Some of My Lives

by Rosamond Bernier

  It worked just as I had hoped. The children circled around it on their bikes, their bicycle wheels echoing the giant wheels of the sculpture. Giacometti was delighted.

  Giacometti was always politeness itself, even though he hated being interrupted. He would greet the visitor amiably, but then came the mantra. There were endless variations, but the gist of it was: “I don’t know why you bother to come. There’s nothing to see. I can’t finish anything. What I have done is no good, so I’m going to destroy it and/or paint it out, and/or erase it. You can see how badly things are going.”

  This gloomy mood would disappear when he talked of art that was important to him. He told me that since childhood, he had made copies of works of art that he liked—from books and catalogs—sometimes just sketches with a ballpoint pen. He spoke of his favorites as if he had them in front of his eyes. He knew the walls of the Louvre as well as the walls of his cramped bedroom.

  At the time I started my visits to the Hippolyte-Maindron atelier, I was preparing an illustrated book on Venice. We had commissioned the American author Mary McCarthy to write us a profile of a city. We were to illustrate it entirely with works of art that were still in Venice.

  When I talked about this to Alberto, it stirred up torrents of visual memories. He had spent time in Venice in 1920, when he accompanied his father, Giovanni, who was representing the Swiss pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

  Giacometti had written about his enthusiasms: “During that stay in Venice I was excited solely by Tintoretto. I spent the entire month running around the city, worried that there might be one more painting by him hidden somewhere in the corner of a church. Tintoretto was for me a marvelous discovery; he opened a curtain upon a new world. I loved him with an exclusive and fanatic love. Tintoretto was right and the others were wrong.

  “The last day I ran to the Scuola di San Rocco and to San Giorgio Maggiore as if to tell him goodbye, goodbye to the greatest of friends.”

  However, he went on to write that that very same afternoon, “when I went into the Arena Chapel in Padua, I received a body blow right in the chest, in front of the frescoes of Giotto. I was confused and lost. The power of Giotto asserted itself irresistibly on me. I was crushed by those immutable figures, dense as basalt, with their precise and accurate gestures, heavy with expression and infinite tenderness.”

  Sometimes Alberto came to visit me at my Paris apartment. He was fascinated by two giant tree fern figures from the New Hebrides that I had in my salon. He thought that their great eyeless sockets carried the power of what he called le regard (the gaze). He used to talk about the importance of le regard.

  “One day, when I was drawing a young girl, I suddenly noticed that the only thing that was alive was her gaze. The rest of her head meant no more to me than the skull of a dead man.

  “One does not sculpt a living person, but what makes him alive is without doubt his gaze. Everything else is only a framework for the gaze.”

  As an example of the power of the gaze, he mentioned the gaze of the Savior in Matthias Grünewald’s great altarpiece at Isenheim.

  My small office on the Left Bank, rue des Saints-Pères, had walls painted a shade of blue I like very much, the color of a pack of Gauloises cigarettes (I did not smoke myself). There were no pictures on the walls yet.

  Alberto dropped by. He sat down opposite me. I said, “It must seem odd to you, an art magazine where there is not a single work of art in sight.”

  “Not at all,” he answered. “You are a personnage sur fond bleu [a figure against a blue background]. That’s the way I will paint you one day.” This never came about. It would have been difficult to pose at Giacometti’s hours: all-night sessions, starting at already late hours—hard to combine with running a demanding monthly publication.

  I had told him about my plan to run an article about him in the first issue. He was absolutely appalled. This was in 1954, before his worldwide celebrity, but he was hugely admired by the cognoscenti: Sartre, Genet, and Beckett had all written about him. But he was so genuinely modest that he was convinced it would harm the new magazine if I featured him.

  “Come and have a drink,” he said in his hoarse voice (all those cigarettes).

  We went to a nearby café. He invariably drank red wine. He did his best to convince me not to show his work. “It will sink your magazine. Nobody will buy it.” Naturally, I paid no attention.

  Incidentally, I was rather surprised when he wanted to know if Matisse had asked me to pose. He knew I had just visited Matisse.

