Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections THE EUGENE BERMAN COLLECTION : A R OMAN MEMOIR Richard Daniel De Puma University of Iowa ABSTRACT This memoir recounts the author’s first meetings with David Soren in Tunis and Rome during the summer of 1970. It also records an influential visit to the Roman apartment of a major artist and collector of Etruscan antiquities, Eugene Berman (1899 –1972), that same summer and gives a brief description of the collection, now the property of the Italian State. Finally it shows how that visit helped to set the author on a path that would lead to his career as an Etruscologist. his is a personal memoir about my first meeting of we enjoyed, about Italian cuisine and numerous topics of Noelle and David Soren and some of the events that mutual interest helped to lay the foundations for a long- sThaped my development as an archaeologist at the time. lasting friendship. In future years we would all meet again In that regard, I hope the Sorens and our readers will find at excavations and over meals in Italy or at meetings of the it an interesting and amusing diversion from the more Etruscan Foundation in Boston, New York and other cities. serious and useful contents of this Festschrift. So, summer 1970 was the beginning of a long and happy relationship that continues to this day. t was the summer of 1970, almost fifty years ago. I had In that summer I was also working on organizing an spent May doing research in London and Paris but exhibition of Etruscan and Villanovan pottery for the mIoved on to work on Roman mosaics in Tunisia in June. I University of Iowa. An elegant new art museum had met David and Noelle in Tunis that month. Then, after opened in 1969 during my first year of teaching there and some archaeological work in Sicily and Naples, I arrived I had become a friend of Ulfert Wilke (1907–1987), the in Rome on a very hot day in July. Unfortunately, I did not founding director. Wilke was a fascinating character. He begin to keep a journal of my European sojourns until 1977 came from an artistic Bavarian family, spoke with a and so must reconstruct the happenings of this period, charming German accent, and was very cosmopolitan and seven years earlier, from memory. Exact dates are talented. 1 He was an excellent painter, printmaker, and impossible to recover, but I knew from our previous draftsman who produced a great deal of art all of his life. meeting that the Sorens were also going to be in Rome in He knew personally scores of artists and collectors in July. We met again one afternoon at the American North America, Europe and Japan. Best of all he possessed Academy in Rome. David was preparing for his an incredibly discerning eye for artistic quality and had preliminary exams at Harvard and I had just completed begun, during the early 1960s, to add ancient art to his my Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr a year earlier. We were both very earlier holdings of Japanese, African and Oceanic art. young, but at least I could qualify as “experienced” when When we first met he already owned a small but fine it came to taking rigorous doctoral exams in classical art collection of early Etruscan pottery. Most of this had been and archaeology. Somehow the three of us decided that purchased while he was a Guggenheim Fellow at the we should go to Tivoli to visit Hadrian’s Villa and, on a American Academy in Rome, either on excursions to the later day, to Ostia Antica where we could review the Porta Portese flea market in Trastevere, or from architecture and art for David’s upcoming exams. Both established dealers, or sometimes by exchange with other trips, despite the oppressive summer heat, were enjoyable, artist-collectors. For example, he might offer a recent entertaining and enlightening for all of us. Walking painting or watercolor plus a cash fee in exchange for an methodically through the various ruins, talking about antiquity from another artist or collector who valued his Hadrian and Rome, about “baroque” elements in Roman art. When he encouraged me to work on an exhibition of architecture, then about film noir and other cinema that ancient pottery for our new museum and learned I would Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections | http://jaei.library.arizona.edu |vol. 10 (September 2016) | 45 –55 De Puma | The Eugene Berman Collection be in Italy the next summer, he instructed me to visit a small-talk and said something to the effect that “Working good friend who lived in Rome and who had an Etruscan here must be like working in a museum.” “Indeed,” she collection I should see. He would send a letter of replied, “when I dust, the maestro notices every object that introduction but told me relatively