An encounter of artistic minds and a friendship

Lila de Nobili and Yiannis Tsarouchis

By Alexandra Koroxenidis - Kathimerini English Edition

In referring to her friendship with the painter Yiannis Tsarouchis, the Swiss-born artist and stage designer Lila de Nobili once said that he was the most important person she had ever met. “I have been fortunate in knowing very talented people, major creators and great theorists, but none of them is like Tsarouchis. Tsarouchis is at once the bees and Maeterlinck, that’s the truth. He is an answer in himself, whereas so many others are no more than the question,” she is quoted as saying in the literary journal “Word,” published in the late 1980s.

Tsarouchis was no less profuse in his admiration for de Nobili. In a letter to a friend he wrote, “She is one of the few persons in this vile world who makes me feel proud to be human.”

Of roughly the same age (Tsarouchis was older by six years), de Nobili and Tsarouchis met at La Scala in Milan in the 1950s and what began as artistic admiration for each other’s work soon developed into a long friendship and creative collaboration. Documenting this exchange is “Lila de Nobili — Yiannis Tsarouchis: An Encounter,” an exhibition of multiple drawings by de Nobili and some by Tsarouchis. Held in memory of de Nobili, who died earlier this year, the exhibition at the Benaki Museum is a joint collaboration with the Yiannis Tsarouchis Foundation.

Despite her acclaim and the breadth of creative talent, de Nobili avoided publicity and did not wish her work to receive undue exposure. Remarkable as it may seem, from the 1970s on, she even declined all invitations to design for the theater (the only exception was for a Manon Lescaut production in 1973), withdrawing from a field in which she had become so gifted and renowned.

Throughout her life, however, she remained an avid explorer of the art of painting, investigating the potentials of line, color and technique. Tsarouchis joined her in this exploration. At roughly the same time that she resigned from designing for the theater, de Nobili asked Tsarouchis to instruct her in the technique of Byzantine icon-painting. Tsarouchis agreed with delight and arranged a series of seminars with de Nobili and a number of other artists, among them Fabio Palamidese and Irene Groundisky, at the house of a common friend, Andr� Bouchy, in Paris.

At some point during the time that Tsarouchis spent in Paris, he also worked with de Nobili in setting up a private school for drawing. The idea grew out of their shared devotion to painting and although the “Academy,” as they called it, was short-lived it provided an opportunity for pupils to paint using live models free of charge. It was also there that Tsarouchis painted some of his most important works, including “Sailor in the Sun,” “The Dance” and “The Seasons” as well as “Tsamiko and Zeibekiko.”

De Nobili and Tsarouchis also joined forces on more immediate projects. They worked together on the designs for “I Claudius” a film adaptation to have been directed by Tony Richardson (who had worked with de Nobili before on “The Charge of the Light Brigade”); another unusual joint project involved the decoration of a bourgeois Parisian apartment for which Tsarouchis made gigantic copies of 17th-century Italian masters.

What makes the mutual creativity between de Nobili and Tsarouchis interesting is the fact that it flowed between two mature artists, both experienced and widely acclaimed, who despite their accomplishments continued to find inspiration in each other’s work.

When she met Tsarouchis, de Nobili was close to turning 40. Most of her work until then had been stage design for theatrical plays directed by Raymond Rouleau (the sets of “Anna Karenina” won the enthusiasm of Luchino Visconti).

Rouleau was the person who launched de Nobili into the world of theater, opera and set design. De Nobili met him through her childhood friend Francoise Lugagne, an actress and the wife of the director.

Before that fortuitous meeting, de Nobili had been hired by Vogue magazine to do some illustrations for Parisian haute couture. This was in the early 1940s when de Nobili had just fled Italy to settle in Paris, where she promptly became part of an artistic and fashion set that included Christian Berard, Jean Cocteau and Christian Dior.

De Nobili’s cosmopolitan and artistic background meant that she could easily fit in with her new surroundings. Born in Castagnola, de Nobili came from mixed parentage; her father was descended from an old Italian family from Spezzia and her mother was of Jewish-Hungarian origins.

Her introduction to painting came through her uncle, the painter Marcel Vertes (a portrait he painted of the young de Nobili is included in the exhibition). In the 1930s, at the same time that the Scuola Roman was emerging (a movement against the classicism of the Novecento; a style of painting which increasingly came to be associated with fascist propaganda), de Nobili was studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.

Fused with her innate talent, de Nobili’s education gave her the basis for imaginative concepts drawn out with skill and inventiveness. When the curtain rose at La Scala in Milan to reveal the opening scene of a 1955 production of “La Traviata” produced by Visconti and starring Maria Callas, the conductor Carlo Maria Giulini was overwhelmed. He described what he saw as “the most exquisite scenes where each detail made me feel that I was physically penetrating another world. The illusion of art dissolved. I was to experience that same sensation every time I conducted the opera.”

In many ways, Tsarouchis felt the same admiration for de Nobili that she had for him. Neither the artists’ individual artistic magnitude nor the mutual, deep appreciation that each of them shared for the work of the other can, of course, be captured in a retrospective exhibition. But the reminiscence of their relationship the exhibition induces is what gives it an unusual, slightly emotional quality.