Mary Blume, “The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, His World”

I’m going to start with a quotation here, and if you don’t like it you can just move on, because while I adored The Master of Us All, not every reader wants to devote a few hours to a long-dead Spanish fashion designer. See how this tickles your fancy:

The sleeve was, as is well known, Balenciaga’s obsession: everyone connected with the house remembers anguished cries of la manga and the awful sound of the master ripping one out at the last moment.

“The sleeve was a mania with him and always a problem,” Florette said. “In those days the buyers came by ship and their orders had to be ready to leave with them, not on the next ship. Once I had a huge delivery and I saw he was taking apart the sleeves of a dress I had to ship that night. I said, Monsieur Balenciaga, you can’t do this, they have to be there at six p.m. He said, they can’t leave like this, and kept on working. I finally started to cry and he said I was bad-tempered — et en plus elle a un mauvais caractère – and kept right on pinning.”

Maybe The Master of Us All is the literary equivalent of one of those wonderful fashion documentaries like The September Issue or Valentino: The Last Emperor. It offers the insider’s view, the unscripted moments. Missing, of course, are color and motion, but what you do get with a book is the ability to control the pace of your experience. And I found that valuable with The Master of Us All: there are so many delicious moments that I wanted to linger over or return to. Like the fact that when Christian Dior died, “his otherwise hard-headed business manager told Japanese television that it was because God needed Dior to dress His angels.” (It was Dior who dubbed Balenciaga “the master of us all.”) Not wholly relevant, but too good to leave out, I guess.

Irving Penn photo of his wife Lisa Fonssagrives in a Balenciaga dress, taken for Vogue in 1950. Courtesy National Gallery of Art

This little book is full of splendid nuggets like that. I got the sense that Mary Blume had been collecting material for years. Her primary source seems to have been Florette Chelot, Balenciaga’s head vendeuse, a position of enormous power (and earning power) in the heyday of couture. Blume was lucky enough to get to know Florette in the 1960s and to benefit from Florette’s generosity with discounted Balenciaga outfits. She stays out of the story until the end, though, preferring to showcase Florette, an appealing, good-natured but hard-headed woman who thought the world of Balenciaga.

If you’ve read this far, it’s because you you admire the clothes. There aren’t many glamorous photographs in the book — there are other books for that — mostly grainy black and white candids, with a slender insert of color. You’ll know also about Balenciaga’s famous reticence, dignity, and perfectionism. As Blume says, “Those who admire him want to know him better, aware that we cannot really know him at all. A paradox, and mighty unsatisfactory, but also a homage of sorts — to the art, the discretion, and even the contradictions of the man.”

Pierre Assouline, “Le Portrait”

It’s not easy to buy me books, but Beloved Husband outdid himself this Christmas. And say what we will about the state of the book market, it’s pretty cool that he could find a French paperback published in 2007 and put it under our tree.

The portrait of the title is Ingres’ fabulous painting of Betty de Rothschild, completed in 1848. It is still in the Rothschild family, so Pierre Assouline  must have had extensive cooperation from the family. No surprise: he’s a very well-known French journalist and author who focuses on the broad area of intersection between culture, politics, and social history in France. (For instance, see his Le dernier des Camondo.) Le Portrait builds on some of that context, because it is narrated by the portrait itself.

La baronne de Rothschild, Ingres, 1848

Clever, no? Betty-the-portrait is a wonderful character; cosmopolitan, warm, grand. And what a world she has seen! Born a Rothschild in Vienna in 1805, she married her uncle James in 1824 and moved to Paris. In those early days of the Rothschild banking empire, there were brothers in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Naples and Vienna. (They were known as the “five arrows” of international banking.) Betty describes the luxury of their way of life, the beautiful houses, the relationships with artists and musicians like Rossini and Chopin. This section of the book is catnip for social historians: for instance, did you know that there was a French category of friendship known as “relations de bal?” I suppose those would be casual, dancing-partner friendships? Certainly a level of acquantanceship that exists no more. Betty is fond of observations like this: “In a certain society, knowing how to express yourself in five languages is also knowing how to be silent in five languages.”

