The Man Who Knew All

Seated in his wheelchair, his brush bound to his hand between two fingers, the painter worked intently on his canvas, his grey-green eyes squinting at the luxuriant landscape. "Merde," he murmured, "but it's beautiful!" He was Auguste Renoir, already in his late 70s and crippled by rheumatism, but lively in his opinions (shown a Picasso painting, he shouted: "Take that filth away!") and unabashedly glorying in his work. Showing a nude he had just completed, he confessed that his model was the baker's wife, exclaimed: "She had a bottom--oh, forgive me. But it's true. It was so beautiful. The whole town would have liked to dance around it."

Juices of Life. The recorder of this Renoir scene of 1918 is Michel Georges-Michel, 73-year-old dean of Paris art critics, who began his career by interviewing Edgar Degas, has in a busy lifetime turned out more than a hundred books--novels, histories, art studies. To top off his career, Michel Georges-Michel this week is bringing out the American edition of his carefully culled memoirs (From Renoir to Picasso; Houghton Mifflin; $4). Glittering with wit and the reflections of the great, M. G.-M.'s book is not only lively anecdotal history but a refreshing reminder that the men who painted today's museum pieces were rich with the juices of life.

Hobnobbing with the great, M.G.M. ate tripe with Rodin, introduced Diaghilev to Picasso, was present when Clemenceau offered Claude Monet a seat in the French Academy (Monet refused). With such a star-studded cast, he can afford to throw away in a footnote the fact that Lenin once wanted to be an artist's model, gave up because he was too short.

"Biff! Bang! Wallop!" In search of a hero for his sensational novel of the 19205, Montparnos, which established the claim of Montparnasse as a rip-roaring Bohemia to rival the prewar Montmartre, M.G.M. uncovered such unknowns as Amedeo Modigliani and Utrillo, recounts how on their first meeting the two great painters exchanged coats as a token of mutual admiration. Then one said: "You are the world's greatest painter."

"No, you are the world's greatest painter."

"I forbid you to contradict me."

"I forbid you to forbid me."

"If you say that again, I'll hit you!"

"The world's greatest--Reports M. G.-M.: "Biff! Bang! And the fight started. They made it up in a nearby bistro. There they consumed a large number of bottles of wine, and exchanged coats several more times . . . Biff! Bang! Wallop! And they were at it again, landing up in the gutter, where they went to sleep, and woke up at dawn to find that they had been robbed."

Riffling through his sharply focused snapshot memories of some 80 greats and near greats, M.G.M. comes down to the finish line with a recent interview with Paris' rocketing young Bernard Buffet, who in the last decade has shot from abject poverty to Rolls-Royce status. Such luck was rare in the old days, M.G.M. recalls. Looking back over the past, he says: "What they call la belle epoque was the most hostile and hardest time that ever existed. They are always talking of the good old days. But in those days painters were starving. Nowadays a painter with a bit of talent is driving a car--and he deserves it."

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