Spacemaker

The sense of deep space that Renaissance artists brought to painting has largely gone by the board. Such moderns as Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Rouault set the fashion for flatter pictures. "Leonid" (real name Leonide Berman) is a 53-year-old painter who flouts that fashion. His work, on exhibition in a Manhattan gallery last week, was as spacious as he could make it.

The pictures were mostly of putty-colored seashores awash with pea-soup seas and peopled by puppet-like fishermen. Though the colors were dreary, they did make a wet, mysterious atmosphere, and Leonid's brush had time & again captured the textures of dry dunes and soaking sand flats, the hiss and sigh of retreating waves. Moreover, his drawing was as graceful as the brushwork of a Chinese calligrapher. Each composition was a looping arabesque in which men and boats were neatly knotted, carrying the gaze back and back to far-distant horizons.

Socks & Tabletops. The son of a St. Petersburg banker, Leonid started to draw, he says, "on the lap of my mother." He fled from the Bolsheviks to Paris, studied art there and began, after a 1926 vacation at St. Tropez, to paint the seashore scenes that have occupied him ever since.

Painting space, Leonid thinks, is not half so tricky as it's cracked up to be: "It's a question of color and line. You make your objects very bright in the foreground and not at all bright on the horizon."

Surprisingly, for a painter whose work looks so natural, Leonid lists cubism and surrealism, along with impressionism, as the schools that shaped his style. "The cubists used to picture a tabletop from above," he says, "and show the objects on the table as if they were at eye-level. I do the same--I paint a lot of pictures as though seen from a cliff and paint the people below as if you were down there looking at them. In a cubist picture you see the two perspectives, but in mine no one notices. I think it's old-fashioned to show how your socks are knitted."

As for surrealism, Leonid never paints outright fantasies, "but I like to discover the surreal things that exist in nature. I look for the paradox . . . like men reaping seaweed or growing mussels in regular vineyards under water."

Memory & Spirit. Short, slight and urbane, Leonid is the younger brother of a better-known artist, Eugene Berman (TIME, May 24). He long ago dropped the Berman from his signature to avoid being confused with his brother, whom he followed to the U.S. three years ago. Married to Harpsichordist Sylvia Marlowe, he lives in Manhattan, paints mostly from memory. "When I was young," he says, "I painted outdoors and after three or four hours I was lost. But the more I am getting older the more I can paint without a subject. I made a drawing from nature for Port Jefferson (see cut), but in the painting itself the details are different. The spirit, though, is the same."

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