But grand as they are, the Rothschilds are also Jews, and this essential part of Betty’s identity is always in the foreground. The family and the businesses are knit tightly together; the children marry in the faith; the quality of “other” is never forgotten. Betty’s portrait is often seen primarily as a painting of “la grande Juive.” So we know where this story is going. First there is the Dreyfus dust-up, and ugliness starts to appear. Then Assouline skips to a day in 1938 when Betty  witnesses the family’s reaction to news from Germany: papers burned, accounts closed, preparations for the worst. Then the portrait is captured. Betty’s not a fan of Goering, and does not enjoy her spell in the salt mines.

Hotel Lambert, Paris

The last portion of the book covers the portrait’s career at various post-war exhibitions, which gives Assouline a way to work art-historical interpretations into the narrative. By and large, Betty isn’t  impressed. She is, however, saddened when the furnishings of the  Hôtel Lambert, the Rothschild house on the Ile de la Cité in Paris and her home since 1975, are split up after the house is sold to Qatari prince: “A dispersion is always a heartbreak, even if everything remains within the narrow limits of the family circle.” But Betty is not sentimental. Her last words, true for portraits and families as well as for women, are, “We will never again be the way we were. That’s the way it is.”

Erica Hirshler, “Sargent’s Daughters”

I’m a big fan of John Singer Sargent’s paintings and on a recent visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, I was moved by the room devoted to his portrayals of the Edward Darley Boit family. Of course I knew the big canvas now usually known as “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.” But hanging near it were Mrs. Boit, cheerful in a pink dress with black coin-sized polka dots, and a much more sober portrait of Papa Boit himself. And flanking the big portrait of their daughters were the very same immense Oriental blue-and-white vases in the canvas. To quote from Sargent’s Daughters, “When they first traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts for display in 1986, they contained — among handfuls of the excelsior with which they had been so carefully packed — a cigar stub, a paper airplane, a pink ribbon, a tennis ball, sheets of geography lessons, a letter about the repeal of Prohibition, an Arrow shirt collar, an old doughnut, an admission card to a dance at the Eastern Yacht Club in Marblehead, Massachusetts, three badminton shuttlecocks, many coins, and a feather.”

The vases and “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit,” Boston Museum of Fine Art

The contents of the vases, like the painting itself, were once part of family life, and this is one of the points of Erica Hirshler’s book. Sargent’s Daughters looks at a familiar image — call it a document if you’d rather — from a series of different angles. Hirshler covers Sargent’s biography as well as that of the Boit family before the time of their commission of the portrait, which was painted in around 6 weeks in the fall of 1882. As a formal portrait, or a record of the appearances of four young girls, it was highly unconventional. But Edward Boit was a painter himself and a friend of Sargent’s; it’s assumed that he was pleased with his daughters’ casual poses and the fact that the eldest girl, Florence, seen dimly lit and in profile, is scarcely recognizable.

Hirshler discusses the history of the picture; where it was exhibited and what critics thought of it. She broadens this discussion to take in the rise and fall of Sargent’s reputation, which suffered in the years when American art veered toward abstraction. Sargent’s fluent, European-style virtuosity looked meretricious for a while there, but it has come roaring back into fashion, and Hirshler spends some time with recent feminist and psychosocial interpretations of the painting. But what I found most moving, and saddest, was the history of the daughters themselves.They were frozen in time, weren’t they, in the big dark front hall of that Avenue Friedland apartment, immobilized in their starched pinafores and dark stockings? Of course not. Jane was mentally fragile, not one of them ever married. Their mother Isa, laughing around the corner, died before she reached fifty. Edward Boit remarried and had two sons, whom Sargent didn’t paint. The creation of this canvas, like every family portrait, commemorated a moment. Sargent’s Daughters both precisely defines that personal, individual moment, and demonstrates the wide-ranging impact of the work of art.

