Some of My Lives

by Rosamond Bernier

  Diaghilev bought the collage for Massine.

  Braque was so delighted with his collage that he signed it boldly both on the front and, turning it over, on the back.

  So Mr. Pulitzer got his prize. It is now in the serene new museum in St. Louis designed by Tadao Ando, as part of the Pulitzer collection on view there.

  It occurred to me later that this collage undoubtedly had a particular significance for Braque. When he was a young man living in Le Havre, he took flute lessons from Raoul Dufy’s brother Gaston, who was a flautist.

  Braque died in 1963. He was given all the pomp of a state funeral, in the Cour Carrée of the Louvre. I went to it with Tériade, the art publisher. The funeral oration was given by André Malraux in his torrential oratorical style, practically inaudible due to faulty amplification. Massed bands played Beethoven. I think Braque would have preferred Bach.

  All very well intended, but it seemed strangely at odds with his quiet, unassuming life.

  The big studio upstairs is empty now, but the house downstairs was very much the same in 1967, when I went to have supper with Henri Laurens and his family. Braque had bequeathed the house to his great friend Laurens, the sculptor who did not get the prize at the Venice Biennale.

  The miniature upright piano that had belonged to Erik Satie was still there, as well as the flower piece by Cézanne that Braque always kept by him.

  Incidentally, for Braque’s eightieth birthday a fifty-centime stamp was issued. It could not have been more appropriate: a white bird on a blue background.

  Remembering Fernand Léger

  I met Fernand Léger when I came to Paris in the late 1940s to write about the arts for Vogue. I had always admired his work in New York, but I had never met him. I had no introduction; I just wrote asking if I could come and see him. The answer came immediately, the French equivalent of “Come on over.”

  He was recently back from the war years as an émigré in America. He was once again in the big old studio at 86, rue Notre Dame des Champs on the Left Bank, where he had worked since 1919.

  Up a narrow winding staircase to the second floor, it was typical of him that the key was always on the outside of the door, so anyone could come in. He would advance to greet you, both hands outstretched. He was a robust broad-shouldered man—just like a figure by Léger—rugged featured, freckled, the color of a good apple from his native Normandy.

  He gave me a warm welcome. From then on, he never seemed too busy to show me what he was doing or to talk. He would pull out canvases for me and ask which I liked best. When, as it sometimes happened, I chose one that he considered difficult to take but that he particularly liked himself, he would clap me vigorously across the back and say, “You’re a good girl; you have a strong stomach.”

  There were always a number of canvases turned to the wall in his studio: some were on easels, none were hung. I remember a plain plank of wood used as a palette with craters of pure color. There was a battered sofa covered with drawings and papers of various kinds, a trestle table equally littered, a few plain chairs. An interior staircase led to an alcove where he sometimes slept.

  One of the paintings he showed me was called Adieu New York. He had begun it at the end of a five-year stay in America during World War II and finished it in Paris. It was based on what he called “la couleur en dehors”—a disassociation of color and drawing. He splashed bold swaths of color across the canvas that lived quite independently of the subject matter: two separate elements in the same picture.

  “I’ll tell you how I got the idea,” he said. “I was talking to someone in Times Square late one night. The man suddenly turned first blue, then yellow, then red—as the advertising lights swept over him. It was free color in space. So I did the same thing with my canvas. I put color on its own. I never could have invented it. I have no imagination.”

  Léger had been in New York a number of times before the long wartime exile, starting in 1931, when the young Americans Gerald and Sara Murphy, who lived in France, had financed his trip. He was bowled over by New York every time. He still talked about the vertical architecture, the speed, the raw energy, but also about the pretty girls: “every manicurist a beauty queen.”

  But he had a few suggestions: “By day, New York is too severe, why not color the houses? Fifth Avenue red, Madison blue, Park Avenue yellow—why not? And the lack of greenery. One could oblige shops to launch a run of green dresses, green suits. One could drive trees around the streets in open trucks for people who cannot go to the country.

