“art-talk
spellbinder.” “the Met’s
living treasure.” “a scintillating creature with the speed
of light” and “the most stylish talker around.” “gift of instant communication
to a degree I have rarely encountered.”
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About Rosamond Bernier After World War II she spent more than twenty years in Paris, initially as European features editor for Vogue magazine. She became friends with the masters of the School of Paris: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Max Ernst and Alberto Giacometti. She knew them as few foreigners did, and when she founded the art magazine L'OEIL in 1955 they did all they could to help her. L'OEIL soon established itself as an international review of the highest quality. To read it was a liberal education, alike for its well-chosen and unexpected images and for the distinguished writers -- French, English, American -- who contributed to it.
In many cases Rosamond Bernier was herself the first writer to get into print with new achievements in art that have since acquired landmark status. Among these were the Matisse chapel in Venice and the ensemble of paintings by Picasso in the Château d'Antibes. It was at Picasso's suggestion that she went to Barcelona and became the first person to report on the important collection of early works -- later to become the nucleus of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona -- that he had left there with his family many years before. In Paris Rosamond Bernier also became known as the publisher, editor and, in several instances, the initiator of innovative illustrated books. One of these,"Venice Observed", by Mary McCarthy, became a classic of its kind. Not long after returning to the United States in 1971 she began a new career as a lecturer, speaking to audiences throughout the United States and abroad. It was immediately clear that she had exceptional gifts as a speaker. Leonard Bernstein wrote that "Madame Bernier has the gift of instant communication to a degree which I have rarely encountered. Where other lecturers on art stand at a lectern and plod through a typewritten script, she speaks freely and easily. Expert and beginner alike are treated with the same conversational grace."
She knows France and the French, England and the English, Spain and the Spanish. Often she knows the artists as well as their art. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York her bi-annual lecture series is routinely sold out months in advance. In France, she has been invited to lecture at the Grand Palais, the Louvre and the Pompidou Center. As a guest of the Indian government she has lectured in New Delhi and Bombay. The government of Israel as well invited her to speak at the Jerusalem Museum of Fine Arts. A practiced television performer, during the 1970s she conducted interviews with Max Ernst, Paul Mellon and Joseph Hirshhorn for CBS' Camera Three Productions. Her interviews with Henry Moore and Philip Johnson were produced as three-part programs. An additional interview with Johnson was featured in the American Masters series produced by WNET/Channel 13. Narrating scripts written by her husband John Russell, chief art critic emeritus of the New York Times, she also made two programs on unfamiliar aspects of the Louvre and a further two on the Pompidou Center. The latter won the coveted Peabody Award. In 1980 she narrated Russell's script for "American Light: The Luminist Movement," a film produced for the National Gallery of Art, and in 1981 they collaborated again on "An Everlasting France." Shot in Paris, Chartres, Fontainebleau and elsewhere, it was made as an introduction to the French collections in the Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco. She also narrated Channel 13's two hour-long programs based on Russell's best-selling book The Meanings of Modern Art, first published in 1981 under the auspices of the Museum of Modern Art.
Videotapes of her lectures Live At The Met are available through KULTUR . Her first series of five hour-long programs on Matisse, Picasso and Miró, and her second, four-part series on French Impressionism were immediate best-sellers and have been repeatedly broadcast on national public television. Another video series is Taste At The Top, a third series of four hour-long programs on the royal collectors François I of France, Charles I of England, Queen Christina of Sweden, and Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. Her most recent video project is a portrait of Louise Bourgeois at Close Quarters. In recognition of her contribution to French culture, she was decorated by the French government in 1980 and again in 1999 when she received the title of Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. She has also been awarded the highest Spanish honour, the Order of Isabel la Católica for her contributions to Spanish culture. In 1991 Alfred A. Knopf Inc. published her book Matisse, Picasso, Miró--As I Knew Them, a splendidly illustrated volume illuminating the art and lives of three major artists of the 20th century through personal insight and extraordinary visual acumen. French, German and Italian editions were published in 1992. In 1991 she received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. She is also a Fellow of the Pierpont Morgan Library. In 1998, she received the Albert Einstein Medical College's "Spirit of Achievement Award". She was honoured with her husband John Russell by the National Academy of Fine Arts, on which occasion they were made "Fellows for LIfe" of that institution.She was awarded the James D. Burke Prize in Fine Arts by the St. Louis Art Museum. She was honoured for "Lifetime Achievement" in 2004 at her alma mater Sarah Lawrence College, as a "National Treasure" along with her husband, John Russell, by the Municipal Art Society that same year. She received the Gold Medal of the National Arts Club in December 2004. Rosamond Bernier was for many years a contributing editor of Vogue. She has lectured over 200 times at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The subject of lengthy articles in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, Town & Country and other publications, Rosamond Bernier has also been profiled on the television programs Today (NBC), 60 Minutes (CBS) and World Day (CNN). She was named for life to the International Best-Dressed List.
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(c) 2007 Rosamond Bernier |
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Born in Philadelphia, of an American father and an English mother, Rosamond Bernier was educated in France, in England and at Sarah Lawrence College. She then lived for some years in Mexico, where she flew her own airplane and raised a small private zoo. 