  It was Henri Matisse’s son Pierre, the distinguished New York dealer who had introduced contemporary European art to America, who organized the first Giacometti exhibition in the United States. He had been to see the then little-known sculptor in Paris in 1946. He was sufficiently impressed to present the work in an important exhibition at his gallery in 1948.

  It got the best possible send-off. There was an essay about the sculptor by Jean-Paul Sartre. At that time, Sartre was high on the radar screen of intellectuals and those who wanted to be in the know.

  And most important, Giacometti sent along a letter that amounted to an illustrated catalog. He had made little ideogram drawings of each piece and described it. This provided an invaluable document—a living link with the artist and his thoughts about his own work. It has often been reproduced since then, including in the Giacometti catalog of his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

  The exhibition was such a success that the Matisse Gallery presented a second exhibition two years later.

  As I mentioned before, domesticity was not for Alberto. Meals, such as they were, were taken in neighboring bistros or cafés. His main meal, always the same, consisted of two hard-boiled eggs, two slices of ham, two cups of coffee, two glasses of Beaujolais. Four packs of cigarettes throughout the day and more coffee continued the onslaught on his health.

  Nights he roamed from café to café. He never went to bed before dawn. His companion on these nocturnal forays, exasperated but devoted, was usually his brother Diego. “How do you expect to work in that condition? Nothing will come of it—maybe a little chicken?” Usually, something did come of it, although Alberto, dissatisfied with his own work, frequently destroyed it.

  “Diego’s head is the one I know best,” Alberto said. “He posed for me over a long period of time, from 1935 to 1940, every day. When I draw or paint from memory, it always turns out to be more or less Diego’s head.”

  Before they were closed by law, his regular rounds included a stop at one of several brothels he frequented. His favorite was called Le Sphinx.

  Julien Levy, the dashing New York dealer of the postwar art world, left this affectionate description of Le Sphinx in his Memoir of an Art Gallery:

  The atmosphere was half nude, very carnal, pretty and amusing. The artists in the neighborhood had developed a habit of coming to the Sphinx at aperitif time … just for the pleasure of having a glass of wine and chatting in this rather unusual atmosphere. The girls were not at all averse to this, enjoying being treated to a drink and having a chat before their professional clients came in later in the evening.

  Sadly, this easygoing oasis had to shut down in 1946, when a crusading female minister outlawed all the brothels. On October 6 of that year, the mistress of the Sphinx invited all her regular customers, including Giacometti, to celebrate the brothel’s last evening.

  Alberto described the origins of his Four Figures on a Stand as a memory of a scene at the Sphinx. His sculpture hoists four minute figures high up on a blocklike stand, which in turn is held aloft by four spindly shafts.

  “Several nude women seen at the Sphinx as I was sitting at the back of the room: the distance which separated us (the shining parquet floor) and which seemed insurmountable despite my desire to cross it made as strong an impression on me as the women themselves.”

  Alberto’s feelings toward women were violently ambivalent. They were both adored and despised. They were goddesses to be worshipped from
afar, but they were also fallen women who deserved to suffer. He admitted he had fantasies of rape and murder (like Cézanne).

  “Whores are the most honest girls,” he said. “They present the bill right away. The others hang on and never let you go. When one lives with the problem of impotence, the prostitute is ideal. You pay, and whether or not you fail is of no importance.”

  His last great love was a prostitute and sometime thief who called herself Caroline. She came into his life in 1960 and remained an agonizing thorn in the side of both Annette and Diego. He painted countless portraits of her in the following years.

  In contrast to his rackety Parisian lifestyle, Alberto remained deeply attached to his mother and to his native village of Stampa. He returned there several times a year to see his mother and to draw. In later years, he telephoned her frequently from Paris.

  I owe the following to Giacometti’s friend the late art critic Thomas B. Hess. When asked what his mother thought of his work, Alberto answered, grinning, “She can’t stand it, and she gets the whole village to back her up. She’ll draw out one of my new paintings and say, ‘Look, isn’t this terrible? Look at the dirty colors.’ And the mailman will nod his head.”