  “Since New York seems to be constantly rebuilding itself—why not build the new city in glass with blue, yellow, red floors!”

  Then he confided to me a few minor complaints: “That terrible bread!” (Those were the days when only blotting-paper-like white bread was available.) “And worst of all: ‘le twin bed.’ You had to get out of bed to make love, get into another bed, then get back to your own bed. Oh là là, ‘le twin bed.’”

  In New York in the 1930s and 1940s he seems to have met everyone of interest—from James Johnson Sweeney to John Dos Passos. Through the Murphys he met Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. He told me proudly he had taught Arshile Gorky’s wife, Magouche, how to make a pot-au-feu. He was an excellent country-style cook.

  He lectured at Yale and all over the country. Since he never learned a word of English, valiant translators tried to keep up with his colorful, highly colloquial French.

  In 1941 he joined his friend the composer Darius Milhaud at Mills College, near San Francisco, to give a summer course—crossing the entire country by Greyhound bus. Milhaud told me that with his customary generosity, Léger threw himself into student activities, painting scenery, even devising makeup for the actors. Apparently, the language barrier was no problem. When addressed in English, he would announce clearly, “I speak English, but I do not understand it.”

  I got to see Léger’s last work for the stage (he had designed ballets in the 1930s) in 1949; in fact, I went with Léger as part of his entourage at the Paris Opéra for the opening. It was a four-act opera about Simón Bolívar, the South American liberator. The score was by Darius Milhaud, the book written by Milhaud’s wife, the excellent pianist Madeleine Milhaud.

  Léger had described the scenic effects he was devising with mounting excitement when I visited him at the studio. “You’ll see, everything will blow up,” he would say cheerfully.

  I learned that the stagehands at the Paris Opéra still remembered with horror the complications demanded by Léger: not only unprecedented elaborate lighting effects for the times, but an epic crossing of the Andes during an earthquake with scenery flying all over the place.

  I was able to follow step-by-step one of Léger’s last adventures, combining art, architecture, and color, in 1948. When he was in New York, Léger had met the Dominican monk Father Couturier, the influential cleric who enlisted first-rate artists (Matisse, Rouault, and Bonnard among them) to decorate churches.

  Back in France, Father Couturier persuaded Léger to design mosaics to cover the facade of a church high in the French Alps, at Assy. Léger, a card-carrying Communist, made no pretense of being religious. He simply saw this as an opportunity to work on a large scale in a new medium.

  This was the first time Léger had worked with mosaics, and he relished the collaboration with the skilled artisans of the Bony atelier in Paris. We used to go there together to watch the men interpret the maquette, assembling small pieces of colored glass.

  I monitored the process as the pieces of mosaic were assembled on some sort of heavy cardboard backing, the design in reverse.

  Then I traveled to the remote spot of Assy to watch the transfer of the mosaics onto the facade of the church. The facade was covered with what looked like cement, then the sheets of cardboard were slapped on, then pulled off, leaving the mosaic embedded in the facade.

  Shortly after we started to photograph the church, a heavy fog descended. The fog persisted for a week.
It was impossible to see more than a foot ahead.

  I had been assigned a young photographer whose company was of a unique dullness, but we were trapped together like characters in Sartre’s No Exit. My only solace was the welcome visits of the local priest, who shared my taste for Gewürztraminer, a delicious white wine.

  Léger had an open, generous nature. He enjoyed young people. He had run an academy in 1924, which attracted many foreigners. The sculptor Louise Bourgeois, then a young would-be painter, told me he was an admirable teacher—talked little, but homed right into a student’s problems. When she drew a wood shaving, he told her, “Louise, you aren’t a painter. You’re a sculptor. You see things in the round. Go ahead, be a sculptor.” She followed his advice.

  He reopened his academy after World War II, and a number of Americans on the GI Bill flocked there, among them Ellsworth Kelly (who found Léger intimidating), Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Robert Colescott.

