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  Leaving from Bayreuth, the new expedition was scheduled to cross through Syria, Iraq, and Persia. To avoid the formidable Pamir mountain chain that stretches across Afghanistan and what was then Northwest-India (now Pakistan), the group planned to swerve northward in Persia and enter the Soviet Union south of Samarkand; the travelers would travel across the Russian steppes south of Lake Balkhash, enter northwest China’s Sinkiang Province and then pick up the ancient “silk route” to Beijing.

  Alexandre Iacovleff’s portrait of a Tibetan lama, 1932

  But the entire schedule had to be radically altered three months before the planned departure, in November 1930, when the Soviet Union, which under Joseph Stalin was entering an era of severe isolationism, rescinded its visas for the Croisière Jaune. The route now had to include many treacherous mountain crossings. The travelers divided into two groups: The Pamir group, which included Iacovleff and Haardt, would have to proceed across Afghanistan and tackle the dreaded Pamir Mountains. A smaller group, which was headed by the dashing explorer and naval captain Victor Point and included France’s most distinguished paleontologist, the Jesuit scholar Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, would travel westward from Beijing. The two teams would meet east of the Pamir Mountains and then return together to Beijing and travel southward into Indochina. The new itinerary was much more complex and perilous than the original one, but men of Haardt’s and Iacovleff’s mettle seemed to relish such risks: The very difficulties of the trip, Iacovleff wrote, “only strengthen our determination to surmount them.”

  The expedition headed by Haardt and Iaco proceeded fairly smoothly for the first few months, through Persia, Iraq, and most of Afghanistan. But just as they had feared, the travelers began to encounter great difficulties in the Hindu Kush and the Pamir Mountains. There, Citroën’s vehicles had to cross 5,000-meter-high mountains with icy surfaces that, even in summer, could be six meters thick. Weeks were spent breaking up hunks of rock and ice to create passageways for the cars. At any moment, half a mountainside could slide away and stall progress for days. In several instances, the only way to continue was to disassemble the vehicles on one side of a mountain and reassemble them on the other side, forcing the travelers to proceed on foot or atop yaks and mules that were often breast-deep in snow. Footing was never secure. Loose rocks slipped at almost every step. One hundred fifty mule loads were needed for the group’s provisions alone—sleeping sacks, toolboxes, tents, food, spare axles, and dismantled car parts—and on the more hazardous passages the expedition could not advance more than four kilometers per day.

  There were equally severe difficulties of a political kind. In the last days of August 1931, the two segments of the expedition finally met at their appointed site, in Aksu, China, a few kilometers south of the Soviet border. But several weeks later, as it was crossing the northwestern province of Sinkiang on their way to Beijing, the group was imprisoned by the local governor, Marshal King. The marshal detained them for over a month, until November 1931, releasing them only when Citroën dispatched a dozen of his caterpillar tractors via the trans-Siberian railroad in the way of ransom. The travelers proceeded eastward, but a few weeks later were again arrested, albeit for a shorter time, by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops. This series of delays forced the travelers to endure the awesome winter of the Chinese plains just below the Gobi Desert, where temperatures often fall to forty degrees below zero Centigrade, and which they had originally been scheduled to cross in the relatively benign clime of late summer and early fall.

  Iacovleff faced his own set of problems on the Asian expedition. Below-zero temperatures presented harrowing material difficulties to his painting. In the ruins of ancient cities just south of the Gobi Desert, where he attempted to make copies of Buddhist frescoes in caves never before entered by European explorers, his colors froze shortly after being squeezed out of their tubes. He finally devised a metal palette that could be set upon a gas burner, but he was still forced to mix them from minute to minute. In China’s urban centers, a totally different kind of complication confronted him: It had to do with the veneration of portrait painting in Chinese culture, a culture in which, as Iacovleff himself put it, “the painter incarnates the quintessence of the aristocrat…and the portrait painter carries an undisputed title of nobility.”

