In the late and too often lamented 1920s, when Paris was the navel of the art world, there was not one but three dogmatic painting "academies"' jockeying for predominance. The first and most popular was still the followers of impressionism, who mostly painted light effects. The second, and most honored by the cognoscenti, was the lingering revolution of cubism, as exemplified by the works of Braque and Leger. The third and most chic was surrealism. But in 1926 a fourth group quietly challenged the reign of the other three. Dubbed the "neo-romantics," this new avant-garde consisted of Pavel Tchelitchev, Christian ("Bebe") Berard, various forgotten men, and notably the young brothers Berman. This week Eugene Berman, now 60, is having a major show at Manhattan's Knoedler Galleries, and his brother Leonid, 63 (who dropped the family name from his nom-de-brosse to avoid confusion), is celebrating his best sales ever. Both had remained true to the neoromantic atmosphere.
Pictures v. Effects. Every school of painting has its weaknesses. The impressionists, as a group, put too much emphasis on mere pleasure in the effects of light. The cubists cared too exclusively for what they called "formal values." The surrealists immured themselves in sex sadism. The neo-romantics proposed to put poetry back into art by painting such romantic subjects as ruins, beggars and misty shore-scapes in the studio, from memory, with an 18th century care for picture making as opposed to effect making.

The roly-poly Berman brothers turned out to be the cream of this softhearted and hard-skilled group. The sons of a rich St. Petersburg banker, they had fled Russia at the time of the Bolshevik uprising, made their home in Paris. Both eventually married American women and are now U.S. citizens. But Eugene spends most of his time in Rome; Leonid has settled in Manhattan, looks back at Europe without regret: "It has become a museum with walls. But the future is without walls."

Dreams but Awake. Leonid makes the shore his province. No other living artist can create so much sense of the sea's space, stretching away, and of man's essential littleness. Manila, a snake line of Filipino net fishermen, owes much to Leonid's eyes but equally as much to his brush; it was "corrected" in the studio. "I paint a lot of pictures as though seen from a cliff," he says urbanely, "and the people as if you were down there looking at them." Why such muted colors? Leonid shrugs: "I like to see only one nuance."

Eugene Berman, the younger brother, has a one-sentence explanation of neo-romanticism: "We wanted to dream, but with our eyes open." Berman himself has painted gloomy things in the main: girls with their backs bowed and turned away, or ruins strung with clotheslines. Sometimes his paintings are packed with apparent spots of mold, as if the canvas itself were decaying. His stage sets have been much in demand for romantic ballets and operas. A bon vivant like his brother, he admits gloom to his studio rather than to his life: "My painting is in a minor key. I like melancholy things; I enjoy them more." Berman's Roman Columns (overleaf) communicates just such enjoyment of the sad.

For such a frail flower, with so few champions, neoromanticism has survived remarkably well. Has it a future? Probably, so long as youth and disillusion last.

Eugène Berman died in 1972.