  Alberto didn’t have the slightest interest in worldly social life. In the mid-1960s I was often under pressure from Philippe de Rothschild and his wife, Pauline, owners of the wine château Mouton Rothschild, to bring Giacometti to dinner in Paris. They had started commissioning well-known artists to design the bottle labels for each vintage and were longing to have one designed by Giacometti.

  It took a lot of persuasion on my part, but I finally convinced him to come with me to dinner. He was vague about the evening, and on the way in a taxi he asked me several times where we were going.

  He sat politely through the dinner but nudged me to leave as soon as we could. On the way back, he agreed that the wines were superb, but he never wanted to go back again. The Rothschilds never got their label.

  For years, Giacometti had never crossed the Atlantic, although his early exhibitions at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York (in 1947 and 1950) attracted great attention. His first reason was that boats were too slow. “You can’t draw the horizon for a whole week without going crazy.” His second reason: “Because I don’t trust pilots. If I were in an airplane crash, I’d die of rage on the way down.”

  However, he did give in in 1965 and boarded the Queen Elizabeth with Annette, Pierre Matisse, and his wife, Patricia, for New York, to see his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

  He was delighted with the exhibition and visited it a number of times. He thoroughly enjoyed New York. He bought a plan of the city and after two days could find his way around unaided.

  “It’s curious that I should be the object of so much attention when I’m only a beginner. For if ever I achieve anything, it’s only at present that I am beginning to glimpse what it might be.

  “But then maybe it’s better to get honors out of the way at the beginning so as to work in peace afterward.”

  Alberto died in 1966 and was buried in the Swiss Alps near his parents.

  My Friend Miró

  In 1954 I was in Paris preparing the first issue of L’ŒIL, which was to appear in January 1955. I lived near the Hôtel Pont Royal, and its dusky bar was a convivial meeting place. The venerable publishing house Gallimard was just down the street, and its authors often congregated there. (Camus, Gide, Malraux, Céline, and Proust were all on its distinguished backlist.) Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, chased away from the Café de Flore by unwanted attention, found refuge there.

  It was in the Pont Royal bar that I met Balthus, the Freudian analyst Jacques Lacan, and many other well-known characters of the times. Most notably, I met Joan Miró, who used to come to Paris to do his graphic work, with the master craftsmen Fernand Mourlot and Roger Lacourière, and he stayed at the Pont Royal. I was planning travel destinations for a future summer issue, and I asked Miró what I should show of his native city, Barcelona.

  To my delighted surprise, he answered, “I’ll show you. I am going back to Barcelona next week.” He gave me his address—it was for an old building in the Gothic section, just off the Ramblas—but not the apartment number. Next week I left for Barcelona with that splendid photographer, Brassaï, to join Miró.

  Miró was a celebrated artist in France and America by then, and I presumed he was as well-known in his own country. However, there was no one in the little conical porter’s lodge at the entrance on the calle Folgueroles to give me directions. So I went from floor to floor, knocking on doors and asking for “el pintor Miró.” No one had heard of the famous artist who had lived there so many years.

  I finally found him, a small, benign figure (like many Catalans, he was very short), impeccably dressed as usual (he favored bow ties), white hair neatly combed, round blue eyes that seemed to look out at the world in perpetual astonishment. He couldn’t wait to show me some of his favorites. High on his list was the work of the visionary architect Antoni Gaudí, a Catalan hero. Gaudí was a passion of his—the embodiment of Catalan genius in all its singularity and invention.

  He detoured the well-known Sagrada Família cathedral, expressing disdain for plans to finish it. Gaudí had been knocked down by a streetcar and carried to a charity ward, where he died, unrecognized, without having finished the plans for his cathedral. He always improvised as he went along, so Miró and many others objected to contemporary architects “guessing” the master’s intentions. Controversy still rages about this.

  We went to the park where Miró played as a boy, the Parque Güell, commissioned by Gaudí’s main patron, Count Güell. What Miró liked best about it was its technical ingeniousness combined with moments of pure improvisation, total fantasy combined with precise calculation—very much like his own work.