Elizabeth Kostova, “The Swan Thieves”

There was a lot of fuss over Elizabeth Kostova’s earlier book, The Historian, and I tried to read it but could not quite cozy up to the Dracula theme, the violence, the portentousness. The Swan Thieves, though, was a much more appealing subject for me. Andrew Marlow, the protagonist,  is a middle-aged psychiatrist who paints quite seriously as a hobby. He is called upon to treat an artist named Robert Oliver who has attempted to slash an Impressionist painting at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. But Oliver refuses to be treated — in fact, he refuses to talk at all. So Marlow has to launch an informal investigation to figure out what’s wrong with Oliver, and how he can be helped. In the course of his research into the patient, of course, the doctor’s character is laid bare as well. Art, madness, medical mystery; what’s not to like?

Monet painted at Etretat: so do some of these characters.

Kostova has Marlow narrating the framework of the story. It’s he who visits the National Gallery to visit the painting Oliver slashed; it’s he who drives to North Carolina to visit Oliver’s divorced wife; it’s he who travels to Mexico and to Paris, following leads. But there are other narrative voices as well: both the painter’s divorced wife Kate and his recent girlfriend Mary write long letters to Marlow, detailing their relationships with Oliver. In addition, there’s a packet of letters, in French, dating from the late 1870s, that Oliver treasures. And finally, there’s some present-tense narrative dating from that era.

I was perfectly happy to go along with the whole thing: characters, structure, subject. Kostova’s a good writer, the research was solid, the characters appealing, the settings convincing. It’s a leisurely tale, but I was completely absorbed and the narrative appeared to be going somewhere interesting… until it finally, at the end, it didn’t.

I’m still a little bit baffled. Without giving the plot away, I can tell you that Robert Oliver is obsessed by an obsession with a nineteenth-century Frenchwoman, to the extent that he ruins his real-life relationships. This woman also dominates his art. But why? I’m still scratching my head. I think if you spend 500+ pages with a mentally ill main character and his doctor, you want a diagnosis and a prognosis. What’s the nature of Robert Oliver’s malady and will he recover? Even more, you want the source of his obsession to be more than a set of features and a resumé. Béatrice de Clerval is beautiful, dark-haired, talented, plucky, loyal, faithful —  and she never comes to life. And finally, you want some rationale. Why was it that Robert Oliver was singled out for these visions, or visitations? I was inventing all kinds of scenarios, confident that Kostova would tie the tale up neatly, but she doesn’t, which for me cast a veil of dissatisfaction over the whole book.

Steven Naifeh & Gregory White Smith, “Van Gogh: The Life”

Phew!

Sorry — but really, who doesn’t feel relief upon finishing a volume that runs 870 pages?

I read a paper-bound galley of Van Gogh: The Life and had a hard time just managing its physical bulk. This is not a book to take on the subway or to toss in a backpack as airplane reading. Nor is it a book you can finish in one or even six sittings. It is, though, the new definitive biography of Vincent Van Gogh and nobody is going to touch that status for years and years.

Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith won a Pulitzer Prize for their earlier biography of Jackson Pollock. For this tome (which took more than a decade to produce) they had the cooperation of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and access to an astounding amount of material. Very early in the book, as I read the names of the flowers that bloomed in the Van Gogh garden in Zundert when Vincent was a tot, I realized that the authors were going to share with their readers the vast majority of what they were able to find out, both directly from Van Gogh’s letters, and from their very thorough sifting through contextual material. Fortunately, Van Gogh: The Life has the mysterious quality of readability that keeps you turning the pages despite the avalanche of detail, and despite the fact that we all know how this story ends. The authors have pulled off a remarkable feat by writing a book that succeeds as both reference and narrative.

