As a rebellious offspring of the best-dressed crowd, I should end this chapter with a last note on my thrifty, unmodish attitude toward clothes and on my sentimental concern for carefully preserving any present my parents have ever given me: I so lovingly maintained the jacket of the Chanel suit in which I met my husband that in the fall of 1994 I wore it to the christening of our first grandchild.
NINETEEN
The Artist in His Studios
I must now explain how Alex began to paint again.
In March of 1946, at the age of thirty-three, he had suffered the first ulcer hemorrhage he’d had since the age of seventeen, and again he had nearly bled to death. He was ordered to stop working for two months. I was on spring vacation from Spence during a few weeks of his convalescence. Mabel was on maternity leave, Sally could come for only a few hours a day, so it was up to me to cook most of Alex’s meals—if the desolate pap of a severe ulcer diet can be called a meal: His all-white regimen consisted mostly of breast of chicken, mashed potatoes, rice, Cream of Wheat, vanilla junket. I took immense pride in cooking for Alex and always tried to give his food a festive touch by putting a tiny green object at the center of the whiteness—a green pea, a teeny sprig of parsley. During that spring break, I did little else than shop for my parents, sit home and read Dostoevsky, and cook. At the appointed time for his lunch—1:00 P.M.—I would bring Alex his tray. He would be lying on his bed on the right side of the room, reading, propped up against several pillows. “Hello, darling,” he’d say, however tired or sleepy he was. Sitting up a bit—in the first weeks after his hemorrhage, the effort was visible—he would squeeze my hand, say, “Thank you, my love,” and ask me what I’d done or read that morning. Before disappearing, I’d kiss him on the top of his head, aware, as I remained throughout my youth, that beyond the fact that I adored him, this man may well have saved my life.
Alex’s “Yellow Boy” (portrait of Liuba Krasin’s son), painted in Paris in 1938.
It had been a stressful and eventful year for Alex. In January, his father had died of cancer, leaving barely a cent to anyone—by that time, Simon’s business earnings had sharply declined. His mother, Henriette, had been more exasperating than ever since Simon’s death. (We all breathed a sigh of relief the following year, when she returned to live in Paris.) Moreover, that very year, shortly after Alex had become an American citizen, the lease on our Seventieth Street house had expired, and Alex had taken a large loan from Condé Nast to buy it, retaining the Shuvalov family as our upstairs tenants. But the most important factor in Alex’s illness, I believe, was that his success as a whiz kid of American fashion publishing had left him no time to paint: Beyond the very academic portrait he had done of his father upon arriving in the States in 1941, Alex had not picked up a paintbrush for five years, totally repressing what he looked on as his true vocation. The summer after his illness, he decided to take a longer summer break than usual and accepted an invitation for us to visit the Levals in July at their house on Martha’s Vineyard. Alex had had no time whatever to travel in the States, and it was in a little fishing town on the Vineyard, seemingly inspired by the impact of a totally novel site, that he suddenly went to an art store and bought himself a folding easel, some brushes, and oils.
Alex was particularly captivated by the fishing boats on Menemsha Bay and the area’s misty marine light. Setting up his easel amid the lobster pots, he started painting landscapes with brushstrokes far looser, far more liberated than those on his tight, academic canvases of the prewar years. The pleasure of making art again seemed to be infectious. As soon as we returned to Stony Brook for our August vacation, Alex set up his easel in the gallery area of the squash court, dropped out of Mother’s and Uncle Pat’s card games, and began a six-hour-a-day studio regimen. He painted flowers that Mother arranged from the garden; landscapes of the water view from our house; a portrait of me—the first he had done since 1938, when Mother had first brought us together—that still bore traces of Iacovleff’s slick realism. That very fall, upon returning to Seventieth Street, Alex transformed our second-floor library into a studio and began quietly to paint on weekends whenever there was a respite from his social life, showing his work to no one beyond Mother and me.
