Some of My Lives

by Rosamond Bernier

  She often complained that she could never get down to the books that she ought to write and wanted to write. In private, she would admit that it was not only her demanding work for The New Yorker that was responsible. The long haul was not for her. As she wrote to her friend Kay Boyle, “I seem to live on in a steady conflagration of matches, easily burnt out, but always re-lighted.” She did actually write two articles for my magazine, L’ŒIL—one on her old friend Mark Tobey, the other, less predictably, on Helena Rubinstein—but although we commissioned her to write the text for an illustrated book on Paris, she backed out.

  Happily, she lived to know that her reports from Paris and elsewhere were being reprinted in book form. She enjoyed the belated personal recognition—her pseudonym, Genet, concealed her identity for many years—and toward the end of her life, when debilitating illness prevented her from writing, she took an enormous delight in reading herself in book form. She would laugh uproariously. “I must say,” she told her friends, “that nobody ever amuses me as much as reading myself!”

  That amusement is contagious. Janet Flanner was a person of very strong convictions, but she never preached. Delight was what she offered, from one decade to the next, and it has never staled. The profiles in this book are as fresh as they were on the day that she wrote them. As for “The Beautiful Spoils,” her account of the looting of art by the Nazis from 1940 onward, it too is a profile but a profile of iniquity, minutely researched in often difficult circumstances. We can learn from all these pieces, but in doing so, we also have ourselves a very good time.

  Richard Avedon

  This is my introduction to the catalog for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1978 exhibition Avedon: Photographs, 1947–1977.

  Fashion is theater. It has its authors and its directors, it has its actors and its actresses, and it has an audience that can be very large indeed. It is art, and it is also big business. It is trade, of a particularly complex and ramifying kind, and at its best it is poetry as well. It has successes that seem for a season or two to take the whole world and roll it flat, and it has its failures that are both gruesome and definitive.

  It has variables—names that come and go—and it has constants. One of its constants over the last thirty years and more has been the activity of Richard Avedon. Avedon is self-evidently one of the best photographers of the day. But he is also a philosopher, a historian, a moralist, a poet, and a wit. He does not see fashion photography as a chore to be got through as quickly as possible. He gives it everything he has; and that “everything” includes those fantasies which take hold of us in childhood and never let go.

  However implausibly, it was while serving in the Merchant Marine, during World War II, that he learned the techniques of photography that later served him so well in the world of high fashion.

  He began his activity in that domain at a time right after the war, when nobody in this country knew anything about the state of high fashion in France, for the very good reason that there was nothing to work with and nothing to show. But the French fashion industry wasn’t willing to lie down and die; and just to show that it was still alive, the French sent over to New York an exhibition of small and extremely lifelike dolls that were dressed just as real live full-sized people would be dressed when the couture houses could open again. The show was called Le Théâtre de la Mode, and among the people who came over with it was Christian Bérard, the most brilliant stage designer of his day.

  It made a great stir, and when the French fashion houses began to open up again in 1946–47, American magazines thought it worthwhile to send people over to report on them. One of these people was Richard Avedon, who was seeing Paris for the first time. It was the decisive moment in his professional life. He knew nothing of Paris, beyond what he had picked up from the movies of the 1930s, and he was overwhelmed not only by the city itself but by the world of high fashion with its impassioned commitment to elegance and technical perfection.

  He was in Paris when a soft-spoken, moonfaced man called Christian Dior showed his first collection. Such was the shortage of fabrics in France at the time that many women in the audience were still wearing skirts above their knees. His models came sailing through the crowded gray salons like sloops in a high wind. As they pirouetted this way and that, their long full skirts swooshed out around them, knocking ashtrays off the tables as they went. It was the New Look, the proof that Paris could still call a tune that the whole world would follow, and people wept to see it. It meant that miles of French cloth would be sold, and it meant years of work for the skilled French fingers that made braid, flowers, belts, buttons, and embroidery. The finely trained artisans of la haute couture were in business again.

