Arts and Letters

Eugene Berman was one of four Paris painters who came to be known quite early as "neo-Romantic." The others were Pavel Tchelitchew, Christian Bérard, and Berman's brother Leonid—three Russians and one Frenchman. All had ripened in Paris and made their first frame there, between the middle 1920s and the middle thirties. Bérard remained French and Parisian; the three Russians all became American.

The terms neo-Romantic and neo-Humanist, as used by Waldemar George to describe their work, means that these painters, while painting whatever they painted, expressed also the way they felt about it. Their subjects were generally people or places; still-life never made them vibrate. And they rendered their subjects naturalistically, at the same time infusing these with a personal sentiment. So that every landscape had a genius loci and every person his particular pathos.

Bérard, Tchelitchew, and Berman found in the theatre an outlet for their humane compassion and their poetic view of life. Leonid created his mythology by painting the shores of France, later those of a larger Europe, of America, Asia, and Africa, praising everywhere the interpenetrations of land and sea as populated by working fisherfolk. The others created for Diaghilev, for Balanchine, for the repertory theatres of France, and for the great opera houses most of the memorable settings and costumings that have come into existence since 1925. I use this date because Picasso's last theatre piece—Erik Satie's ballet Mercure—was of 1924. Stylistic self-assertion in stage decoration went on, of course, long after that. It still goes on. And professional painters, with their wisdom about forms and colors, remain its chief masters. But the poetic ones among them—stage-struck, stage-passionate, and involved—do bring to a poetic play, a ballet, dance-drama, or opera an intrinsic vitality quite different from that of mere easel-painting-in-the-theatre, and possibly of a higher expressive order.

Genia Berman's art was always a staging of something, a presentation with poetry built in. But behind any work that got to the monumental stage, or even to that of the fine-spun pen-and-ink drawings that he regularly exposed and sold, there lay the sacred sketch books. These were his raw materials, and few beyond his intimates ever saw them. I remember well one summer day when we walked together by the Seine in its nearby fields below high-lying Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Naturally, Genia had his sketch book along, a small bound one, not a tablet. On its pages he would pencil a tree, a bush, a view, anything that tempted his hand; and everything he drew seemed of the utmost beauty. So I said, "Genia, why don't you, instead of selling only drawings worked up as pictures, why don't you show your admirers the real thing?” "But Virgil," he said, "I could never part with those. My sketch books are my capital, my sources of saleable art. They are my living."

Since Genia's death last year in Rome, where he had resided for over twenty years, surrounded by artifacts of every place, time, and land (for he collected with a comprehensive and bold taste) I have often wondered where those sketch books are, and whether his estate lawyers have any inkling of their contents, even of their existence. I do hope they have been preserved, for they are witness to an artist's authenticity. His poetic feeling for half-buried monuments and his romantic attraction toward the sumptuosities of ballet and opera have given his work identity. But its authenticity lies in the raw materials of it, which he called his capital. A rich capital too it was, because like the others of his Franco-Russian group, he was forever drawing; of that skill they all were masters. And somewhere lies buried Berman's treasure of original nuggets, of findings, priceless bits of reality stored up by a painter who cherished above all his book and pencil.