There aren't many people of whose lives I am envious, but Rosamond Bernier's is one of them. If you've read my Paris book, you already know that I had the supreme pleasure of meeting Bernier, on several occasions, during the summer of 1980, which was the summer between my junior and senior year of college (I won't recount it here as the story is a little long, but you can read it in full in my book -- it serves as the introduction to a piece by Bernier, which was her introduction to the excellent book Paris by her husband, John Russell).

Some of you may know Bernier from the lectures she gave for many years at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, or you may know the magazine she co-founded in Paris in 1955, L'Oeil, one of the most distinguished and noteworthy monthly art publications of the 20th century. Still others may know that Bernier was made an officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters in 1980, and that she wrote for Vogue and the former HG magazine.

All of these are reasons to be impressed but not necessarily envious. The reasons for envy are revealed in her book published late last year: Some of My Lives: A Scrapbook Memoir (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). The truly extraordinary life she has lived -- filled as it's been with fabulous experiences and people -- was surely partially shaped at a young age as her father, Samuel Rosenbaum, then head of the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia orchestra, routinely invited visiting conductors and soloists over for dinner many Sunday evenings. "I was brought up in a bath of music," Bernier writes, and she also notes that "The Philadelphia Orchestra was my extended family." Among the many people she met in the music world were Leopold Stokowski, Otto Klemperer, Nathan Milstein, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Eugene Ormandy (did you know his real name was Jeno Blau and that he took his stage name from the ship on which he'd traveled to America, the Normandy?)

Once you've met people in the music world it's not a great leap to then meet people in the art world, and Bernier has known many, many (which is to say practically all) of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. And she didn't just know them in a superficial way. Take note:

*once she'd become friends with Matisse, he told her he was going to design a chapel, and Bernier wrote the first story to appear anywhere about the Sainte Marie du Rosaire chapel in Vence.
*she was the first person from the outside world to see what works Picasso was creating at the Chateau Grimaldi in Antibes, and after the inaugural issue of L'Oeil was published, Picasso gave her a gift: he sent her to Barcelona to see his sister, Dona Lola de Vilato, who had a large body of his work that was completely unknown; none of it had ever been published. Bernier was the first person Picasso had ever sent to his family, and she was able to publish a number of early sketches, paintings of family members and friends, and a group of paintings dating from 1917 in the fourth issue of L'Oeil (most of these works are now in the collection of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona). The issue was met with international acclaim.
*When she told Miro that she was working on an article about Barcelona and asked for his suggestions of what to feature, he offered to be her personal tour guide. So Bernier and the photographer Brassai were led "up and down and all around the town" for a week with Miro.

But much of Bernier's life was spent in Paris, and I think it is not a stretch to say that the name Rosamond Bernier is actually synonymous with Paris. If you love Paris as much as I do, you will rejoice in reading Bernier's memoir.  'Scrapbook' is an accurate word in the title as Bernier writes in rather short chapters and  simply tells story after story, sharing experience after experience as well as photos (all of these are to die for, by the way). Bernier was often in the right place at the right time, but she had (and still does) loads of elegance, grace, curiosity, and intelligence, plus she's kind and humble, all of which endeared her to others. All the artists she came to know had a great deal of respect for her, and they treasured her friendship.

[And the photograph on the book jacket? Of course, there's a story about it: Bernier and a photographer, Erwin Blumenfeld, were working on a story about Proust and they were in Normandy on August 15th, the national holiday of Ascension when there is not a hotel room to be found unless you have made a prior reservation. Bernier and Blumfeld had not, but when they were discussing what to do in the restaurant of the auberge Guillaume le Conquerant (a favorite of Proust), the manager overheard them and offered that Rosamond could sleep upstairs in the Madame de Sevigne museum -- her bed was on display -- and as long as Blumfeld slept in the car and Rosamond promised to be out by 6 a.m. the manager would be happy to help. When Blumfeld woke Bernier up promptly at six, he snapped the photo and gave a print of it to her as a souvenir.]