Alex’s next breakthrough occurred in the summer of 1947, when he made his first postwar trip to Venice. The Libermans took a room at the Gritti Hotel, across the Grand Canal from Santa Maria della Salute, and Alex began obsessively to paint the view from his window, working with gouache on paper, limning the play of light on the church’s domes and voluted arches at various times of day. After two weeks in Venice, they drove on to Sainte Maxime. They had joyfully reclaimed Va-et-Vient, which had been only faintly damaged by the German occupation, the previous summer. Maria, the housekeeper, had been there to welcome them, weeping with emotion. They were so happy with this summer vacation schedule—two weeks apiece in Venice and Va-et-Vient—that they continued it for many years.
Alexander Liberman, “Santa Maria della Salute,” Venice, oil on canvas, painted in 1948.
In the following winters, Alex gave an increasing amount of time on weekends to his painting. In his attempt to express an original vision, he felt he had to experiment with a vast variety of styles. And in the ensuing three years, he traveled his way through the history of modern art with what one can only call a vertiginous journalistic speed: Experimenting with Expressionism, Impressionism, Pointillism, he “worked out his admirations,” as he put it, for the artists whom he considered the greatest modern masters. A 1948 painting inspired by attending a recital by Vladimir Horowitz is an unabashed gloss on Braque. A tortured self-portrait done in the same year is an equally shameless pastiche of Van Gogh. In a 1949 portrait of me done while I was home from Bryn Mawr, the technique of distortion is strikingly similar to Chaïm Soutine’s. This eerily swift change of pace was characteristic of Alex’s gypsyish restlessness and his extraordinary facility.
But the late 1940s were also a period of spiritual and aesthetic search for him. He was rebelling against the stranglehold of Cubism on French twentieth-century art. He had begun to admire the work of American Abstract Expressionists, such as Rothko, Pollock, and Newman, but he thought their painterliness was still more “European” than the style he was hoping to evolve for himself. He also disliked the New York School’s autobiographical impulse. For in those years he was fond of quoting a saying of Pascal that had been a motto of sorts during his Calvinist education at Les Roches: “Le moi est haissable,” “The ego is hateful.” He dreamed of the possibility of creating an art that would be utterly impersonal and that would also be akin to music or drama in its repeatability.
Ultimately, the landscapes Alex painted of Venice’s Grand Canal were most instrumental in nudging him toward abstraction. He had rendered the shimmering play of light on water by large thick dots of white gouache applied directly from his tube onto the canvas, and in 1949 these pointillistic daubs, greatly expanded in scale, took on a life of their own. He began to paint jagged, abstracted round shapes that recalled Monet’s suns or volcanic craters. But these forms still bore too many traces of Impressionism and Expressionism for his taste. Later that year, his “revulsion for the personal,” as he phrased it, inspired the creation of large-format circles, drawn to geometric precision with large compasses, for which he abandoned all traditional materials. Instead of using canvas, he turned to Masonite or aluminum panels. Instead of oil, he employed commercial high-gloss enamel, which created a hard, reflective sheen akin to that of refrigerator or automobile paint. He dubbed his style “Circlism,” and in a statement drawn up a few years later for the Museum of Modern Art archives he explained it in the following manner:
I consider the circle the simplest, purest element of visual research. The circle is the common property of the two infinites, from the immense sun to the infinitesimal atom…. [A]bove all the circle is the purest symbol because it is instantly visible in its totality.
By the early 1950s, Alex had e
volved a system whereby his hard-line circle paintings could be created in his absence by an assistant working from maquettes. Still very weakened by his ulcers, he may have been searching for art forms through which his vision could be perpetuated in case he grew too ill to execute them himself. He is also likely to have been inspired by the Suprematist and Constructivist art that flourished in Russia in the 1910s and 1920s. And his preoccupation with art as an indestructible idea rather than a perishable object (which the art critic Barbara Rose, in her 1983 book on Alex, reads as a neo-Platonic concept) might well be traced to his traumatic experience of the century’s greatest historical upheavals. Whatever motivated him, there is no doubt that he was making some of the first Minimalist art in our time. In fact, one of his breakthrough paintings of 1949, long before that “ism” had entered our vocabulary, was a white circle, finely drawn on a four-foot black square, called Minimum.
