Some of My Lives

by Rosamond Bernier

  “But the older I grow, I feel younger and more keen, more and more violent and more and more free.”

  There was a knock at the door. A car had arrived for us; Pierre Matisse and his wife were expecting us for lunch. By now it was one o’clock. There had been a business meeting for Miró, the television filming, my interview, yet Miró seemed genuinely disappointed to break off.

  Before leaving, I asked him to sign the poster of the Maeght exhibition. I pulled off its protective wrapping; he uncurled the poster, looked at it intently, selecting a spot for his signature with great care. His pen hovered over it, then came down like a dragonfly alighting.

  We walked together to the car. I realized I still had the crumpled wrapping in my hand and looked around for a place to throw it away. Suddenly Miró asked, “You permit?” and took the paper from me. He smoothed it out with eager anticipation, beamed, and with an apology went back into the house with it.

  He came out still smiling. “It is superb! I will take it back to Barcelona with me for a drawing. We have not only bien travaillé ensemble, we have collaborated!”

  For many years Miró never had much room for a studio. When, in 1933, he was making the large collages of minute machine parts that were shown at the Museum of Modern Art, he had no money and had to come back to live with his parents. He holed up in a small attic, so small that he strung strings across it and attached the collages to them, not having wall space.

  “I used to dream of a large studio,” he would say. Some time after he came back to Spain after the war, he finally had it. He had left Barcelona for Majorca, home ground for his wife’s family. He was getting too much unwanted attention from the authorities in Spain; it was still the Franco days. His friend and fellow Catalan the architect José Luis Sert designed him a large studio outside Palma facing the water.

  I went to visit him there several times; it was a short hop by plane from Paris to Palma. The last visit was in January 1980. He was waiting for me in the hall of the house, some way from the studio—arms outstretched in welcome, a small beaming figure with what I can only describe as goodness radiating from him. We sat down in the comfortable but conventional living room. “That is Pilar’s domain, I have nothing to do with the house,” he had said on a previous occasion. “The women sit here and talk about the price of onions.”

  We sat at a table near the window, overlooking the neatly planted garden and the big modern studio. I had brought a box of the traditional New Year delicacy marrons glacés. There was a bottle of Miró’s favorite wine from Tarragona, Priorat. Pilar kept an eye out to see that Miró had only one glass of wine and a nibble of the marrons. “He is on a diet,” she said.

  He talked about an exhibition he had just seen at the Pompidou Center in Paris. “I came away bowled over all over again by Matisse. I had not seen the Matisses from Russia before. The Dance particularly—fabulous. What a great artist! I admired him so, I wish I had seen him more often, but I was shy, I hesitated to disturb him.”

  There were some souvenirs of his old Paris days—two canvases by Fernand Léger (“I liked him very much, a genuine human being”), a still life by Braque, Miró’s own cartoon for a tapestry, incorporating evocative words: “étoile … escargot … fleur … femme.”

  He had heard that through a personal upheaval I had lost many of my possessions, including my books. “Did you even lose the Dupin?” he asked me (Jacques Dupin had written a first-rate critical account of Miró’s work). I had. Miró excused himself and left the room. He was gone almost half an hour. He came back with his own copy of the Dupin, and on a blank page he had made a full-page vibrant color drawing, with a touching inscription.

  We went to the studio. On an earlier visit I had seen it almost empty, with cases ready to be unpacked. Miró had not seen the contents since before the war, when it was in storage. “When I took out works dating back over years, I began to make my autocriticism,” he told me. “I corrected myself coldly, objectively, the way a teacher at the Grande Chaumière corrects a pupil. I was quite pitiless with myself. I destroyed a number of canvases, and especially drawings and gouaches. I would look at a whole series, then put them aside to be destroyed, then—zac, zac, zac—I tore them up. There were several big purges like that over several years. Some of the old canvases I wanted to rework; others I wanted to leave as they were. The work I did after that resulted from what I learned during the period.”

  Now, as Miró said, his studio “was like a forest.” There were scores of canvases in all stages of progress. One canvas had a small pencil sketch pinned onto it—an idea for the future. Notes in black and red on bits of paper with penciled notations were filed under stones on a flat table. Miró was almost fanatically neat. Painting material was laid out in orderly fashion. Pots with brushes sticking out of them were lined up with military precision. He always kept a few Catalan souvenirs around him: a sunburst out of straw, painted Majorca whistles on which he enjoyed giving a vigorous toot.

  He told me that when he is working, nobody, but nobody, could come into the studio. “I’m always alone there, no assistant. Never any music. Silence.” He told me more than once that when he gets into the studio and closes the door, “I go completely wild. The older I get, the meaner and the more aggressive I get.” I must say that if this was so, outside the studio there never was any trace of this ferocity.

  I didn’t want to tire him; Pilar had told me that he was exhausted, that during the last visit to Paris he had caught cold and had to sign too many engravings. Her brother, who is a doctor, had insisted that if things were entertaining, then it’s all right, but he must not be bothered by unpleasant things. “He sees very few people now. But he wanted to see you,” she said.