little about this friend I accidentally move out of place, even slightly.” She served and gave only a vague idea of the scope of his collection. me a drink and mentioned that my host would be with me Thus, I was quite surprised when I finally met Eugene presently. Berman in late July, 1970. After a few minutes, while I was attempting to absorb the splendor of my surroundings but careful not to disturb THE BERMAN COLLECTION anything, Berman appeared. He was a short, rotund, Mr. Berman was a successful stage and set designer who bespectacled man wearing an elaborate silk robe, red had worked in New York and Hollywood from ca. 1936 to velvet slippers decorated with golden arabesques, and a 1955. He was born in St. Petersburg in 1899 but in 1919 soft, black embroidered pill-box cap. He might have been immigrated to France, via Finland, with his parents and the bey of some forgotten Ottoman district in the Balkans. older brother Léonid (1896–1976) to escape the hardships Despite this exotic outfit, he was rather formal and asked of the Russian Revolution. The Berman brothers studied about my education, my present teaching position, his art at the Académie Ranson in Paris where their teachers friend Wilke and the university’s new museum. We also included Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. There talked a great deal about the various objects in his were numerous visits to Italy during the 1920s and 1930s, collection as we wandered about the salone and then to sometimes with Eugene’s close friend, Emilio Terry, the other rooms in his vast two-floor penthouse. His influential architect and designer. 2 Eugene Berman’s work observations were primarily aesthetic; he didn’t seem was exhibited as early as 1923 in Paris; his first solo especially interested in the archaeological details or exhibition there was at the Galerie Katia Granoff in 1927. cultural significance of his antiquities. He first visited America in 1936 and at that time he began Upstairs were three parlors or salotti , as he called them, his long association with theater design (for the Hartford all filled with art. Clearly, every room in the apartment, Festival and later for the Metropolitan Opera). Theater, even the bathrooms, showed his passionate connection to and especially ballet, had been a powerful interest from the theater; all were richly appointed with carefully his earliest years. As a child he had known Nijinsky, who arranged art. I remember especially a glorious studio on lived in the same St. Petersburg apartment building. He the upper floor. The walls were painted a perfect moved to the USA in 1940 and became a citizen in 1944. In Pompeian red which served as a vibrant background for a 1950 he married the film star Ona Munson, perhaps best series of Piranesi’s Vedute di Roma engravings in elaborate remembered today for her moving portrayal of Belle gilded frames. The placement and relationship of every Watling, Rhett Butler’s loyal prostitute friend, in Gone with object in the home seemed to have been thoughtfully the Wind in 1939. 3 (This last detail about Berman’s marriage calculated for maximum effect. Indeed, it was a personal was the only one Wilke had told me about Berman before museum... and, he explained, it was always changing. I met him.) Like many of us, Berman adored and was New acquisitions or objects traded or sold to friends and constantly inspired by Italy. His work as a set designer and galleries necessitated subtle adjustments. Cabinets might artist was strongly influenced by the ancient ruins, by be closed and then, on other days, opened to reveal Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico , and by contemporary Italian intimate displays of Roman or antique Venetian glass or painters and friends like Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978). Pre-Columbian pottery. An Egyptian mummy mask might After his wife’s death, he resided in Rome for the last move to a larger room and now be flanked by Villanovan sixteen years of his life (1956–1972). It was in 1959, when biconical urns or African masks and colorful Peruvian both Berman and Wilke held Guggenheim Fellowships, textile fragments. 5 that they met in Rome. The collection was emphatically eclectic, but in general So, I had the address and telephone number of a tended to the primitive. For example, Berman (like Wilke, Russian-American artist-collector in Rome. Imagine my who had learned from the master) preferred Villanovan surprise when I realized that Via del Plebiscito 107 was and early Etruscan pottery, especially impasto and part of the splendid baroque Palazzo Doria Pamfili in bucchero, to the later Etruscan painted vases that imitate Rome’s historical center! 4 I was greeted by the matronly Greek wares.