  This had become all too evident when the Citroën expedition was being held captive by Marshal King: Scores of local officials clamored to pose for the Citroën group’s official artist. In an effort to liberate his comrades, Iacovleff complied with the Chinese officials’ wishes and spent exhausting days shuttling from one end of the city to another, doing portraits of mandarin after mandarin in hopes that one of them might persuade Marshal King to release them. He limned a particularly powerful portrait of a local warlord, the former governor of Hami Province. “[General Tchou] posed for me in an immense hall filled with the carousing guests of a wedding banquet,” he wrote. “The orchestra’s strident sounds accompanied a theatrical production being performed in the open courtyard. Huge vases placed in the corners of the room allowed the joyous guests to alleviate their digestive systems before returning to the frenzied feast. A strong odor of opium (which explained the good general’s beatific and soporific countenance) combated that of the local aquavit.”

  It was an exhausted group of travelers that reached Beijing in February of 1932, after twelve thousand kilometers of travel. Weeks of festivities, organized by Chinese authorities, the French embassy, and numerous other foreign legations, celebrated their heroic journey. But following a year of frugality and solitude, such revelries only disconcerted Iacovleff and accentuated his inexplicable gloom. “Why is the joy of our success tinged by an indefinable melancholy?” he asked himself in his travel notes toward the end of his stay in Beijing. “Is it the renewed contact with civilization?”

  Iacovleff’s despondency may have been a form of premonition. On the foggy night the expedition members were traveling by ship to Hong Kong, whence they were scheduled to return to Syria via Vietnam and India, his friend Georges-Marie Haardt came into his cabin for a chat. He had been plagued by a bad grippe for the past several weeks and told Iacovleff that he would stop for a few days in Hong Kong to rest, rejoining the group at some later date. “‘It’s a sinister night, isn’t it Iaco,’ Haardt said to me at the end of our talk,” Iacovleff wrote in his memoir. “I still remember the voice of that rare man, that dear friend, speaking what would be his parting words.”

  Haardt, who left ship in Hong Kong the morning after that conversation, died ten days later of double pneumonia, shortly before his forty-eighth birthday. The news reached his colleagues in Haiphong. All previous plans for a return through the Near East were canceled. Complying with Citroën’s orders, the travelers came back to Hong Kong. Iacovleff, as Haardt’s closest friend, was charged with the somber details of the funerary transport to France. In late April 1932, when the group’s ship reached Marseille, Citroën was there to greet them. He, too, was in mourning for a cherished collaborator and friend. Haardt, who had remained a bachelor, was buried not far from Edouard Manet’s tomb in Passy Cemetery, in a service attended by scores of grieving friends and colleagues.

  Notwithstanding their tragic loss, the members of the Croisière Jaune were welcomed back in Paris with the same kind of festivities that had greeted their return from Africa. A few months after their return, a vast exhibition celebrated the achievements of both Citroën expeditions. However, Iacovleff remained despondent, and the grief he had felt upon the loss of Haardt was deepened that very summer by the death of another comrade: In August, Victor Point, the charismatic leader of the Croisière Jaune’s China group, committed suicide for the love of a beautiful, unfaithful mistress, the popular actress Alice Cocea.

  In the midst of these sorrows, Iacovleff had to think of making a living. His gallery, Charpentier, had scheduled a large show for him in the spring of 1933. He set to work, in Paris and in Capri, to complete a group of paintings based on his travel sketches o
f Asia, producing 100 paintings and 250 drawings. He wished all of his Croisière Jaune works to be homages to his lost friend, Georges-Marie Haardt: “To interpret, through successive images, the immense trajectory and diverse phases of our nomadic life; to evoke its sense of limitless space…such were the directions of my activity, a tribute to the memory of the friend I lost.”

  The show was a great critical success but perhaps not as remunerative as the artist hoped, for the Great Depression that had struck Wall Street in 1929 was affecting France particularly hard in the summer of 1933. Iacovleff was devoid of any fixed income and had to continue supporting his aging mother and his sister, the latter of whom, then forty-seven, had suffered some setbacks in her singing profession. His devotion and passionate loyalty to the two women, and the financial responsibilities they entailed, were the only plausible explanations for the next, very unexpected phase of Iacovleff’s career: In 1934, he accepted an invitation to come to the United States and serve as the director of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Through the scores of Iacovleff drawings reproduced in National Geographic—the magazine had dedicated hundreds of pages to the Croisière Jaune—American art connoisseurs had had considerable exposure to Iacovleff’s marvelous gifts as a draftsman. And the intensive academic training displayed in his work must have been particularly attractive to a fairly traditional American art school.

