Volume 26, Number 1 · February 8, 1979
Life Studies
By John Russell
The Three Worlds of Leonid
by Leonid Berman, preface by Virgil Thomson, translated by Olivier Bernier
Basic Books, 275 pp., $13.95
For the last twenty and more years of his life—he died in 1976 at the age of eighty—Leonid Berman seemed the very picture of contentment. He was not 'a famous artist,' but he had patrons who loved his paintings and could never get enough of them. He had a marriage—to Sylvia Marlowe, the harpsichordist—that was stable but not at all stagnant. He had never been ill, and he got around the tennis court to great effect until he was in his late seventies. He read widely and with intense pleasure in English, French, and Russian. He and his wife had friends who rarely said a dull thing. If Leonid himself did not often intervene in the conversation, it was because so many champion chatter-boxes were around. Besides, he was a master of the shrug: by moving one shoulder one inch, he could suggest an affectionate and fatalistic tolerance while the conversational howitzers blasted off on every side.
Review, 2230 words
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