Some of My Lives
A Scrapbook Memoir
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4.2 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Rosamond Bernier has lived an unusually full life—remarkable for its vividness and diversity of experience—and she has known many (one is tempted to say all) of the greatest artists and composers of the twentieth century.
In Some of My Lives, Bernier has made a kind of literary scrapbook from an extraordinary array of writings, ranging from diary entries to her many contributions to the art journal L'OEIL, which she cofounded in 1955. The result is a multifaceted self-portrait of a life informed and surrounded by the arts.
Through the stories of her encounters with some of the twentieth century's great artists and composers—including Pablo Picasso, Leonard Bernstein, Max Ernst, Aaron Copeland, Malcolm Lowry, and Karl Lagerfeld—we come to understand the sheer richness of Bernier's experiences, interactions, and memories. The result is pithy, hilarious, and wise—a richly rewarding chronicle of many lives fully lived.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Early Vogue fashion editor and accomplished lecturer on modern art, Bernier (Matisse, Picasso, Miro As I Knew Them) reminisces about the famous artists she has known throughout a full, rich career, from Mexico to Paris. Although Bernier was born in Philadelphia in 1916, her mother was English, and Bernier rarely lived in the U.S. until after the 1970s, when she made a second career as an itinerant lecturer. Her first marriage took her to Acapulco, Mexico, and in short, snappy chapters she recounts dishy anecdotes about acquaintances Jane and Paul Bowles, the drunken Malcolm Lowry, and the jealous couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Through her friendship with Nada Patcevitch, wife of the "guiding spirit" at Cond Nast, Iva Patcevitch, Bernier managed to wangle several job offers at once at New York Vogue and ended up reporting on fashion under Babs Rawlings, then "swerved" into covering the Parisian art scene using legendary photographers like Irving Penn during the creative post-WWII years. The names Bernier drops are jaw-dropping Matisse got a gander of her Balenciaga full-length orange coat and suggested, "Wear a yellow scarf with it"; Philip Johnson staged her wedding to English art critic John Russell at MoMA in 1975 but she is ever demure and unpretentious. These precious remembrances prove a tremendous record.
