The Happy Pessimist

To look at Eugene Berman, a bald, plump, cheerful little man, you would never guess that his paintings are meticulously composed glimpses of ruin, misery and decay. A Thomas Traddles among painters, he pictures philosophers asleep under Paris bridges and ragged princes mooning among the ruins of their family palaces; his work fairly groans with heartache. But Berman himself, whose painted gloom has earned him a solid reputation throughout Europe, has claimed to be "divinely happy" ("It's just that I enjoy melancholy things!").

Last week a Manhattan gallery exhibited Berman's latest paintings. They showed a striking new power. He had been to Mexico, and the visit had inspired the best work of his career.

That career has run against the current of modern art. The stepson of a rich St. Petersburg banker, Berman was left homeless at 18 by the Russian Revolution. Settling in Paris, he was enchanted by the "Blue Period" paintings of another alien, Picasso, 18 years older than Berman. By that time, restless "Papa" Picasso was gaining notoriety as a cubist; but Berman, along with his brother Leonid, and his friends Tchelitchew and Berard, thought cubism something to keep clear of. Their idea was to go on from where Picasso's Blue Period left off--to paint, in a traditional way, the cracked shells of European civilization. They were the "Neo-Romantics."

In 1935, Berman came to the U.S. For a while he painted murals for fashionable houses, covers for Vogue and Town & Country He settled in Hollywood, "the way New York artists go to Connecticut. It's a quiet life, very few people." But he seemed to yearn for the tragic actors and the monumental stage sets of Renaissance Europe. He began to produce ever larger, ever emptier pictures of a girl with her back turned (she might have been his own Muse). At last, as if his pictures were decaying with his talent, he gave his canvases a moldy, gnawed-on look by painting cracks and holes in them.

In Mexico Berman made a rapid recovery. He went down on a Guggenheim Fellowship, carrying a Brownie, and returned with a suitcase full of snapshots to use for filling in the details of his imaginary compositions. He found the life of the Indians, in rags beneath their ancient monuments, as moving and vivid as his gloomiest dream. "There's always some disaster," he says happily. "They spend half their lives in the fields and on the roads--without an auto, without a Frigidaire. The bareness is what appeals to me."

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