  Iacovleff, who had never before been to the United States, arrived in Boston in 1934 to assume the post, which he was to hold for three unhappy years. He was now widely known on both continents. Exhibitions of his works were held in Washington, D.C., in Pittsburgh, and in New York’s Grand Central Galleries. During his stay in the United States, he occasionally had an chance to visit with his brother, my grandfather Alexis, who had left Russia for the United States in 1915 and whom he had not seen since. Otherwise, Iacovleff—a man who had never been known to complain, who notwithstanding his sunny, affable exterior seldom exposed his innermost feelings, even to close friends—made it clear to all that he was miserable in Boston.

  “Boston’s atmosphere is not conducive to creation, it is provincial and conservative,” he wrote in 1937 to Louis Audouin-Dubreuil, Haardt’s second-in-command during both Citroën expeditions. “Though I’m aware of the fact that financial prospects are not brilliant in Europe, I intend to spend the next year there; I’ll be able to last one year during which, if I find life too difficult, I might resolve to return to the United States…. [T]he Boston school, which sees me leave with great regrets, might well be happy to hire me again; meanwhile it’s of vital importance for me to steep myself again in the stimulating atmosphere of ancient, ailing Europe.”

  Iacovleff’s unhappiness in the United States and his longing for “ancient, ailing Europe” were accompanied by a period of great self-doubt as an artist. He seemed to have become indifferent to his peerless gifts as a draftsman. Whenever his Boston students, with whom he was extremely popular, praised his virtuoso technique, he warned them, doubtless in a spirit of self-criticism, that the gift of great draftsmanship might be a peril to some artists. Upon returning to Paris in the spring of 1937, Iacovleff, now striving to make his mark as a painter, set to work in the flat, lusterless tempera medium he had adopted during his travels. He experimented with mythological themes rendered in an expressionist genre—Theseus fighting the Minotaur, odalisques, grotesque sea monsters. These were not his best works, and he was far too intelligent not to realize his shortcomings as an “imaginative” painter.

  Uncle Sasha was able to enjoy his freedom for only a year. He was to die in May 1938, of a cancer of the stomach that spread with devastating rapidity. An American art critic ardently devoted to Iacovleff and his work, Martin Birnbaum, has left a vivid depiction of my grand-uncle in the final weeks of his life and of the stoicism with which he cloaked the truth of his illness from even his closest friends.

  Birnbaum paid his last visit to Iacovleff’s studio on the rue Campagne-Première, in Montmartre, in May 1938. The artist came “bounding rather than walking” down the stairs to accompany the visitor to his fourth-floor studio, and Birnbaum was struck once more by the gaiety and intelligence of his sparkling eyes, his quality of “virile refinement,” the ribbon of well-groomed beard “that gave him a resemblance to Pan.” The visitor also describes the artist’s modest but fastidious surroundings and those details that denoted his intellectual and aesthetic predilections: the collection of rare first editions, bound in red morocco with his initials engraved in gold; the horizontal exercise bar, set in the middle of his studio, on which Iacovleff daily performed a strenuous muscle-building routine; the luxurious set of silver-topped cut-crystal bottles, salvaged from his mother’s home in St. Petersburg, that graced his tiny, tidy bedroom.

  Upon this visit, Uncle Sasha was packing up his painting materials in preparation for a return to Capri, and he spoke about the important work he would do there that summer, work that he felt would be his “most solid lasting achievement.” In the late afternoon, the two men went as planned to a concert at Salle Pleyel, to hear Yehudi Menuhin perform. In the middle of the concert, Iacovleff, suddenly looking uneasy, complained of a pain in his side and confided to Birnbaum that he was scheduled to enter the hospital the next morning for a “slight operation.” In a few weeks, he reassured his friend as he drove him home in his little sports car, they’d be visiting together at the Piccola Marina in Capri.

