Christian Bérard

Christian Bérard, ‘Bébé’ to all Paris, was born in the capital on 20 August 1902, the son of an architect, and studied at the Académie Ranson and the Académie Julian under Vuillard and Maurice Denis. In the 1920s he was one of the Neo-Humanist painters shown by the Galerie Druet with Tchelitchew and the Berman brothers, a painter of melancholy figures and portraits whose easel work he later practised almost in secret while his public career ran elsewhere.

That career was the stage and the page: sets and costumes for Louis Jouvet, from Cocteau’s ‘La Machine infernale’ (1934) to Giraudoux’s ‘La Folle de Chaillot’ and Molière, for the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo and Roland Petit, and the designs for Cocteau’s film ‘La Belle et la Bête’ (1946); fashion drawings for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar that defined the look of Schiaparelli, Chanel and the young Dior; and illustrations for Cocteau, Colette and Giraudoux.

He drew constantly, on tablecloths, menus and napkins, and his caricatures of friends became collectors’ pieces in his lifetime. He died in February 1949 during a rehearsal of ‘Les Fourberies de Scapin’ at the Théâtre Marigny, aged forty-six. His work is in the Centre Pompidou, the Musée des Arts décoratifs and the Museum of Modern Art; the monograph edited by Boris Kochno (1987) and the retrospectives at the Palais Lumière in Évian remain the references.