The alphabet etc.

From Rosamund Bernier's "Some Of My Lives"
With his usual itch to change everything he touched, Picasso had
inscribed it all over the cover, making my name part of a face. He
had repeated the inscription inside, possibly from affection for me,
but more probably because he couldn’t bear to leave a blank page
alone. He misspelled my name twice, but that did not surprise me;
He had a very freewheeling eighteenth-century way with spelling. In
fact, he once told me he had never learned the alphabet and had no
intention of ever doing so. “Why should one letter follow another in
a predestined order? Ridiculous!”

and on Max Ernst:

 I met Max Ernst in the early 1940s in New York. He had
managed to get out of German-occupied France and had arrived in
the United States thanks to the support of Peggy Guggenheim. She
prized him as a catch on several levels: he was a leading figure of
the Surrealist movement, and he was outstandingly handsome. He
looked like a cross between a noble bird of prey and a fallen archan-
gel. He was known for his beauty of person, his laserlike intelli-
gence, his idiosyncratic command of at least three languages, and
his gift for the lapidary phrase that stops the stuffed shirt dead in his
tracks.
Although he had lived in France since 1922, German born, he
had never bothered to take out French nationality. As he described
it, he arrived in the United States by plane: “Splendid view of the
Statue of Liberty. I was met by immigrations authorities, who sent
me straight to Ellis Island. Splendid view of the Statue of Liberty.”
The only way out of this impasse was to give in to Peggy Guggen-
heim’s insistence that he marry her, giving him American citizen-
ship. I don’t think either of them expected a smooth crossing. AS
Peggy put it to me, “When Max paints a picture, I like him. When
Max sells a picture, I love him.”
We happened to be fellow houseguests for a weekend in thfi
Hamptons. A group of us had been swimming. The beach was a
short walk to the house, and there were bicycles. Max and I rode
back to the house on bicycles, and so we arrived a few minutes b6-
fore the others. When Peggy arrived, she made a terrible scene, aC"
cusing Max of dalliance with me. Max commented drily, “Not even
I can make love on a bicycle.” Later, Peggy told me about this her-
self and said, “Wasn’t I foolish?” which was endearing.

and on Louise Bourgeois

This is where she used to meticulously iron The New York Times
every morning and flame a spoon and slide it directly into the jam
pot for her breakfast. “No toast,” she explained, “but no germs.”
She told me that all her, subjects for at least the last sixty years
found their inspiration in her childhood. It has never lost its magic,
its mystery for her. “I need my memories, they are my documenta-
tion,” she said.
As we all know from the movies and the great French novelists,
French family life is often full of secrets not quite covered up and
hatreds that leave their mark for a lifetime.
Louise grew up in a large house at Choisy-le—Roi outside of Paris.
It was very large because some thirty people lived and worked there,
besides the family. The family business was repairing tapestries. Liv-
ing with tapestries was a form of education for her, she said. “Through
tapestries I learned what I did not learn in school: stories from
the Old Testament, and the New Testament, antiquity, history,
mythology.
“The characters from the Old Testament were crafty and blood-
thirsty. People just loved that. The New Testament was full of
pieties. As subject for tapestries they had no appeal. Scandalous
subjects were successful. Pious ones bored people.”
There were elements in the Choisy house that made her feel un—
wanted, betrayed. One was the fact that her father already had two
daughters and had no wish for another. Louise’s tactful mother tried
to mollify him: “Can’t you see she looks exactly like you, 6014/H’I’M3
nleuxgouttes nfmu [like two drops of water].>”
i The betrayal that was to haunt her for many years was the fact
that in 1922 a young Englishwoman called Sadie came to live in the
house. Ostensibly, she was there to teach Louise English, but very
soon it was clear that she was sleeping with her father and had been
engaged for that purpose.
Sadie lived in the house ten years. Louise said, “The motivation
for my work is a negative reaction against her. It is the anger that
makes me work. I thought she was going to like me; instead, she
betrayed me. I was betrayed not only by my father but by her too.”

She said that it was because of her father that she was always sur-
rounded by sculptures. “He was really crazy about sculpture; he col-
lected lead sculptures. Our garden at Saint- Cloud was full of them.
“He had his big Panhard, all his other cars. He was always on the
road, looking for sculptures. He would put them on the rumble seat.
“He never knew that I made sculptures; he would never have
tolerated it. He detested artists. They were always out to steal other
people’s wives, he said. He was projecting of course. As he saw it,
every artist was out to swipe his daughter.
“So he put his sculptures all over the garden. Apollo was a favor-
ite subject. My mother would not have allowed them in the house.
We had great respect for my mother’s wishes—no cluttering allowed.
“No cluttering became the number one characteristic of the
house. We had no animals indoors, no dogs, no cats, for that reason.
Tapestry doesn’t clutter. You fold it up, and it doesn’t take any room.
“My father collected chair frames, but they did not clutter the
house, because they were hanging from the ceiling, in the attic.
“Hanging is safe, and it allows for a lot of movement. So the
floor belonged to my mother and her tapestries.”
Louise said she still had this very much in her mind’s eye. Sus-
pended ladders and suspended plants turn up in her work of the
1940s. Many years later she used rubber in the ambiguous image of
two elongated legs, which hang from the ceiling.
In the 1960s Louise started working with marble and going to
the Henraux quarry at Forte dei Marmi, just below Carrara in Italy.
She said it was not a great change for her to work in marble.
She told me that if you are making an outdoor sculpture, it is
important to have the right kind of marble and to know what not to
do with it. If you leave a small chink, and if rain falls into it and it
freezes, the marble will crack.
“That is why there is so much marble in Italy, where there is sup-
posedly no freezing point. In the North you have to use granite or
bronze. That's why there is Rodin in France and archaic sculpture in Greece.