  Avedon the fashion photographer had his first great success in the atmosphere of high excitement and overflowing emotion that was the mark of Paris reborn. Those new fashions were a triumph for French intelligence, French wit, and French craftsmanship. For one or two men and women of genius and for a great many hardworking people of talent they foretold a lifetime of constructive activity; and for the pride and the dignity of a lately humbled France they were a tremendous tonic.

  Coverage of the Paris collections was a serious matter in those days. Preparations were made long in advance. The girl who was to model the clothes was chosen way ahead in New York and worked over like a vestal virgin predestined for a magic ritual. Avedon went to Paris ahead of time to choose and rehearse his locations. The whole magazine team spent three weeks to record the showings. Nothing was left to chance. What looked like accident and spontaneity was nothing of the kind. There was not a breath of the reportage spirit. Every last effect was thought out in advance: the concierge in the doorway, the still-unchanged life of the street, the unexpected encounters, even the rising cloud of pigeons with their wings akimbo.

  Avedon lived and worked in the closed world of couture and the clothes he was to photograph. He spent all day on location and all night in a small studio on the rue Jean Goujon. Paris for him was his little team: the model, his assistant, an electrician, the aged messenger who brought the big dressmaker’s boxes round on his bicycle. He had no contact whatever with the glittering world that was conjured up in the photographs that would appear in Harper’s Bazaar and later in Vogue.

  Reclusive by choice as much as by necessity, Avedon at the age of twenty-four did not attempt to impress himself upon Paris. But when he shot in the Palais Royal, he knew that somewhere behind an upper window Colette was writing with her fanal bleu beside her. He also knew that at any moment Jean Cocteau, who also lived in the Palais Royal, might saunter down, with his carefully permed mane waving in the breeze, to have lunch at Véfour.

  Paris after the liberation was full of bitterness and recrimination. Yet something was coming alive again, and behind that renewed vitality was the most imaginative of economic programs: the Marshall Plan.

  Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault at their Théâtre Marigny under the bare chestnut trees delighted with their repertoire. A few years later the Barraults were to offer Pierre Boulez the hospitality of their small upstairs, where, on excruciatingly uncomfortable chairs, the Parisians heard Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Boulez’s own music for the first time. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were writing and holding court, first at the Café de Flore, then downstairs in the dark bar of the Pont Royal when too many gawkers invaded their Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Albert Camus came back from North Africa to run the most intelligent newspaper, Combat.

  The austere and splendid Nadia Boulanger was still pouring out her enthusiasms, insights, and perceptions to a new generation of musicians in her freezing apartment on the rue Ballu (unchanged since Aaron Copland became her first composition pupil in 1921).

  The tradition of intelligent popular entertainment continued. While over on the avenue George V Balenciaga showed superb black dresses as stiff with heavy embroidery as a jeweled icon, across the Seine on the Left Bank Juliette Gréco, in worn black slacks and sweater, sang désabu
sé songs written for her by Sartre and Raymond Queneau. And of course Piaf, diminutive sparrow of sorrow in a shapeless black shift, broke everybody’s heart singing “La Vie en Rose.”

  These early photographs chart Avedon’s evolution. From the start, he differed from the famous figures who preceded him: Baron de Meyer, Steichen, Man Ray, Hoyningen-Huene, Beaton, Horst. For one thing, he chose to observe, rather than to mingle with, the professionally elegant world. To that world he brought wit, vitality that never quite masked an underlying anxiety, and the ability to distill drama from frivolity. He did everything his own way. Not for him the backlighting that aureoled hair and profile, the ectoplasmic shimmer of a flattering background, the static pose by a Grecian column. Avedon’s models are rarely still: they run, pivot, stride. (An early photograph of a girl gleefully speeding along on roller skates horrified officials of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, who thought it undignified.)

