavian, in English. He had come to have me translate them.

  Some years passed, and Wifredo was married and living in the Paris suburbs with a wife (one of the Scandinavians) and two children. “You must come and see them,” he insisted. “Son muy bonitos.”

  So I went out to meet them. Wifredo asked his wife, in Spanish—he still didn’t speak anything else—to bring in the children. Indeed, they were very bonny. “¿Cómo se llaman?”—“What are their names?” I asked. A look of total confusion came over his face. “¿Cómo se llaman?” he asked his wife.

  No wonder. They all seemed to have been named after obscure Norse gods.

  Venetian Adventures—Venice Observed

  In 1955, still the first year of L’ŒIL, we got the idea that we could use our experience with combining images with text for a new kind of illustrated book. There would be works of art, but it would not essentially be an art book. A profile of a city was what I had in mind. Venice would be an obvious choice.

  I had not met her, but of course I had read Mary McCarthy. I thought her sharp eye and analytical mind might make her just the author we needed.

  By providential good luck, Mary happened to be in Europe, in fact in Switzerland. She was looking around for an excuse to delay returning to the States and an unresolved matrimonial situation. I went to Switzerland to meet her and explain the project.

  After the usual back-and-forth with such discussions, she accepted. “Don’t get carried away by Titian and Veronese,” I warned. “The city itself is the star.”

  From then on (it was 1956), I was a regular commuter to Venice. I got Mary rented rooms in a private apartment, her subscription to the library, and a few introductions. This was in February and March, not a tourist in sight, but lots of rain.

  My job was to direct the small team of photographers: Inge Morath for the black-and-whites (she was not yet Mrs. Arthur Miller), the Swiss German Hans Hinz for the color transparencies, a Frenchman for the color exteriors. There was no one mutual language. The team of Italian electricians and carpenters spoke Italian and only Italian. But being Italian, they warmed to the job and would make suggestions about their favorite frescoed Virgins.

  The other part of my job would have required a Talleyrand blended with a Machiavelli: getting the permits to photograph from both the patriarch’s office (San Marco) and the Communist Commune (city government) directly across the plaza. They seldom agreed. A tricky case in point: I wanted to photograph Titian’s Martyrdom of San Lorenzo, which was in the Gesuiti Church. The painting itself belonged to the Church. But the actual land on which the church stood belonged to the city. One had to get both parties to give their consent; I made many a trek between the two seats of power.

  I was determined to get a color transparency of the splendidly robust thirteenth-century mosaic of the Last Judgment in the cathedral on the island of Torcello. This being February, there was no boat service to the island and no cozy meals at the Locanda, which was closed for the season.

  This meant organizing a miniature Normandy invasion—all via boats for Torcello. We had to load up with wood for the scaffolding, to be built on the spot (the mural was high aboveground), electric equipment, even food for everyone. It was worth it: we got splendid swirling images of angels tootling on wind instruments, a resolute nude riding the waves atop a beast of the apocalypse disgorging unfortunate sinners.

  On the level below, a regular ballet of blue devils tossing severed crowned heads into the flames.

  Another technical challenge was getting power for the floodlights needed to photograph in the Doge’s Palace. We are in 1956, and there was no electricity inside the palace. We had been given special dispensation to photograph there at night, when there would be no public. The only solution was to have generators churning away outside and a hundred meters of cables bringing the power into the palace via the windows. With my minimum Italian and minimum knowledge of technical matters, this was a stretch.

  There were some tense moments negotiating with a group of a dozen black-robed Dalmatians for permission to photograph the three Carpaccio panels in the San Giorgio degli Schiavoni (“Dalmatian” in Venetian dialect), still controlled by the Dalmatian fraternity. No interpreter, no other woman. It was about how many copies at what price and when, and there was no evidence of Christian charity.

  I ha
d also come to an agreement with the patriarch’s office at San Marco about the same details. At that time, the future pope John XXIII represented the Holy See in Paris. The day of actual publication, I called the nunciature’s Paris office to know where I should send the books. I was passed from one voice to another until I heard a sonorous “Ici Roncalli.” It was the future pope himself. When he heard my query, he said, “Send the books directly to me, otherwise a little priest will get hold of them and I’ll never see them.”