Bernier's beautiful book Matisse Picasso Miro As I Knew Them (Knopf, 1991), with 350 illustrations, photographs, and reproductions, is terrific to read together with her memoir. A few of the anecdotes that originally appeared in this book are repeated in her memoir, but it is a wholly different experience to look at the artworks mentioned while reading Bernier's stories about them.

In every chapter of Some of My Lives there is some interesting fact or detail that leaves you saying "wow" or "what must that have been like?" or, in my case, "I so want to be Rosamond Bernier." She has a gift for putting the people she's writing about in the spotlight, but when you're finished reading about them you realize that she is equally as interesting as her subjects.  The Paris Bernier experienced in her younger years really doesn't exist anymore, and she is keenly aware of that. She's also aware that she was very fortunate to be in Paris at a time when the city attracted such a hit parade of talented people in the arts.  Perhaps someone else within this artistic circle could have written a similar memoir of these years, but I think Bernier is the perfect chronicler as she was an "insider" who was also an "outsider."

I love this book and I didn't want it to end, and I will keep pulling it off my shelf to reread certain chapters. I would also be a bit disingenuous if I didn't admit to being more than a little pleased that Rosamond's Foreword to John Russell's Paris appears not only in my book but here in her memoir, on page 271.  I believe that the essays and articles I select for my books in The Collected Traveler series are worthwhile, and it is gratifying when this is confirmed.  Bernier's Foreword deserves to be read and recounted many times over, as does her splendid memoir.

A number of friends and colleagues have been asking me for gift ideas for people they know who love Paris and France, and Tuscany and Umbria and Italy, and Istanbul and Turkey,...and therefore who also love art, music, history, and travel in general. Short of an airplane ticket or a hotel gift certificate, I always reply that the best gifts for people who love travel are books, and I don't say that just because I am an author. Rather, I truly believe that books (in any format) offer what literate, curious travelers want most: depth, background, and inspiration.

Without doubt, the book I am recommending most often right now is the one pictured above, The Louvre: All the Paintings (Black Dog & Leventhal, published on November 14th). This is no ordinary book, and it is not an updated version of a book previously published. It is a ground-breaking, extraordinary, gorgeous, must-have work of art itself, and it features every single painting in the Louvre's permanent collection. Every one. Three-thousand and twenty two of them. The book is 766 pages, it weighs a number of pounds (I'm not sure how many, but you need two hands to hold it), it's accompanied by a navigational DVD-ROM, and it's $75. And it's a perfect gift, even one for yourself.

Readers of my Paris book know that I am hugely fond of the numerous small museums in the city, whether devoted exclusively to a single artist (Delacroix, Picasso, Rodin, etc.) or to collections (Jacquemart-Andre, Cognacq-Jay, etc.). But there is no doubt that my most favorite museum on earth is the Louvre, the largest single museum in the world. When I was a student in the Hollins Abroad Paris program in 1979, my art history classes were held once a week at the Jeu de Paume (which then housed the French Impressionists) and once a week at the Louvre. We were required to go to each museum a second time each week to complete homework assignments, but I always returned to the Louvre a third time, every Sunday, when it was free (today it is free on the first Sunday of every month, as well as on Bastille Day and on Fridays after 6:00 p.m. for anyone under age 26). I loved (and still do) the enormity of the museum (I like knowing that I will never see everything), and I loved the beautiful parquet floors in the galleries and I loved the periodic views out the windows and I loved seeing the 'Winged Victory of Samothrace' sculpture that was then at the top of a stone staircase. Most of all I loved the paintings, some of them the largest I'd ever seen.