But one should emphasize the extreme isolation in which Alex was making this kind of hard-edge geometric art. He was working in direct opposition to the 1950s New York art scene, which was totally dominated by action painting. (In those years, the only American artist of Alex’s generation to be working with geometric forms was Ellsworth Kelly, who remained in Paris until the mid-fifties.) Did Alex have any community of friends or colleagues with whom he could discuss his work? None whatsoever. His immediate entourage—Uncle Pat, Marlene Dietrich, the Levals—thought his abstractions to be amusing nonsense. Given his superhuman schedule as media mogul, househusband, and weekend artist, Alex had not had a second in which to hang out with those American painters who were transforming the art of our time—Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt. As for my mother, she was not fond of the company of artists unless they had reached phenomenal renown, such as Picasso or Dalí or her compatriot Chagall. Moreover, however extensive her culture, her tastes in the visual arts were downright reactionary. Her favorite painter was still Vermeer—the artist she kept urging Alex to emulate even into the 1950s. She had barely progressed beyond Impressionism, had been appalled when Alex started moving beyond his realistic portraits and his pretty landscapes, and like the rest of her milieu thought Alex’s circles were, as she put it, “a lot of bunk.”
In fact, it is ironic that the greatest enthusiasm elicited by Alex’s paintings in the early 1950s came from the radical artists whom I had met at Black Mountain in the summers of 1951 and 1952. My closest friends there had been John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Bob Rauschenberg, and we visited together at Seventieth Street after the end of the 1951 summer session. They were all enthused by Alex’s experiments with the circle and returned often to visit him in subsequent years, when I was living in Paris. Alex was particularly taken with Cage, whose system of chance notation he occasionally emulated in his own system of composing circles, and he always remained grateful to these artists for offering him such encouragement at the beginning of his career as a Minimalist.
“Two Circles,” enamel on masonite, exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum’s “Younger American Painters” exhibition in 1954.
So here was Alex during weekday office hours, managing a group of magazines that shouted headlines such as “Hems up three inches, absolutely!” Here he was on weekday nights being a socialite. And here he was on weekends, creating, in often painful isolation, some of the decade’s boldest art. The critic Clement Greenberg and the artist Barnett Newman came to his studio in 1953, stayed a long time, drank a great deal, but did nothing to help him, and he did not see them again for some years. In those same months, the dealer Sidney Janis visited Alex and told him he should do ballet decors. There was only one breakthrough in the solitude Alex suffered during that decade as an artist: In 1954 James Johnson Sweeney chose one of his Minimalist canvases—a stark image of two black circles on white—for a group show at the Guggenheim Museum entitled Younger American Painters. It was the only painting Alex was to exhibit before 1960, and it gave him a taste of the stigma his publishing career was to cast on his artistic vocation for a long time to come: Time dismissed Alex’s Guggenheim piece as “a pristine nothing…by the art director of Conde Nast magazines.”
It is in the context of this solitude that Alex started the series of photographs of the School of Paris painters that were ultimately assembled into his book The Artist in His Studio.
Over the years, Alex had developed a kind of self-protective contempt for his work at Condé Nast. He sensed that it was the only course he could have taken to assure his and my mother’s needs for comfort and security—needs dictated by their chronically poor health and by the traumatic deracinations of their youths. He felt that the financial security brought by his job also liberated his art (or so he rationalized it) from marketplace constraints, from the whims of critics and art collectors. He often told me that his identity as an artist made him feel superior to much of the magazine world, and this gave him the kind of unquestioning self-confidence every good editor needs. So all the while, he looked on painting—his own and others’—as a kind of ideal realm, which could serve as a shelter from the shallow glitz of the fashion world. And in the summer of 1948, when, during his yearly vacation in France, a mutual acquaintance proposed that Alex go to photograph Georges Braque at his home on the Normandy coast, Alex jumped at the idea. He had long regretted not having met the School of Paris painters in the prewar years, and he saw it as a good chance to catch up with them. He found his visit with Braque so enriching that in the following four summers he photographed more than a dozen other artists and also documented the studios of several artists no longer alive, such as Cézanne, Monet, and Kandinsky.