  The clothes themselves take on a tautened nervous energy: panels fly, poufs billow, coats jut and twirl. Shoes become monuments. There is an acute sensitivity to texture: he is as alive to sunlit cigarette smoke against a cheek as he is to the mushroom bloom of a suede hat or the sheen of fur against the grain of wool.

  These photographs reflect his romance with Paris: the loving side-look at uneven paving stones, the worn surface of a wall, the curve of a café chair, the watery lights on a bridge, the siphon of soda water on a bistro table, the old-fashioned lettering on a shop front, the Art Nouveau arabesques over a doorway.

  An increasing interest in portraiture that was to blossom uncompromisingly in the 1960s creeps into the fashion photographs as the French fashion press crowd around girls in evening dress, members of the Dior état-major flank one of their creations. He knew just how to juxtapose everyday people with the improbable perfection of the professional beauty.

  There are moments of cinematic quality—episodes from an unwritten story when the action is not yet defined. Something has happened, or is about to happen: we never know which. Tongue-in-cheek mini-dramas comment indirectly on the world they set before us. In one image a young woman sits in a French railway carriage (Avedon’s Anna Karenina?). As she clasps her little dog, her frail face emerges, bathed in tears, from a sea of flowers. This photograph was refused by his magazine editor. “No one cries in a Dior hat” was the tart comment. Incidentally, while most of these photographs were done during assignments for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, some favorites of his were never published.

  Soon the romance is over. A new emphasis on humor, frenzy, and finally wry satire takes over. The gaiety is more frantic than exuberant, the openmouthed laughs look strident, everyone seems to be smoking nervously. Boredom creeps in as handsome bodies loll on beaches. There is a radical change in what is considered beautiful and acceptable. The first breasts are bared. The first black model appears. High fashion and the high stepper were one, at that moment in time. Avedon dealt with a world of performers. The anonymous models of the immediate postwar years were replaced by young women who became celebrities in their own right. At the same time, it turned out that the professional performers and the redoubtable heiresses to great fortunes asked nothing better than to put their persons in the public domain by modeling whatever was newest in high fashion. Beauty and notoriety and a certain stylish abandon were adroitly compounded by Avedon in images that quintessentialize one of the more curious moments in recent social history.

  With the 1960s come the tough fashions, the clunks of jewelry, the face mask like Maori tattooing, the space-age glasses, the matted hair. The photographer-ringmaster urges his models to movement and yet more movement: they wheel, leap, cavort in midair.

  These tough fashions corresponded to radical changes in a world that in the late 1960s and early 1970s was falling apart and did not know how to put itself together again. Fashion came out of the quilted silence of the couture houses and into the streets for its inspiration. Nothing could be too odd, nothing could be too extreme, nothing could contrast too abruptly with the fastidious perfection that had once been the aim of high fashion. It was a visual moment that got completely out of hand; and already after less than ten years the fashions in question look as remote from us as the costumes that went berserk under the Directoire. But Avedon was there; those frantic fashions were his material; and he went to work among them the way Claude Monet went to work among his water lilies.

  The last room leaves the discotheque universe for the quiet privacy of Avedon’s studio. It tells us as much about the man behind the camera and the journey he has undertaken as it does about the seven women who are enshrined there. Here is simplicity—of dress, of pose—with all artifice gone and nothing but the white studio wall behind the straightforward frontal pose. Alberto Giacometti used to say that what mattered to him in sculpture was to capture le regard—the gaze. The other features were only a framework for le regard. Once you had this, everything else fell into place. Richard Avedon has wrought this particular miracle, time and time again.

  Irving Penn

  My chapter in Irving Penn: A Career in Photography, the catalog for a 1997–98 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.

  At the end of World War II, Vogue magazine was a tumult of packaged high style. Superlatives swirled around like perfumed snowflakes in a heavy storm. The major players in the Vogue of those days had a distinctly cosmopolitan turn of mind. Iva Patcevitch, president of Vogue’s publishing house, Condé Nast, and Alexander Liberman, art director of Vogue, were recent arrivals from Paris, and both were of Russian origin; several of the magazine’s photographers, such as Serge Balkin and Constantin Joffé, were also Russian.