  I went into the house to say goodbye to Pilar. Miró accompanied me to the door. A car was waiting. We embraced; both of us knew that this was probably the last time. I waited until I got into the car to shed a few tears.

  Miró died on Christmas Day in 1983. He was ninety years old.

  Henry Moore

  When I started visiting Henry Moore in 1948 at his farmhouse at Much Hadham, we often sat in what he called his ideas bank and what I thought of as his hermit’s cell. It was a tiny space, more hut than studio, extremely uncomfortable. There was a small, hard wooden chair, an electric stove as big as a postcard, and the sort of table that wouldn’t even make it to the thrift shop. For more than forty years, he sat there and waited to see what would come of it.

  In that room there was an encyclopedia of natural forms. There might be anything from an elephant’s skull to a vegetable form, no bigger than his thumb, that had caught his fancy.

  He said, “Sometimes I come in the morning without a single idea, and just seeing a stone with an odd shape will set me off.”

  He demonstrated his favorite contrasts of forms, holding up a shell—a hollow form, hard outside, with a soft, vulnerable inside—a recurring sculptural theme: an external shape sheltering an interior one.

  He rummaged around and came up with a large bone—the opposite, internal strength on which a soft outside depends. He looked at it with real awe. He turned it slowly, showing how it looked completely different from each angle. “That’s what I want my sculpture to be like,” he said. “You keep discovering entirely new shapes as you look around it.”

  But all his sculpture, he insisted, stemmed from the human body. “We only understand other forms from our own body. Our sense of scale is based on our person and the space we occupy. If we were the size of dinosaurs, or ants, we would see things very differently.”

  Drawing was all-important to Henry. “I’d make it part of everyone’s education. It’s the only way to make people look intensely. If you look out of your window at a view hundreds of times, you won’t know it as well as if you drew it once.”

  But I also remember him saying that if husbands had to draw their wives, there’d be more divorces.

  Henry was plain, direct, straightforward, and steadfast. He loved a good jok
e, and plenty of them, and he never prevaricated.

  As a world-famous sculptor, he had to sit patiently through many long laudatory speeches. He would shift just a little when he saw there were still six or seven pages to go.

  What he really liked was to shake the sawdust out of the stuffed shirts of officials and get them to play paper games in which he kept the score. By the end of the evening they were having as good a time as he was.

  The Moores bought their modest house in the country in 1940. It dates in part from the fifteenth century, and in the early days you had no trouble believing that. No one was ever less nouveau riche than Henry. The house had begun plain, and in essentials it stayed plain.

  And the house stayed small except for one light and airy sitting room that was built onto it—always called the New Room. I often sat there drinking scotch with Henry, chatting and looking with him at things he had lovingly collected. There were works of art that he never ceased exploring: a Seurat drawing, a big Degas painting of a woman brushing her hair, a small Rembrandt etching, a head of a woman by Courbet, a Vuillard panel. There was a fragment of a Romanesque pulpit and many pieces of the kind that had fired Henry’s imagination long ago at the British Museum—examples of Cycladic, pre-Columbian, and African art.

  And there were always things to pick up and feel: smooth stones, crystals, gourds, fruits.

  Little by little Henry was able to buy more pieces of land. Gradually, more and larger studios were added. The garden was designed by his Russian wife, Irina. Henry was very proud of it, and the fields became a private anthology of his favorite sculptures.

  When I first used to go and see the Moores, Henry was so impatient to get to work that he rode his bicycle standing up.

  He loved his sculptures and took great trouble about where they were placed. He said, “There is no background to sculpture better than the sky, because you are contrasting solid form with its opposite—space.”

  One of his favorites was the Sheep Piece. He had installed it on high ground not far from the house. The great treat for every visitor in later years was to go and see this big piece. Not only was it meant for sheep to rub against, but Henry saw to it that when visitors came round the corner, sheep were there doing just that. Those sheep got to carry on like charter members of the National Theatre company.

  Henry got to know these sheep intimately when his big studio became unusable because it was filled all day by over a dozen men hauling and carting his sculptures to ship off to Italy, where he was having a huge exhibition in Florence at the Belvedere.

  He retreated to the small studio that had a window giving onto the field where his neighbor’s sheep were grazing. When he tapped on the window, the sheep would look up and come closer—they couldn’t see him in the dark interior. So he was able to study them at close range. “They were as good as life models. There is something ancient, biblical about sheep. And you know those sheep just love the piece.”

  For much of his long life Henry was one of the most famous men around. At one time, you could have written to him from almost anywhere in the world and known it would get there if you just wrote “Henry Moore, England” on the envelope.

  Yet never, ever did he come on as someone “important.” Our mutual friend the poet Stephen Spender said about Henry Moore at the memorial service in Westminster Abbey, “The son of a miner, Henry told me that in his whole life he had never had any sense of anyone being socially superior or, for that matter, socially inferior to him. People to him were equals, simply in being human.”

