The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  I was even more delighted to receive an invitation to the Picasso Museum’s inaugural dinner (had word about Art International’s new owner got out?), set up on huge trestle tables in tents in the Salé’s noble courtyard. The conjunction of seventeenth-century grandeur and Picasso’s abrupt reversal, then masterful reintegration, of tradition is a triumph in my eyes, my only regret being that Diego Giacometti, who designed the museum’s delicate lighting and furniture, died a few months ago. Diego apart, the evening is an extraordinary Proustian roll call for me. Glimpsed in the galleries, encountered on the grand staircase, darting between the tables like ghosts, are the great and the good I have been associated with, mostly briefly and tangentially, since I arrived nearly twenty years ago in Paris. Some of the dramatis personae I barely know but recognise by their attributes: Pierre Rosenberg, the specialist on Poussin, Watteau and David, who invariably wears a bright red cashmere scarf, and Pierre Berès, outstanding rare-books dealer and publisher, who always sports a blue one. Then there are a few people I am familiar with: Michel Leiris, impeccable if constrained in his Savile Row suit; the ebullient Minister of Culture, Jack Lang; a frail André Masson, looking round for old friends from the Surrealist days; Henri Cartier-Bresson, as direct and refreshingly confrontational as if you had just met him in the street; the enigmatic Balthus, closely followed by his dealer, Claude Bernard, at whose parties I have met many of the more influential people I know, from Henri-Georges Clouzot (his Wages of Fear keeps me on the edge of my seat every time I watch it) to James Lord, the American writer with a strangely haunted look whose controversial biography of Alberto Giacometti has just appeared, putting him at hissing, spitting odds with Annette, the artist’s widow. A whole phalanx of art-world worthies, from prominent painters like Tàpies (whose work will certainly feature in a future issue of Art International), Zao Wou-ki and Niki de Saint-Phalle to prominent widows such as Teeny Duchamp and Julie Man Ray, pass by like figures woven on a tapestry or in a fresco highlighting significant moments of my life. Last but certainly not least, I espy Pierre Matisse, the burly, hard-drinking son of the artist, who not long ago confided to me: ‘I am only a ghastly dealer (un sale marchand). I don’t belong to the great family of artists.’

  I breathe in all these memories and meetings under the slightly clammy atmosphere of the tents and let them swirl around my brain. All this history, this heady connection with the Marais’ grandeur, with Picasso, with the Parisian art world, is mine for an instant, before it evaporates like the glass of blonde, bubbly champagne in my hand.

  The opening of the Picasso Museum has given me wings. I have been in Paris now for twenty years, twenty summers as I phrase it in the invitation, since I chose the Saint-Jean, midsummer’s night, once again for the date of the party. A big mix of friends came, ate the simple chicken curry I’d prepared, drank my inexpensive Montagne Saint-Emilion and hived off, as is the Paris custom, into intimate little groups to spend the evening together. I managed nevertheless to achieve a good balance of artists and collectors (who have a spontaneous affinity, since one has art and the other money) as well as a non-art-world contingency consisting of the brighter, more presentable of my squash club friends, a couple of whom have donned ancient blazers with brass buttons and old-school ties for the occasion. At one point, led by Peter Matisse (the art dealer’s son), everyone tried to dance the Charleston, until Zoran Music, who had danced it many decades ago as a young man, got onto the floor to show us how it was really done.

  One of the artists who came to the party has been promising for some time to introduce me to a collector of his who, he says, would help finance a high-quality art magazine. I make a mental note that, if this comes off, the artist in question will expect a payback, no doubt in the form of a fully illustrated essay about his perfunctory figure paintings and portraits. I hate the idea of beginning the whole enterprise on a tit-for-tat basis, but I have to raise some capital somehow to get the publication off the ground, and although I know I can ask a few artists to create some prints that I can sell to help pay the printing and staff costs (Bacon’s lithographs fetch high prices), a direct injection of cash would still be absolutely necessary. I’m enjoying this pre-publication period, which I think of as the calm before the storm, but I realise more acutely every day that buying the title is nothing compared to the task of actually re-thinking and re-launching Art International, so rather than worry about a minor obligation, I immediately set up a meeting with my prospective backer.

