Some of My Lives
Page 31
A certain aloofness is often built into Penn’s portraiture. One feels that he has deliberately set up a distance between himself and his subjects. He observes them but does not want to know them. He arranges their positions, their limbs, as meticulously but as impersonally as he organized the famous still lifes that were such a feature of his pages for Vogue (and one that was to be carried over in his commercial work).
The English actor Paul Scofield once noted that Penn liked to photograph strangers. But there were exceptions. Penn went to Barcelona in 1948 to try to recapture the atmosphere in which the young Picasso had matured in the late 1890s. Penn had introductions to Sebastià Junyer, Picasso’s companion in those heady days and the friend who had accompanied him to Paris on that historic first trip in 1900. The Penn Archives have long, affectionate letters from Junyer, full of genuine delight in Penn’s company. In Junyer, Penn made a friend for life.
Even in Paris, also in 1948, where he often started with only minimal knowledge of his sitters, he got results that completely contradicted expectation. Readers of Vogue who knew of Dora Maar as Picasso’s archetypal weeping woman were amazed to find her shown by Penn as an immensely distinguished human being, no longer quite young, who stared back at the camera as one photographer to another.
Penn also captured something of the inner anxiety that underlay Jean Cocteau’s elegantly angular, show-off pose. The sideways glance, the jacket worn off the shoulder, the contrasted patterns of tie and waistcoat, and the famous hands (“like articulated jewels,” Marcel Proust had said)—all were trapped by Penn.
When faced with the quite young painter Balthus, who was then known only to a small group of passionate admirers—Picasso among them—Penn pounced on the reversed dandyism that Balthus affected at the time: his torn and tattered old clothes, his painter’s coat belted with string, and the then-mandatory cigarette drooping from his lips. Balthus adored being Balthus, and Penn’s portrait captures this to perfection.
One of the Parisian sitters, an expatriate American, was terribly observant. Janet Flanner, who informed and delighted readers of The New Yorker magazine for many years with her “Letter from Paris,” wrote with characteristic pungency and insight about her portrait, “It is excellent of my face; that is exactly how worried I am and look, especially when I fleetingly think of the universe today … The only element which is not true is that I look tall; this comes from your extraordinary and slightly falsified perspective, which is your style signature and a highly interesting one, too. The top and capital parts of the sitter go back, so that the head is idealizedly small and the limbs come forward, giving, in my case, an impressive but untrue height. You are very talented; your Hitchcock portrait in Vogue this month is a fine piece of monstrosity, practically straight Goya.”
Not unexpectedly, Alfred Hitchcock himself had a different opinion and telegraphed, “Have seen the picture taken by Vogue—horrible! Please thank Mr. Penn with hope that it will be reshaped, both in features and posture.” It wasn’t.
Penn was to photograph many figures from the world of dance, but the ecstatic arabesque was not his style: he brought a new poetry to immobility. For example, in 1948, after posing for her corner portrait, Martha Graham wrote how moved she was by Penn’s “quietness and gentleness.” The “inner stillness” of the confined space intrigued her, she said. In fact, while posing, she began to plan “a dramatic dance” drawn from the experience.
When Penn photographed him that same year, Merce Cunningham had just formed his endlessly innovative company. Not long before, in 1944, he had created the role of the preacher in Martha Graham’s dance Appalachian Spring, with music by Aaron Copland. And then there is Jerome Robbins, barefoot, his slim black-clad body taking the measure of that corner and looking for once as defenseless as a puppet.
Acknowledgments
My first thanks go to my stepson, Olivier Bernier, for his steadfast encouragement and editorial acumen.
I will always be grateful to my stylish agent, Lynn Nesbit, for introducing my book and me to Jonathan Galassi. This led to the happiest of collaborations with Jonathan and his colleagues Jeff Seroy and Jesse Coleman, models all three of helpfulness and patience.
My longtime friend and now lawyer Virginia Rutledge has been, as always, a valued sounding board and counselor.
An abrazo to my nieces Natalia and Margarita Jimenez for keeping the Spanish accents going in the right direction.
My thanks to Elizabeth C. Baker, distinguished art editor, for taking a benign look at some of my text.
Another old friend, now the Rev. Susan J. Barnes, made helpful suggestions about a subject she knows intimately, the Menil family and collection.
Affectionate thanks to Michael Mahoney, who invented me as a lecturer and added a clarification to the Manet family text.
Thanks are due to Stephen Pascal, who delved into the Condé Nast archives for me.
More thanks go to Marcello Simonetti, who stepped in late with some helpful observations.
On the home front, I thank my assistant, Sue Spears, for plumbing the depths of the technological age for me.
And warm thanks to my housekeeper of thirty-five years, Lucy Montes, for her unselfish devotion.
A bouquet of thanks to the master florist Ronaldo Maia, for brightening my life with his uninterrupted, imaginative generosity.
Also by Rosamond Bernier
Matisse, Picasso, Miró—as I Knew Them
Copyright © 2011 by Rosamond Bernier
All rights reserved
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
www.fsgbooks.com
Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott
eISBN 9781429995054
First eBook Edition : September 2011
First edition, 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bernier, Rosamond.
Some of my lives : a scrapbook memoir / Rosamond Bernier.—1st ed. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-374-26661-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Bernier, Rosamond. 2. Art critics—United States—Biography. 3. Arts, Modern—20th century. I. Title.
NX640.5.B47 A3 2011
709.2—dc22
[B]
2011007503