  Henry told us with amusement about being invited to luncheon at Buckingham Palace to meet the queen. The guests—there were a number of them—were instructed to file by the queen after the meal, and each in turn would have a few brief moments to address her. His place in the line inched forward smartly. But when a little man in front of Henry reached Her Majesty, the line stopped, and the queen talked to him with considerable animation. When it came to be Henry’s turn, there were only a few seconds left for him. Who was the favored guest? The queen’s jockey.

  In 1974, I did two programs about Henry for CBS television. We were hooked up with microphones and left free to roam. Henry was completely unself-conscious, and we went on chatting as we had for years. We spoke of Alberto Giacometti, whom we both admired. Giacometti as a modeler started with nothing and worked outward, Henry explained. The carver, like himself, starts with a block and moves inward.

  When we went by one of his big bronzes, Henry tapped it affectionately, smartly enough to make it reverberate. “I was just proving that it was hollow,” he said. “A good cast should ring like a bell. One likes the sound and the feel.

  “When the cast is well done, bronze would be good for twenty thousand years and be able to resist the elements rather better than any type of stone.”

  He spoke of the importance of placing sculpture correctly. “Of course, one can’t go on worrying about every piece one’s done, and whether it’s well or badly shown. One’s life would be just misery. But sculpture needs more care in its placing than paintings do.

  “With a picture, the frame keeps you at a distance, and the picture goes on living in its own world. But if a sculpture is placed against the light; if you come into a room and see it against a window, you just see a silhouette with a glare around it. It can’t mean anything.”

  Incidentally, if he didn’t think that people had had the right idea, he was very good at getting his way. When his friend I. M. Pei built the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington, there never was any doubt that Henry would be asked to contribute a sculpture to it. But what? And where?

  He went to Washington to see what the National Gallery had in mind. He was taken to the museum in a very big car.

  People of consequence in hard hats were waiting for him along the side of the new building where there was really quite a nice niche, in its way, for sculpture. It faced the traffic and would be seen by everyone who drove past on the way to the Capitol.

  Henry got out of the car. He was already getting stiff by then, but he wasn’t going to say yes or no in a hurry. He looked. He saw how wide, or rather how narrow, the sidewalk was. He saw how the traffic raced by. He got back into the car, and he said nothing at all.

  “Would you like to tour the building?” they asked. “Oh yes,” said Henry. “That would be very nice. Let’s see everything.”

  They pulled up to the front door. Henry got out. He saw how I. M. Pei had designed a main entrance that drew people right into the gallery and made them feel like empress and emperor.

  He looked at the far corner on the left. He looked up, and he looked down. And then he pointed to that far left corner. “That’s the place for my sculpture.” And that’s where it is today.

  Among the treasures in what Henry still called the New Room was a torso by Auguste Rodin. He would point out the parts representing hard and soft parts, the bumps and the hollows. “I look at it every day. I keep finding new things in it,” he would marvel.

  “I couldn’t remember a time when I had not admired Rodin more than any other sculptor since Michelangelo. So I was particularly moved to have an exhibition in the park of the Rodin Museum [in Paris].”

  Henry would have me come over at the time—I lived just down the street—to circle around the sculptures, and to squat down to get the effect of the Eiffel Tower looming up in the distance as a backdrop for his bronzes.

  In his late sixties Henry owned a cast of the headless and armless Walking Man that Rodin made as a preliminary to his Saint John the Baptist Preaching. Henry didn’t miss, and in fact didn’t want, the head and arms that made Saint John the Baptist look more “complete” in Rodin’s day.

  He said that the head and arms were in the late-nineteenth-century idiom, whereas the forms of the headless figure were timeless. “Because of owning the cast in the original scale—it’s only half-life-size—and loving it, I know it very well. One of the parts in it which continuously astonishes me is the breast, t
he chest, the part on top of the chest, because you can feel that immediately, under a sixteenth of an inch, under the skin, there is hard bone.

  “And this is something which Rodin had, this feeling for the interior bone structure, and yet the stomach part … you can feel that in the stomach there is no bone; for at least two or three inches, you could push through. So this feeling for hardness and softness, for roughness and smoothness, for the pushed-in and the pulled-out, for the hole and the bump, this is what Rodin brought back into sculpture, a reality of form.”

  One time in London, Henry took me to an exhibition of Degas bronzes. He pointed out the differences, as he saw them, between Rodin and Degas as sculptors of dancing figures.

  Rodin’s dancers are full of movement, as if caught at a fleeting moment that would not recur. He reminded me of how Rodin would have his models move around the studio any way they liked, until he got the split second’s movement that he had never seen before and would never see again.

  “On the other hand, the Degas seems to speak for attitudes that he had seen a hundred times over in the classroom and had had time to perfect at leisure. His dancers could have held those poses for five minutes, if they were told to. Rodin’s, never.”

  In 1967, every publication in France was marking the fifty years since Rodin’s death. As editor of the art review I had founded (L’ŒIL), I had to think of what I could do that would be completely different from anyone else’s. Of course, Henry Moore was the answer. What could be better than to have one distinguished sculptor talk about another?

  The only trouble was that Henry was at his summer studio at Forte dei Marmi in Italy, and I had a professional appointment in Athens, and the deadline loomed. Henry, amiability itself, readily agreed for me to come and see him.