  What little I know about her is that she is called Mariella and that, as Mariella Lotti, she was already a successful cinema actress in Italy just before the war; later, after a few post-war films, she married a rich patent lawyer and settled down to a life of secure luxury. But this did not satisfy her, my artist friend has hinted: Mariella began to suffer regular depressions, especially after she discovered that she was more attracted to women than men. I find all this very intriguing, especially since I am no stranger either to depression or to the enigmatic shores of homosexuality, but what I didn’t expect when I went to meet her in her flat in Neuilly was such striking beauty. Exquisitely dressed and cocooned in an Art Deco interior that recalled the Italian ‘white telephone’ movies of the 1930s, Mariella came across at first as haughty and temperamental. Then I caught a strangely stricken look in her diaphanous blue eyes, like a delicate animal at bay, and I started to fall in love with her. By the time the maid came back to pour more champagne, we were laughing like old friends, and the sensation that I had fallen under her spell was in no way diminished when she spontaneously wrote out a cheque to cover the magazine’s start-up costs.

  The cheque (larger than I’d imagined, as I realised once I was outside and could at last decipher it under a street lamp) was the catalyst I’d been waiting for without realising it. Paying the money into a newly opened Art International account at the Société Générale not only empowered me but made me feel more responsible: I am now using someone else’s money. So I have accelerated my efforts to form a skeleton staff, settling after several skirmishes on an American academic as my editorial associate and an English assistant who has brought to the job more social than the required secretarial skills. As for writers and people to ‘represent’ the magazine in one guise or another, I didn’t have to search: the magic of a fledgling, high-minded art review has drawn offers of ‘help’ in bewildering diversity. Several of these I have set to patrolling the Paris galleries in search of advertising, focusing on the well-established ones that traditionally took space in the magazine. Now I need to find the best printer, preferably within easy reach, the best layout designer (the magazine needs a ‘look’ if it’s going to compete with its better-financed American counterparts), then that trio of tutelary deities – banker, lawyer, accountant – and probably someone to head subscription and publicity drives.

  Isn’t it just like life? Now that I have all these pressing priorities, my previous freelance career awakens from its deep sleep and comes to claim me. I have commissions from Architectural Digest so alluring there is no question of turning them down. Could I interview Sophia Loren in the apartment she shares with Carlo Ponti in Geneva? Visit Franco Zeffirelli (who happens to be an old friend of Mariella’s) in his villa on Capri? Join Louis Malle and Candice Bergen in their turreted manor house outside Cahors? I could and I do, just as I somehow find time to travel down the Seine with Christo as he wraps the Pont-Neuf or write an essay for Town and Country about the precious manuscripts, including Rimbaud’s most famous poems and Proust’s virtually rewritten proofs for A la Recherche du temps perdu, at the Bibliothèque Nationale.

  Best known for his behind-the-scenes photographs of the Cuban revolution and Castro’s rise to power, Jesse Fernández has been in touch because he is preparing to do a reportage on Bacon’s studio in London and wants to discuss the project with me beforehand. Jesse has been everywhere and known everyone from Borges and Hemingway to Duchamp and Miró. I’m immediately attracted by his South American garrulousnes
s and cosmopolitan sense of fun and we spend hours together talking for the sheer pleasure of it. While taking my portrait (I’m reminded that Cartier-Bresson said he would do the same, but he never has), Jesse recounts some of his more hair-raising experiences. The one that strikes me most was when he awoke in a pristine white room without knowing who he was or where he was. Peering out of the window didn’t help, although the dreary industrial landscape looked more northern than southern. He imagined he must have been kidnapped by Russian agents because of his relationship with Castro, since he had no inkling that in reality he had suffered a stroke and a subsequent loss of memory. He looked into the mirror and saw that his head had been shaved and covered with surgical tape. He decided not to talk to any of the nurses or doctors, for fear that they were agents in disguise and might use anything he said against him. Eventually Jesse tried to focus on reading a newspaper, and when his wife visited him in hospital (he then immediately forgot about her visits, claiming he had not seen his wife in months), she would gently remind him that he was holding the paper upside down. Over the following weeks his memory started coming back to him in flashes or in whole sequences that he tried desperately to piece together. ‘I felt like a fish that could never get back into the water completely,’ he says. ‘Just in and out of the waves.’ And it was only months later, in the summer, as he sat on the main beach at Royan and watched one wave after another topple onto the beach, that huge gaps in his memory came flooding back, with different episodes linking up to others, until at last he felt his past had returned to him, in all its labyrinthine complexity, entire.