  He pointed out that to cover the surface of the winding curved bench, which snaked around the upper terrace, would be very expensive. So Gaudí bought up odd lots of broken ceramic fragments—of teapots, plates, bathroom tiles, anything—and let the workmen invent mosaic patterns as they went along, setting the pieces into the wet concrete.

  As I looked closely at the mosaic designs on the bench, I noticed circles and stars that seemed to come right out of a Miró composition. “Yes, those motifs became part of my boyhood. Circles and stars stayed with me all my life,” he told me.

  It was July and extremely hot. Poor Brassaï, somewhat portly, had to lug his heavy equipment around unaided, perspiring freely, his person and his camera more accustomed to Paris by night than Barcelona in July. But his alert eye captured the eccentricities and oddities of the Catalan scene in splendid photographs for my magazine.

  During a very charged week in Barcelona, Miró led me up and down and all around the town. What he liked best about the famous apartment house the Casa Milà were the great ventilators on the roof like totemic presences, medieval warriors. “The splendid thing,” he said enthusiastically, “is that these sculptures—because that is what they are—can’t even be seen from the street. Gaudí made them purely for his personal pleasure.”

  Holy ground for Miró was the National Museum of Catalan Art with its rich collection of eleventh- and twelfth-century sculptures and frescoes. They were originally scattered among small rural churches in the mountains beyond Barcelona, mostly abandoned and falling into decay. Fortunately, farseeing preservers salvaged them in the 1920s and brought them to safety in the Catalan museum. “This is the art that means the most to me,” Miró said. “I used to come here every Sunday morning as a boy, by myself. This painting was essential to me.”

  He pointed out a seraphim from the apocalypse with wings covered with eyes. “I never forgot those eyes,” Miró said. Indeed, eyes appear mysteriously throughout his work where they are least expected: on a tree trunk, in the sky. In some of his Constellation series of 1940–41, eyes mingle with the stars.

  I found that the most unexpected incidents might fill him with wonder and stir
his imagination as much as the great Gothic monuments he took me to see. Once, as we were walking, he stopped suddenly and looked intently at a broken telegraph wire, lying curved in the hot asphalt of the road. “Look,” he said, “rien n’est banal ni stupide—le fantastique est partout [nothing is banal or stupid—the fantastic is everywhere].” He carried a little notebook and sometimes jotted down a notation, of a graffito on a wall, for instance.

  Although I speak Spanish, he would only speak to me in French, he so disliked Castilian Spain. “I am a Catalan,” he said firmly. “The rest of Spain is as foreign to me as, say, Holland.” He spoke French with that jubilant Catalan accent that rattles the French language around the tongue like so many smooth boulders being swept along in a torrent.

  As he said, nothing was banal when seen in Miró’s company. A stop for a midday sherry was at an eccentric bar decorated with stuffed animal heads garlanded with red peppers. A meal at a favorite restaurant, Solé, introduced me to seafood so peculiar in shape he might have invented it and a cheese shaped like a collapsed woman’s breast by Claes Oldenburg. I formed a lifelong partiality for the deep red wine Priorat from Miró’s favorite region, Tarragona.

  When I was back in Paris from that historic, for me, Barcelona visit with Miró, I was preparing the article “Miró Shows You Barcelona” and reliving our adventures. A most unexpected treasure arrived: a large gouache dancing with emerald and black incidents on a white background. With it came a note from Miró: “Just cut out the motifs you like, and paste them in the margins of your article.” Naturally, I did nothing of the sort; the gouache is with me today.

  For the following quarter of a century I had the good fortune of catching up with Miró a number of times: in France, Spain, and New York. The connection was never lost. Every New Year’s Day (the New Year is more important than Christmas in much of Europe) I would telephone him from wherever I happened to be, to wish him “une bonne année.” Once I called from Houston. “Où est tu?” he asked. “Where are you?” “Au Texas,” I answered. “Au Texas … ?” He made it sound as if I were calling from the moon.