Like the painting vocation Alex had just begun to resume, his chronicling of these pioneers of twentieth-century modernism was initially a totally private project, a very personal investigation into what, as he put it himself, “my life would have been like if I had devoted it completely to painting.” He worked on it for four years without any intent whatsoever of publishing it. In fact, his chronicles may have served as a dialogue with the inner artist buried in his Faustian personality, the artist his mother had so insistently urged him to be. They can be seen as a meditation on the suffering and dedication all too often required by true artists and by their wives—that very suffering and dedication which Alex had not felt able to undertake.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, I accompanied Alex on several of his visits to artists’ studios and observed his working manner at close hand. It was above all else marked by the truly religious respect he had for art—a respect inherited from the Russian culture in which his parents had been steeped, a culture that adulated art to a greater degree than any other tradition in the West. It was also marked by a humility and egolessness I’d never observed in any other aspect of Alex’s life or work. Similarly to Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom he may well have admired more than any other photographer of his generation, Alex worked very quietly and unobtrusively, with a handheld Leica, never using a tripod, making do with whatever light was available. He kept his stays brief—an hour or so—and returned year after year if he felt he needed more shots to make his documentation complete. The courtesy and respect with which he approached his subjects was returned—he was always welcomed back.
By coincidence, I accompanied Alex on his first visits to Braque and Giacometti, the two painters whose lifestyles, respectively, impressed him and appalled him the most. Braque, an amiable, elegant man who was sixty-six years old upon the first of four visits Alex paid him, struck him as being the “great lord” of contemporary art. He was totally awed by the blend of elegance and efficacy that characterized both Braque’s home and his living space. “Braque has raised the material comfort of the artist to its highest possible degree,” he wrote in The Artist in His Studio. “The conception of his studios is grand and noble. They are like the throne rooms of Renaissance princes. There is no outward show of luxury, but luxury is everywhere—luxury is in the peace of Braque’s life, in its spaciousness and quiet…. Life seems to center around him�
�. He has solved the material problems of creation.” And as we rode back to Paris from Normandy that afternoon in 1948, I detected a nostalgic gleam in Alex’s eyes as he chatted effusively about details of our visit—Have you ever seen a more glorious work space? Wasn’t Mme. Braque so charming and witty? Did you see the way she shelters and nurtures him? Isn’t their life ideal? However efficiently he rationalized his need to work at Condé Nast, over the years I witnessed several such moments when Alex observed a balance of dedication and material comfort in the life of another artist and felt his own glamorous existence sadly wanting.
At the opposite pole of the Braque experience was our visit to Giacometti, who lived with his wife in one tiny, slovenly room that served as living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bath. Here was a man who insisted on a totally needless discomfort—Giacometti was already selling his work quite well but chose to retain the original squalor of his early career for what seemed to be talismanic reasons. Alex was particularly appalled by the grim dustiness, if not filth, of his surroundings: So terrified was Giacometti of imperiling his creative process that no scrap of plaster, no pencil shaving was ever allowed to be thrown out. “Perhaps there is a superstitious need to prolong the mood of his creative inspiration,” Alex mused in The Artist in His Studio. “To relocate to improved quarters might cut the thread, alter the radioactive effect of the surroundings that have produced so many masterpieces.” Needless to say, Alex began to express his horror of Giacometti’s surroundings the second we left his studio. “Have you ever seen anything more squalid?” he burst out. “That beautiful young wife, the poor girl…What does it all mean?” “Thank God your mother didn’t come along on this visit!” he added.
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