  But the operation was one of those in which surgeons open a body, find that the cancer is inoperable and widely spread, and sew the patient up again. Iacovleff died a fortnight or so after that afternoon visit with his admirer, facing his end with the serene gallantry with which he had led his life. I was seven and a half years old and have a vivid memory of his funeral at the Russian Church in Paris’s rue Daru. The coffin was totally covered with scarlet peonies, Uncle Sasha’s favorite flower. His frail seventy-seven-year-old mother, my beloved Babushka, lay prostrate on the stone floor of the church in an ancient, unleashed gesture of mourning, her arms ahead of her, her tiny feet twisted and helpless a few inches from my own. She suffered from congestive heart failure and survived him by only a year, dying in May 1939 on the very anniversary of her son’s death.

  Before ending my reflections on the Iacovleff family’s most romantic figure, I should mention the various ways in which he influenced our lives. First and foremost, I should emphasize that my mother was his creation, that her evolution into a gifted, polished young woman was in great part his doing.

  Under the care of her grandmother and her aunt, the ambitious nineteen-year old waiting to greet Uncle Sasha when he returned from Africa had managed to heal her tuberculosis through a regime of rest and medical treatments. She was now bent on helping her relatives’ scant finances through an occupation she had dreamed of during her tough youth in Russia: posing for photographs. She modeled for fur, jewelry, and stockings ads in fashion magazines and worked for a photographer who made Christmas and birthday cards—embarrassingly simpering shots in which her long, beautifully tapered hands are set off in the foreground to maximum display. Immediately sought after by several suitors, Tatiana had to deal with the infatuation of a Prince Menshikov—“handsome and well behaved, a blue stocking”—whom her grandmother enthusiastically approved but whose affection left her rather cold. (Prince Menshikov’s mother forced him to call off the romance with Tatiana when she saw postcard photos of her at a newsstand that stood in front of a Marseille brothel.) And throughout these innocent adventures she had retained much of the anarchic extravagance of her Soviet youth: upon entering a restaurant and seeing a group of her friends at the other end of a crowded room, she had simply jumped onto a table and leaped from table to table until she reached her pals, impervious to any disturbance she might cause to the diners on the way.

  Alexandre Iacovleff’s portrait of his mother, my “Babushka,” 1929.

  But above all, the beautiful teenager who greeted Sasha upon his return from Africa was getti
ng very restive under the strict supervision imposed on her by her grandmother and aunt, and she was experiencing bitter feelings of loneliness and solitude. Even chaperoned, Tatiana was not allowed out of the house in the evenings, except for a biweekly visit to the movies in her grandmother’s company. “It’s such a bore,” she complained to her mother in a letter to Penza. “I’m not even allowed to go to the movies with anyone without Babushka, she must always come along as chaperone…. I’m used to total independence, I found my way alone to Paris, and here they must lead me by the hand!!” So in addition to the phobias and insecurities caused by the turbulence of her adolescence in the Soviet Union, after a few months of Paris life Tatiana was threatening to become unruly.

  Alexandre Iacovleff’s portrait of his niece, Tatiana, 1929.

  Upon his return from Africa, Sasha set to work healing his niece’s insecurities and refining his “gorgeous savage,” as he called her, into a work of art. He doted on her, and the affection was amply returned. They must have understood each other perfectly: Beneath my mother’s flamboyant panache and my great-uncle’s suave razzle-dazzle were two intensely private persons who seldom revealed their true emotions. Although he was terrified that his beautiful niece might become a courtesan, Sasha relaxed his mother’s chaperoning rules, allowing her to go out in the evenings with a few young men he judged suitable. He also perfected his niece’s table manners; dragged her to museums to instruct her in the history of art; took her to Gordes, Carcassonne, Chartres, Mont-St.-Michel to give her a sense of European history and architecture; made her read Stendhal, Balzac, Baudelaire, and other French classics; brought her to friends’ couture houses to buy whatever modestly priced models’ samples were left in the racks; advised her on how to hold her own at dinner-party conversations. Moreover, can I ever forget that it is Uncle Sasha who introduced Tatiana to the man who would dominate the major part of her life, and become my second father, Alexandre Liberman? Young Alexandre, an aspiring painter, was the son of the woman who was Sasha’s mistress from 1924 to 1927, Henriette Pascar. Alex idolized Sasha and started studying with him in his early teens, and it is in Sasha’s studio, as teenagers, that Tatiana and Alex Liberman first met.