Australian painter John Peter Russell made Vincent look rather debonair for a change

If only they were not so judgmental! Vincent, in their view, is reckless, manipulative, intolerable to live with, full of self-pity, and a lousy draftsman. For instance, describing his 1884 series of canvases depicting weavers in Nuenen, Smith and Naifeh write: “Despite years of trying, Vincent had yet to master the human figure. In The Hague, he had used the controlled environment of his studio, the perspective frame, tricks of posing and endless trial and error to overcome the halting awkwardness of his earliest attempts. But in the cramped weavers’ cottages, his ineptitude was fully exposed.”  Then comes a paragraph speculating about Vincent’s obsession with the weavers, who were seen in those days as “rootless men of unconventional habits and unaccountable means.” From there, the authors conclude that “Vincent no doubt taunted his parents, just as he taunted Theo, with descriptions of his daily visits to the homes of these disruptive agents…. If Dorus and Anna raised objections, he no doubt shouted them down.” Then the authors add that “at mealtimes he brought his paintings into the parsonage dining room and propped them on the chair opposite, defiantly inviting the weavers to his parents’ table.” Well — you know, that does seem kind of hostile. And yet it turns out that when you go to the notes on vangoghbiography.com (more in a moment on this), there’s another way to interpret Vincent’s odd behavior. His sister claimed that he would merely sit looking at the painting he’d been working on that day. That seems much less bizarre, doesn’t it?

I know it’s a tiny detail, but there are hundreds of them in this book. Time and again, the characters are seen to be behaving badly: Vincent is in the asylum in Arles and Theo, rather than visiting him, devotes his free time to corresponding with his fiancée Johanna about wallpaper. Doctors make inaccurate diagnoses despite lack of expertise. Everyone is blamed for something.

Yet the scale of Naifeh and Smith’s achievement outweighs their snarkiness. If you’re in any doubt about that, check the book’s website (vangoghbiography.com), which offers hundreds of complex footnotes as well as archival photos, author bios, and reproductions of the paintings. My favorite section offers guidelines on further exploration of the Van Gogh scholarship, including links to help you purchase copies of some of the books in question. I only wish the authors had been as generous to their subjects as they are with their sources.

Steve Martin, “An Object of Beauty”

An Object of Beauty should have been right up my alley — who wouldn’t like a fable about the contemporary art market? Complete with full-color reproductions of artworks and an ambitious girl heroine? Scenes of auctions, galleries, and art-buying jaunts to St. Petersburg? Sex on a desk, paintings that move people to tears?

Damien Hirst's shark: it is definitely art, OK?

Oh, well. I tried hard to see the career of girl gallerist Lacey Yeager as a post-millenial House of Mirth, but that was a stretch. I’m pretty sure Steve Martin has something to say about the commodification of art works but he’s so deadpan that I couldn’t discern what that was. Or possibly I was reading too carelessly: there was a lot of wooden behind-the-scenes exposition that needed to be zipped through at speed. (Warhol overtakes Picasso; Chelsea gallery boom; 9/11; concept vs. craft; crash of 2008) Lacey is made up of little more than ambition and impressive hair. The rest of the characters, including her European lounge-lizard boyfriend and our art-writer narrator, are barely stick figures. I should have stayed with Edith Wharton. 

Pierre Assouline, “Le dernier des Camondo”

Visitors to the wonderful Parisian house museum, Musée Nissim de Camondo, tend to get hung up by the photographs. There you are, gazing your fill at the stupendous decorative arts ensemble — paneling, tapestries, porcelain, mind-blowing 18th century furniture. And then sitting on the marble top of a marquetry table, you see a framed picture of a mournful-looking young man, or of a girl on horseback, or of a portly fellow in natty tailoring. Shortly you understand: they are no more. The family that assembled this museum, and the money that created it, has vanished. The last of them died at Auschwitz. 

But what Pierre Assouline wants us to understand in Le dernier des Camondo is the context of this disappearance. The last of the Camondos is actually Moïse, father of Nissim for whom the museum is named. He outlived his only son by 18 years, aware that his family line would end with him. The museum thus becomes their monument, and the terms of its gift to the Paris Musée des Arts Decoratifs insists that everything in the museum remain as it was at his death. No loans, no acquisitions, no moving so much as a snuff box.