  I dropped in on Léger a number of times in the next few years. He took a kindly interest in my enthusiasms and activities in Paris. Naturally, I went often to the Louvre. He approved of this, but he warned, “Keep away from the Renaissance. Watch out for that Veronese, Marriage at Cana—nothing but theater design—and that Monsieur Michelangelo, who couldn’t paint an arm without thinking of the anatomy of the muscles.”

  According to Léger, the artists of the Renaissance were responsible for two fundamental errors: they imitated slavishly—in contrast to the primitives, who invented forms—and they copied beautiful subjects. “If a woman is beautiful, she is no use as raw material,” he said.

  “Go and look at Poussin and David. And as soon as you can, go to Barcelona and look at the Catalan Romanesque frescoes.” A few years later, I did just that, guided by Miró.

  He said about David, “I liked David because he is anti-Impressionist. I like the dryness in David’s work. It was my direction.”

  By 1950, Léger had left his old studio in Paris and moved out to the country, to Gif-sur-Yvette. He had to be driven to get there because this passionate lover of the machine age never learned to drive. His friend the Catalan architect José María Sert had designed his studio there. Léger painted the doors in pure, strong Léger colors.

  By then, he was a widower, and he had married a formidable Russian lady called Nadia. She had been in charge of his school and managed the studio. She was clearly out to manage everything else. She presented me with a baby, her grandchild, not his. “Here is the heiress,” she announced.

  I knew that Léger had been working for some time on a theme that had fascinated him since childhood: the circus. He used to describe the excitement of when the circus came to his small Normandy village when he was a boy. “The magic, the color, the freedom of a structure that is moved in and was built in one night, then taken away again.” He spoke of the traditional parade of the circus troupe that takes place before the performance, to draw the crowd. “The gate money is tied to this parade, so it is persuasive and dynamic. The instruments are making as much noise as they can: the huge bass drum, the trombones, snare drums. The hullabaloo is projected from a small raised platform in front of the tent. It hits you right in the face. It’s behind you, beside you, in front, appearing, disappearing … faces, limbs, dancers, clowns, pink legs, an acrobat who walks on his hands.”

  This is what his last great painting, La Grande Parade, is about (it is at the Guggenheim Museum today). The “parade” is the circus event Léger described.

  I used to go out to Gif-sur-Yvette to visit Léger and to follow the development of the big painting—it was about thirteen feet long. He explained, “I’ve never given up the methods I learned at art school. I’m extremely slow. I don’t know how to improvise. I first make preparatory sketches, many of them. Then I make gouaches, and finally I go over onto the canvas.”

  I was able to follow Léger juggling with ideas. There was a jungle of canvases in the studio: figures came and went, the letters “CIR” were inserted, then removed, a green landscape was tried out and rejected. One experiment was to project the entire composition in black and white forward, against a flat red background. “Too much like a ceramic wall panel.” Léger decided against it.

  The problem he tackled was to establish a balance between two basically unrelated elements on a large scale: an assertive dynamic play of abstract colored forms of fortissimo intensity, and the predominantly black-and-white linear composition.

  During this period of struggle, I was struggling too: by 1954, I had left Vogue and was embarking on the perilous project of starting my own magazine, L’ŒIL.

  It culminated in the first issue appearing on January 15, 1955, unheralded. There was no trial run, no prepublicity. It simply appeared on the stands one Tuesday morning. I had decided to use a detail of Léger’s Grande Parade for the cover. At that point we couldn’t afford four-color for the cover, so it was against a flat blue background.

  Léger, a pillar of the Paris school, didn’t need press coverage from a fledgling art review. But he threw himself with characteristic enthusiasm into this new venture.

  He bothered to come into town for the day of the magazine’s initial appearance. He came by my small office. “I’ve been to eleven newsstands and asked for L’ŒIL,” he told me. “None of them had it. Get it, I told them, I’ll be back.” Then this staunch Communist told me, “I’m creating demand!”

  He invited me out to Gif-sur-Yvette for a celebration dinner. We had a splendid Normandy feast, washed down with a respectable amount of his native calvados, a fiery apple brandy—a scene right out of a nineteenth-century French novel.