  We still seem to be playing at publishing, rather than actually publishing, an art magazine. I sit self-importantly in my big room, making lists of the myriad things to do and people to call in the run-up to the first issue, but much of the time is spent in spontaneous meetings with the skeleton staff, which now includes a part-time designer and an ‘advertising manager’ to guide and control the various ‘associates’ who are trying to drum up advertising for us. I was taken aback at first when I noted Dubuffet’s insistence in his letters to Jim Fitzsimmons on getting regular, well-paid ads for his fledgling magazine, preferably from the bigger, better galleries in New York, Paris and London. But I realise how right he was, because I’ve already begun paying out meagre salaries and I can see that these, coupled with the printer’s estimate for the first issue, postal costs and office equipment (including three box-like Macintosh Plus computers which so far remain an impenetrable mystery to me), will make short work of Mariella’s generous contribution. I’d be worried about this and how we will rustle up a second issue if a host of other anxieties didn’t hem me in. Since I was fairly sure that I wasn’t allowed to undertake commercial activities (if indeed this activity ever turned out to be commercial) in my rue des Archives space, I decided not to check the lease so that I could at least honestly plead ignorance if challenged. I told my advertising rep to claim a circulation of ‘several thousand’, based on the number of institutions and names with addresses in Jim’s old shoe-boxes; but of course, for the moment, we have no subscribers whatsoever because no issue has yet gone out. I’m made all the more uneasy when I hear that there is a sinister-sounding outfit called the ‘brigade financière’ which makes spot checks on budding little ventures like ours and invariably finds them full of punishable deviations from the norm. The number of holes in our organisation has just increased significantly because my trusty Ahmed, now a husband and father, has found full-time employment as a truck driver and – to help with the smooth running of the office as well as, eventually, with the packing and posting of the magazine – we have just taken on a clever, capable Filipino called Eli who has no papers, no fixed address and can only be paid in cash.

  I’d imagined that my main priority would be planning the contents of each issue, calmly and subtly, drawing on a range of first-class writers, rather than this welter of administrative problems and unfamiliar decisions. The printer has just asked what ‘grammage’ the paper we want should be and whether it should be ‘coated’, just as a lawyer friend, who is nobly advising us on a pro-bono basis, has informed me of the various types of company I should consider setting up to ‘protect me from my liabilities’. I now actually see nothing but liabilities, and for a moment I consider with fleeting delectation the prospect of getting right off this particular roller coaster (as I did once at the fairground, in tears, as a frightened child) before it gets up to speed and I can only cling on to its gyrations for dear life. But then, in short order, I have to confirm subscription rates in $, £, FF and SF, approve a preliminary layout, schmooze with a prospective advertiser on the telephone, and suddenly go down to the printer’s to check the first colour proofs; this latter activity, which consists basically of cooling down some tones and boosting others, has a pleasing practicality to it, and briefly I enjoy being back amongst printers.