  My headquarters was Harry’s Bar, completely empty of tourists at this season. The kind owners, besides thawing me out with cups of hot chocolate—the damp cold was piercing—knew exactly how to go about getting permits and which person should be cultivated and which avoided.

  Meanwhile, Mary was working away, at first unexpectedly insecure, worrying about matters such as what she should wear to the contessa’s. She had met Bernard Berenson, who held her hand and told her she should write about art. This complicated our editor-author relationship since we had very different ideas.

  It ended with a compromise, but the important thing is that the end result, Venice Observed, is a superb book and was the bestselling art book of that season. Incidentally, no American publisher would touch it when we proposed it. “We wouldn’t know how to sell it” was the usual answer. Once it was a success, everyone wanted a sequel.

  Mary and I remained close friends. She was a stalwart, loyal ally in my legal problems and was an indispensable mail drop.

  Many years later, when I came back to Paris to lecture at the Grand Palais, Mary was always in the front row. After the series was over, she wrote me the most glowing, generous text I could use for my publicity. I think of her with warm affection.

  We went on to publish a series of books with material from the magazine translated into English, under the general title The Selective Eye. Our very first one got off to a flying start with an introduction by the magnificent Alfred H. Barr Jr., founding spirit of the Museum of Modern Art.

  Georges Braque—Lord of the Birds

  In 1950 in Paris, I had gone to a party for the sculptor Henri Laurens, one of Georges Braque’s oldest and closest of friends. Laurens had been passed over—wrongly, we thought—for a prize at the Venice Biennale.

  The party was a gesture of solidarity and affection held in a bistro in Puteaux, near Paris, where the painter Jacques Villon (Marcel Duchamp’s brother) used to live. We all sat at long trestle tables, and there was a very good dinner and many toasts, and finally we danced. Everyone wanted to make it a happy occasion. Everyone danced, even Braque. As a young man, he had been a great dancer, as well as bicyclist, swimmer, and boxer. I actually remembered as a schoolgirl on holiday at Cassis, on the Riviera, seeing a well-built man diving off the rocks and being told it was Georges Braque. I knew very well who he was. But after he had been gassed in World War I, he had had to take things easier.

  That evening he made an exception, and I can still see him turning majestically in a waltz with his handsome features hidden under an improvised mask. In an uncharacteristically playful gesture he had torn holes in a white paper napkin that covered his face completely.

  It was five years later that I had created L’ŒIL in Paris. Braque appeared in the first issue, January 15, 1955; that is to say, his signature, in a bold flourish, appeared above an article about Cubism by Picasso’s veteran dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. It almost edges Picasso’s signature off the page to a corner, far right. Picasso, Braque, and Kahnweiler all signed my copy of this historic issue.

  Braque showed a benign interest in the magazine right from the beginning. He even sent us a characteristically measured endorsement that we could use for publicity: “The first issues of L’ŒIL lead one to believe it will be an outstanding publication.”

  He promised to let me know when he had finished one of the great Studio paintings that were to sum up the ideas dearest to him. And sure enough, one day I got a telephone call. “Venez,” he said, not being a man to waste words.

  Of course I hopped into a taxi in no time. Braque lived on a short no-exit street off the Parc Montsouris; it used to be called rue du Douanier but has been renamed rue Georges Braque. The house was built for him in 1925 by Auguste Perret, the father of reinforced concrete. Braque liked to say that he drew up the plans. It always surprised me that Braque lived in a house made of concrete since he disliked synthetic materials intensely and would only wear real silk, cotton, or wool. But he was very proud of the house, even down to the paulownia he had planted in the little front garden.

  The door was opened for visitors by Mariette Lachaud, the tiny birdlike woman who was Braque’s studio assistant for many years. It was she who led the way up a tall staircase with conspicuously easy rises and into the studio, where Braque would be waiting in his favorite oblique and slightly hooded light, filtered through semitrans-parent white curtains.