  Irving Penn was not like that at all. He was a plainspoken, plain-looking young American, recently back from the American Field Service. He wore sneakers, which at the time were anything but customary in the Vogue offices, and he rarely wore a tie. Quiet and reserved, he spoke little and he spoke softly. But there was no mistaking his steely—in fact, stubborn—resolve: he knew exactly what he wanted, and what he wanted had nothing to do with the accepted high gloss of the fashion photograph.

  When I first met Penn in the New York office of Vogue in 1946, he showed me a photograph of a Venetian canal clogged with a lot of old rubbish. I said, almost to myself, that it looked like a painting by Paul Klee. His face lit up in surprise that a young editor should say such a thing. From that moment, there was a certain rapport between us.

  From 1934 to 1938, Penn had attended the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, where he had hoped to become a painter, and during that time he spent two summers in the New York offices of Harper’s Bazaar as the assistant and protégé of Alexey Brodovitch. While there, he glimpsed Salvador Dalí, Isamu Noguchi, and Richard Lindner on their way in or out, and he was present when new drawings by Jean Cocteau, Christian Bérard, and Jean Hugo arrived in the morning’s mail.

  But when the twenty-six-year-old Penn first came to work for Alexander Liberman at Vogue in 1943, he knew little of the multifarious and multinational avant-garde that he would be called upon to photograph. There was no reason to suppose that he would later excel as a portrait photographer, nor that between 1946 and 1950 Penn would shoot nearly three hundred portraits for Vogue, of which over one hundred would be published. His sitters were to include, among writers, T. S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Stephen Spender, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. There were masters of the keyboard, such as Wanda Landowska, Vladimir Horowitz, and Rudolf Serkin; filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and René Clair; among composers, Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein; jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie; and a couturier, Christian Dior. There was also in 1947 a memorable group portrait that included, among other cartoonists, Charles Addams, Saul Steinberg, George Price, and William Steig.

  In dealing with this formidable cast of characters, Penn turned out to be a gentle but implacable sorcerer—a sorcerer with an artist’s eye. With a built-in divining rod he could pi
ck up the inner vibration of his subjects, even if he had nothing to go on, except perhaps the notes written for him beforehand by a well-informed assistant. But when he peered through the lens, this reticent man showed no mercy as he ferreted out the secrets that the sitters might most have wished to hide. As early as 1942, during the year he spent trying to be a painter in Mexico, he shot a picture of chickens captured in a bottle. He has been doing something like it ever since.

  For some of his portraits for Vogue in 1948, he built a set of two converging panels that forced his sitters into a constricted space. They were caught as surely as a specimen butterfly pinned to a panel.

  Some of them took it (so to speak) in their stride. Marcel Duchamp stood in his corner, imperturbably puffing on his pipe. Spencer Tracy in the same year was as relaxed as if he were in his own living room.

  Others were not so amenable. Georgia O’Keeffe so hated her portrait that she wrote to Penn in a very firm hand asking him to destroy it. O’Keeffe’s reaction is not surprising. I saw the forbidden print, now part of the Penn Collection and Archives at the Art Institute of Chicago. Dressed all in black, she looks like a wizened waif, as much a captive as any of those Mexican chickens.

  Penn’s relentless perfectionism did not make him easy to work with. Even objects had to comply. Liberman once described a shoot involving the instant of a fall of a tray loaded with glasses. Penn insisted that only the finest Baccarat crystal would be right, so dozens and dozens of the most expensive glasses were used in recording the right moment of spill and break.

  Insects, too, had to conform to Penn’s wishes. He needed some flies to complete a color image, called Summer Sleep, of a dozing girl by a fan, shot through a screen. So dead flies were glued to the screen to keep them exactly in the spots where Penn felt they were needed.