  Afterthought as it might now seem, the actual contents of this issue have never been in doubt because, concurrently, I have been curating an exhibition entitled ‘The School of London’ which is about to open at the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo and which, very handily, provides us with a theme to be examined and debated in far greater detail in Art International than the accompanying catalogue allows. Accordingly, I have not only lined up several commentaries on the controversial, central theme (‘Does such a phenomenon as a “School of London” really exist, and is it properly represented by the six artists – Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Kossoff, Kitaj and Michael Andrews – whose work has been chosen?’), but also done interviews specifically on this theme with Bacon, Auerbach and Kitaj. To round the issue out, we have included letters from the various art capitals across the world (as Jim did, thus reaffirming our international outlook), a good clutch of book reviews and an interview with Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom I’ve known for quite a while and who likes – or at least is amused by – the idea that I’m now editing a respected art journal.

  One nice aspect of this dovetailing of the exhibition with the magazine is that I am invited to each venue, from Oslo and the Louisiana in Denmark to Venice and Düsseldorf, and can make sure that at every stage our fully illustrated, elegantly designed new issue is on sale – not that I think we’ve got a best-seller on our hands here, but at least I’ve seen a few people leafing through it, if only to put it back and buy the exhibition catalogue instead. At the show’s opening in Düsseldorf, I listened with rapture to the Kunstmuseum’s tall, genial director heap praise on our new issue until slowly he became even more persuasive as to how valuable an addition his English girlfriend, the young art historian Jill Lloyd, would be to us as a writer, possibly even as a regular contributor or correspondent from London. I relish my new powers to appoint or disappoint briefly, then cover myself hastily with ‘Of course I’ll have to see what she’s written first.’ I meet the ‘Englische Freundin’ at the private-view party that evening and find her attractive, but aloof, not to say stand-offish. Nevertheless we agree to discuss the idea of her writing for Art International over the phone once I’ve read her recent reviews; we also plan to meet whenever I’m next in London.

  With the first issue out, I’d imagined we’d be able to wallow in a delicious mélange of self-congratulation and deep relief. Instead, we are faced with another drama: having packed so much in to our début number, we have virtually nothing left over for the following issue. Tensions in the office rise as we struggle to save our now suddenly sinking ship by ordering articles and reviews urgently across the board. This highly charged atmosphere forces me to face a situation that I’ve been trying to ignore. I am already up to my neck in Art International: I live and breathe it, and even at night and in the early morning I cannot escape it. More and more people want to be associated with the magazine, as writers, advertising reps, circulation boosters or voluble hangers-on, and our meetings and editorial sessions drag on late into the night. Wearily I close the door on the last of them in the wee hours, only to be discovered a few hours later sprawled a
sleep in my bed by the secretary when she arrives. I could live with the farcical aspect of this situation but it means that not only do I not have any semblance of a private life but that I am exhausted to the bone. From having lived my life mostly on the inside, I am now condemned to live it down to the last domestic details publicly. Soon we could have a mini-Versailles in my apartment, with staff and diverse associates gathering round for my morning lever… I would of course never have had the idea of a refuge from the ‘office’ the rue des Archives has turned into, with its computers, faxes and shiny black desks, if the Bacon studio beside the place des Vosges had not existed. I didn’t want to ask Francis a favour, but when I did he was, as he often is, generosity itself. ‘Move in,’ he said. ‘If I come to Paris, I’ll stay in a hotel. I’d actually prefer that, in many ways it’s more convenient.’

  I wondered what chaos I would find once I’d moved in, but Francis has actually made very little mess in the studio. Compared to his London studio, it’s a model of constraint, order and harmony, possibly because that’s what French culture is about. Excess is for the North, but here in Paris, which I feel opens like a grand balcony onto the South, the emphasis is on balance. It’s more likely, however, that Francis is conscious that I have to look after everything and doesn’t want to embarrass me with a great show of artistic abandon. I slip in to the studio with its relatively clear parquet floor and white walls, bringing a minimum of things, so glad to have escaped the tyranny of my new editorial life that even Francis’s alarmingly coloured sheets, all orange and purple, wrap around me like protective shrouds. I even come out of my emotional shell shock sufficiently to have a few timid affairs. You know who you are, but I have nicknames for you that help me keep you at a distance: Tremulous, the Concertina, Miss La La… They sense that I’m not fully engaged and instinctively keep themselves at a distance too.