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Authors: Rosamond Bernier

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I
n 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 occasion 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.”
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.
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.

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