  I was always in awe of this great old man with the commanding presence. He was strikingly handsome, with a shock of pure white hair, solidly built, but by now slightly stooped. He was courtesy itself, but he had never fully recovered from the effects of the war and found it difficult to move around. For that reason he greeted you seated on a sofa and extended his hand like a benign sovereign. He was always elegantly dressed in his own colors: dark blue, brown, black. His slippers were always burnished until they shone like horse chestnuts. He had been one of the first men in Europe to wear denim, impeccably cut.

  He was a man of regular and orderly habits. Nothing could have been further from the barely penetrable jumble in which Picasso lived. He was orderly in other ways too. “Still married to the same wife?” Picasso would ask when I gave him news of Braque. He did indeed have the same wife, Marcelle, for more than half a century. He had the same house in Paris until his death and the same house in Varangéville in Normandy. Stability was important to him.

  I knew that birds real and invented had peopled his imagination for some time. He had chosen two huge birds wheeling in close formation for his design for the ceiling of the Etruscan Room in the Louvre, with stars and a crescent moon in attendance. So I was not surprised to find that his studio in the 1950s was like a well-ordered aviary in which every bird was on its best behavior.

  Large birds streaked across large canvases, dive-bombing any clouds on their way. Small birds clustered on sheets of lithographs tacked to the wall. Ghostly birds lay on the floor on transparent sheets being prepared for more lithographs.

  Pride of place was given to the large, majestic new Atelier, which had occupied several years of his time. It was like a meditation on his own studio, dominated by two red forms and a yellow rectangle, presumably a tabletop. A large white bird streaks across the canvas. Elements of the studio are crowded into a kaleidoscope at the lower third of the painting: a clutter of easels, sketchbooks, paint pots, palettes, vases, a compotier. The great bird is not a bird that Audubon would recognize, but a “painted bird” that has haunted Braque’s imagination in various manifestations.

  All around the room there was a forest of easels of varying heights. Fanned out on a sumptuous display, they made me think that I had walked into a Braque still life larger than life.

  All the ingredients of his art were actually there: the plants, the bowls of fruits, the primitive masks, the shields, the standing figures, the shells and bones, and the pencils and brushes so carefully marshaled on big sheets of corrugated cardboard. There were also some unexpected souvenirs of other artists’ work—a reproduction of van Gogh’s painting of sunflowers for one and a reproduction of Corot’s portrait of the soprano Christine Nilsson. Picasso, Braque, and Juan Gris had all admired an exhibition of Corot’s figure paintings in Paris in 1909, he told me.

  When I looked at what seemed to be a little child’s chair that stood not far away, Braque explained that he sat there to work while Mariette Lachaud handed him the paints and brushes as he needed them, thereby saving him from all unnecessary movement.

  Fired by the oc
casion and by the sight of Braque in his studio with all his paintings around him, I screwed up my courage and asked, aside from photographing the great Studio he had just finished, could we take a photograph of him in situ? He did not usually permit such juxtapositions. He hesitated—he was a man of reflection, not of spontaneity—but finally he agreed, but said, “Just a moment please.” He got up and with infinite precaution went to fetch something from the other room. He came back, tucking a scarlet spectacles case into the breast pocket of his jacket. “Every picture must have a spot of bright red,” he said.

  Some years later, I was back in Braque’s studio, this time with a mission. The distinguished American collector Joseph Pulitzer Jr. of St. Louis was a true connoisseur, scholarly and informed. He had set his heart on a noble Braque Cubist-period collage, from 1912, called Duo Pour Flûte. Like the works of that period by Picasso and Braque, it was not signed.

  As a cautious collector, Pulitzer would not buy it unless it had Braque’s signature. “I will take care of it,” I said. I flagged a taxi—the collage was large but just fitted through the door—and went off to the rue du Douanier.

  Braque’s eyes lit up when I came in with the collage. “I haven’t seen it since 1916,” he said. He told me that it used to hang in his dining room. One day in 1916, Diaghilev came by and saw it and was very taken by it. “I have to show it to someone,” he said, and left. He came back shortly with Léonide Massine, his new star and new love. Braque said of Massine, “He was in the full force of his youthful beauty.”