International Art Expert To Speak March 29

March 22, 2000

Renowned art authority Rosamund Bernier, who regularly lectures to sold-out audiences at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, will be the featured speaker at this year's Allbritton Art Institute lecture. Bernier's talk, "Monet: Lover of Gardens," will begin at 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 29, in room 149 in the Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center on the Baylor University campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Bernier, who was born in Philadelphia, served as European features editor of Vogue magazine in Paris. While in Paris, she became friends with artists Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró and Georges Braque, and her friendship with them encouraged her to found the art magazine L'oeil in 1955.
She returned to the U.S. in 1971 and immediately began a career as a professional lecturer. Her speaking engagements have included those at the Louvre, the Grand Palais, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Guggenheim Museum.
In 1975 she married New York Times art critic John Russell and has collaborated with him on a number of projects including two programs on the Pompidou Center, which won the Peabody Award. Additionally, she produced and narrated video series on French Impressionism and Matisse, Picasso and Miró that have been shown numerous times on national public television. Her book, Matisse, Picasso, Miró -- As I Knew Them, was published in 1991.
Bernier received the Albert Einstein Medical College's Spirit of Achievement Award and in 1999 was decorated by the French government and received the title Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. She also has been awarded the Isabela la Católica, the highest Spanish honor for her contributions to Spanish culture.
The Allbritton Art Institute was established within Baylor's art department in 1998 by Mr. and Mrs. Joe Allbritton. The Institute promotes the appreciation and comprehensive study of the artists and art movements of the 19th and 20th centuries with special emphasis on the movements of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.
For more information, contact the Baylor art department at 710-1867.