The Camondo family were Sephardic Jews who settled in Istanbul and in more recent history had become Italian citizens and bore Italian titles. They did not come to Paris until 1869 when they joined other high-flying Jewish financiers in the Parc Monceau area. Moïse’s cousin was the collector Isaac de Camondo whose death in 1911 added a splendid collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings to the collection of the Louvre (rather before the Louvre was ready for them, but that’s another story). Eventually Moïse lived at 63, rue de Monceau, just down the street from the Ephrussi family. Assouline has done a great deal of research on the earlier history of the Camondo family and conscientiously links the various generations to the social movements and personalities of their eras. Proust appears here, of course, as do the Rothschilds, and notably Charles Ephrussi. But for all his research Assouline doesn’t manage to bring his characters to life the way Edmund de Waal does his Ephrussi ancestors in The Hare with Amber Eyes. Le dernier des Camondo is a fairly conventional social history.

That being said, there are fascinating questions here and Assouline is more than willing to explore them. How much, for instance, can or should a Jewish family assimilate into its host society? The Camondos left Istanbul because they were Westernized, liberal, cosmopolitan. But once in Catholic France, they stayed true to their religion. The children studied Hebrew, the family supported Jewish causes generously, they married within the faith. Assouline does an especially good job tracing the fitful rise of anti-Semitism in France, and the always ambiguous social position of families like the Ephrussis, the Camondos, and even the Rothschilds. The last survivor of the family, Beatrice Reinach, assumed that she would be safe from the Germans because as an excellent equestrian she had many German friends in the world of the horse. Wrong guess. She, her husband, and her children died in Auschwitz.

Memorial to Nissim de Camondo in eastern France. photo Eric Mansuy

But somehow the saddest part of the tale is the death of young Nissim, the gifted, courageous son who was a much-decorated flyer in World War I. He was killed after an air battle on the German front and the Germans so admired his bravery that they paid him the honor of burying him in one of their cemeteries. After the war Moïse had to move heaven and earth to bring Nissim’s body home. He is buried in the family tomb in Montmartre and the golden stone palace, modeled after the Petit Trianon, is his memorial.

Calvin Tomkins, “Living Well Is the Best Revenge”

Living Well Is the Best Revenge was  widely read in my parents’ social circles when it was first published as a book in the early 1970s, so when it turned up on the magical laundry room shelves of course I nabbed it. This is a handsome little hardcover published in 1998 by Modern Library and my copy came from the fifth printing, so people are still reading it.  Are there really that many people out there who are curious about the lives of Gerald and Sara Murphy? Evidently so: I see from Amazon that Amanda Vaill’s highly praised biography of the couple (published in paperback in 1999) is still in print. Jenny of Shelflove reviewed it a couple of years ago and liked it very much.

Just in case you are not familiar with the Murphys, their primary claim to fame is that they were models for Nicole and Dick Diver in Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. They were a wealthy, magnetic American couple who moved to France in the early 1920s and knew Everyone: Hemingway, Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Cocteau, Diaghilev, Picasso, etc. etc. Gerald Murphy was a painter in his own right, though his output is tiny, and their glory years ended in 1929. So why did Calvin Tomkins’ little volume strike such a chord with the reading public?

Tomkins is a prominent writer specializing in art and art criticism. He got to know the Murphys as neighbors in the 1960s, and Living Well… seems to be based largely on a series of interviews with Murphy. Aside from a very compelling coda in which Tomkins discusses Murphy’s paintings, the book is largely an appreciation of a charming couple who knew amazing people during a halcyon period of their lives.

Tomkins himself admits that, “[t]hose closest to the Murphys found it almost impossible to describe the special quality of their life, or the charm it had for their friends.” Anecdotes about parties, descriptions of original clothes (Gerald liked to wear a striped cotton jersey, a novel notion in the 20s), vignettes of the great at play (Picasso on the beach), even menus failed to conjure this world for me. I kept hankering for Sybille Bedford’s Jigsaw. Yet Living Well… has had legs.