  After dinner he said, “Now for the surprise,” and led me into his studio. There were a number of gouaches lined up against the wall. “You choose,” he said. “One is for you.”

  I didn’t choose one of the flower forms, but an abstract composition. He was delighted and clapped me across the back with even more vigor than usual and said, “You’re a good girl. I always said you have a strong stomach!”

  Later he sent us a text to be used for our publicity: “What a tour de force! Never saw anything like it! Here’s something really modern! Once again, BRAVO!”

  I still live very happily with Léger’s gouache.

  Alberto Giacometti

  I still remember Alberto Giacometti’s address by heart: 46, rue Hippolyte-Maindron in the 14th arrondissement, a rather gloomy part of the Montrouge neighborhood of Paris. I remember it not only because of my visits there during the 1950s, and later, but because I used to send postcards to him, gathered on my frequent trips to museums and foreign parts for my magazine, of subjects that might interest him.

  He had lived and worked there since 1921. He shared the crowded quarters with his brother and closest friend, Diego. Sometimes his wife, Annette, who had followed him from Geneva, was around too, although she found the place so uncomfortable that she moved to a hotel. Also, she objected to his insistence on keeping the light burning all night. He never got over his fear of the dark. But he had warned her, when very reluctantly he married her after some years of cohabitation, that he was not going to change his ways. And he didn’t.

  Annette was twenty years younger than Alberto. She was often treated with insulting indifference, but she will be remembered because she became one of his main models, both for paintings and for sculpture.

  The studio was bleak. A single very bright lightbulb hung from the ceiling. A thick coating of dust reduced everything to a Giacometti color scheme of gray and more gray. There was always a distinctive smell of damp clay; a cluster of figures draped in wet cloth waited to be cast in plaster by Diego in his atelier just across the narrow corridor that separated the two studios. It was here that Diego made the armatures and the plaster casts from the original clay models.

  There was a battered old sofa, two rickety chairs, one for Alberto, the other for whoever was posing for him, usually Annette or Diego. Red marks on the floor recorded the exact position of artist an
d subject. His needs were reduced to his necessary working material: clay, plaster, paper, canvas, paints. At that time Alberto was alternating, sometimes on the same day, between painting, drawing, and sculpture. No flowers. No memorabilia.

  The only personal note were two little paintings in the cramped bedroom next to the studio: one of Alberto as a child painted by his father, Giovanni, a well-known Swiss post-Impressionist; the other painted by Alberto at fifteen of his brother.

  Alberto himself was an impressive presence, solid of build, handsome features as rugged as if they had been hewn out of the rocks from his native Swiss mountains. He came from Stampa, a remote village high in the Italian Alps. Years of living in plaster dust seemed to have coated him permanently; even his clothes began to look like fragments of an old wall. He smoked incessantly, so a dusting of ash added to the patina.

  Years before, a drunk driver had run up over a curb and crushed one of Alberto’s feet. Long stays in the hospital followed. He never fully recovered, and he walked with a pronounced limp. He never bothered to sue the driver, although the negligence was clear. He simply didn’t want to be bothered with mercenary transactions.

  In 1950, a figure of a towering woman, as slim as only a Giacometti figure could be, rose above two giant wheels, his hospital experience recalled. Talking about this sculpture, Giacometti said, “It is usually called The Chariot, but I think of it as The Pharmacy Wagon, because this sculpture comes from the glittering wagon that was wheeled around the corridors of the Bichat hospital which astonished me in 1938.

  “In 1947, I saw the sculpture before me, as if it were finished. In 1950 it became impossible for me not to make it, even though for me it was already past.

  “The Chariot was created by the necessity to have the figure in empty space, in order to see it better and to situate it at a distance from the floor.”

  I wanted to photograph The Chariot for the first issue of L’ŒIL, but I didn’t want to shoot against a plain wall. I got the idea of taking the sculpture out to the Parc Monceau on a Wednesday, the day French schoolchildren have the day off.