I know I'm not alone in my love for the Louvre -- it is the most popular art museum among Americans traveling abroad, who represent nearly 1 million of the museum's 8.5 million annual visitors -- and at the celebratory party for this new book last month I met a lot of other fellow Louvre enthusiasts. The party was given by American Friends of the Louvre, and I was initially embarrassed to realize that I'd never heard of AFL, but I now know that this terrific, non-profit organization was only founded in 2002, so I don't feel so ignorant. In addition to fostering collaborations between the Louvre and American institutions with exhibits, educational programs, and scholarly exchanges, AFL also helps finance Louvre projects such as renovations of galleries, restorations, fellowships, and educational programs both in France and in the U.S. AFL has provided grants benefitting all eight curatorial departments of the Louvre, and among the projects it has supported are the creation of Cy Twombly's 'The Ceiling' in 2008; fellowships in Islamic art and American art, 2005-2009; restoration of Greek and Roman antiquities in 2007; and the English version of Atlas, the museum's online collections database with access to the 35,000 works on display. Currently, AFL has pledged to raise $4 million to support the restoration of the museum's 18th century Decorative Arts Galleries, designed by Jacques Garcia and scheduled to re-open in 2013. Additionally, AFL has raised $146,000 toward a conservation program for the Louvre's extensive holdings of pastel drawings.

(Now that I think of it, a truly generous and meaningful gift would be a copy of the book along with, say, a bottle of French wine, some Mariage-Freres tea, a French press and some coffee, or even a bottle of Badoit avec gaz and a membership to AFL (there are 6 levels of membership, ranging from $500 to $25,000 a year). Membership at the Chairman's Circle level ($10,000 for 2 people for 1 year) entitles you to an annual trip to Paris focused on a major exhibition or theme at the Louvre. The description of the 2011 spring trip was among the most distinctive I've ever heard of, including a trip to Metz to visit the Pompidou Centre's new outpost; a private tour in the Louvre on a Tuesday (when the museum is closed to the public); cocktails at the Delacroix museum; visits to the Chateau de Vaux-le-Vicomte and Chateau de Sully; lunch at the Chateau de Courances hosted by the Comtesse Serge de Ganay and the Marquise de Ganay and a tour of the home and gardens; and dinner in the home of a Parisian collector. Wow. AFL is at 60 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan / (212) 367.2645)

At the book party, the Cultural Counselor of the French Embassy, Antonin Baudry, gave the introductory remarks to all of us gathered there in a beautiful room. I was particularly drawn to his comments that, "All together, we are 'les Amis du Louvre' (what a beautiful formula!) because we are friends of art. We are also, I hope, a community that embodies more generally the friendship between France and the U.S. Art is a bridge, as we all know. Between countries, nations, or people. Also between body and soul, the work and the eye, matter and spirit." Baudry later said that a book is not only a book: "A book is a world. Just like a museum: the pages are open, the walls are windows. Body and soul, I said. Matter and spirit." Precisely.

The Louvre: All the Paintings is authored by a ridiculously talented foursome, Erich Lessing, Vincent Pomarede, Anja Grebe, and Henri Loyrette (Loyrette has been Conservateur General du Patrimoine since 1975 and President and Director of the Louvre since 2001, but each of these authors have very impressive credentials). Paging through this monumental edition is an absolute pleasure as I see works I consider to be old friends but I also see others for the first time. And what is especially appealing about a book of this sort is that I can choose to turn to a particular artist or school of painting (in the case of the Louvre these include Italian, Northern, Spanish, and French) and just get lost in it all. Literally, every day since I've had a copy of the book, I cannot wait to spend time with it. Each day has been filled with this lovely surprise.

It's easy to say that this book is for Francophiles and everyone for whom Paris holds a special place. But the truth is it's a book for any art lover, any traveler, any museum goer, any human being who appreciates beauty. Or, as Henri Loyrette states best in the book's Preface, through this illuminating volume, "all people -- from scholars to tourists, art professionals to students, the "learned" to the "unknowing" (to paraphrase the French philosopher Denis Diderot) -- will be able to reflect upon and preserve in their memory the paintings of the Musee du Louvre."


Warm and joyeuses wishes to everyone at this almost-end of 2011! My next posting will appear in early January.