Here’s my theory. While I found the discussion of the Murphys’ perfect taste and hospitality unsatisfying, they were pioneers in a way, electing to leave their stuffy niche in upper-crust America for a more fluid and interesting life in Europe. Perhaps Living Well… struck a chord with readers in the early 1970s because it was another time of social rebellion, when your choice of clothes and furniture signaled rejection of your own square 1950s past. Jean Cocteau, Marimekko, similar impulse. It was also a Scott Fitzgerald moment (remember Nancy Milford’s hugely popular Zelda?) so the Fitzgerald insights may have loomed large.

Ultimately I found the discussion of Murphy’s paintings the best thing in the book. He made enormous still lifes of everyday objects; the one reproduced on the book jacket above is a detail of the 1927 canvas Cocktail. Tomkins discusses fifteen paintings, only seven of which survive. After 1929 the Murphys returned to the U.S. to run Gerald’s family luxury-goods business, Mark Cross, and Murphy stopped painting.

Carol Wallace, “Leaving Van Gogh”

No, I’m not actually going to review my own book! But I’ve made a page for it — see the tab above, far right. It doesn’t come out until April but we are starting to build an online profile for it. I’ve also made a Facebook fan page that will feature regular updates.

Martin Gayford, “Man with a Blue Scarf”

And to think that I almost missed this book, which is subtitled, “On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud.” I was sent it by a friend, who thought the account of intense engagement with an artist would interest me. As it happens, I have read and admired Martin Gayford’s The Yellow House, which is about Van Gogh’s time with Gauguin in Arles. I like Lucian Freud’s work. (He appears tangentially in Book Group of One because he was married to Caroline Blackwood.)

Still, I was not prepared for the sheer exhilaration and charm between these covers. Man with a Blue Scarf is so stimulating and provocative that I gulped it down like my first cup of coffee, and like caffeine, it made me feel more alert and perceptive. The premise is simple but unusual. Gayford is a well-known curator, writer, and art critic, and a longtime friend of Lucian Freud. He proposed himself as a sitter for one of Freud’s portraits, and was accepted. This book is his account of the several hundred hours he spent in Freud’s company, watching — and participating in — the creation of an image of his own face. That transaction in itself, Gayford sitting, Freud painting, is a fascinating matter. Gayford’s erudition and authority make him an excellent guide to Freud’s technique and place in contemporary art. (He’s a huge fan, by the way. My only criticism is a faint whiff of hagiography.) Freud works very slowly, gradually building up his image to reflect, not the way Gayford looks on one occasion as in a photograph, but the way he looks over time, with different expressions and moods.

But as Freud creates a portrait of Gayford, so does Gayford create a portrait of Freud, using his own medium of words. And Freud is evidently a fascinating talker. One of the great pleasures of the book is Gayford’s direct, elegant summaries of ideas, punctuated by Freud’s colorful judgments. (For instance, Freud despises Dante Gabriel Rossetti: “‘He’s the worst of the pre-Raphaelites, his work seems to me the nearest painting can get to bad breath.’”) Naturally one preoccupation of the two men is the creative enterprise and here is real wisdom. Gayford intensely admires Freud’s focus and his work ethic, referring on many occasions to the way Freud thinks about producing paintings. An artist, Gayford says, “has to navigate forward into the unknown guided only by an internal sense of direction, keep up a set of standards which are imposed entirely from within, meanwhile maintaining faith that the task he or she has set him or herself is worth struggling constantly to achieve.” He sees this as a job description for Lucian Freud but it’s true also for himself, as he produces a book. Like the one on the desk next to me. Like the one I’m writing now. He makes it sound difficult but worth while — for that alone, I would love this volume.

I have to add that, much as I love electronic books, I deeply appreciated this physical one. Lovely heavy paper, beautiful type, and many illustrations, placed artfully within the text. All in all, it’s a splendid reading experience.