SEven as a schoolboy, Peter Bermbach enjoyed going to the flea market on the banks of the Main in Frankfurt, very close to the Städel Museum. On Saturdays he took the train from Usingen im Taunus, where he grew up, to his favorite town, because there he could also see a film in a cinema at Hauptwache. In his second favorite city he felt the same way.
The doctor of art history, who also worked at times as a model and actor (“The nights are long in Hamburg”), moved to Paris in 1960. There he bought so much at the flea markets that his apartment was quickly full of antique furniture, accessories, pictures and vases – “so photogenic after all,” he writes in his memoirs, which he now has under the wonderfully direct title “From the other shore “ published that his apartment was pictured in several interior design magazines. He took a similar approach to his friend at the time, Karl Lagerfeld, who was also an interior design freak, who often bought new apartments in Paris to provide Vogue with fresh photo opportunities.
On his balcony: Peter Bermbach has lived in Paris for a long time.
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Image: Helmut Fricke
A life full of art
Bermbach was practically pursued by art. As the author of “Art”, “Schöner Wohnen” and other magazines, he got to know the entire Parisian cultural scene: Marlene Dietrich, Suzy Mante-Proust, Hélène Rochas, Jean Marais, Nina Ricci, Marcel Marceau. And in 1978 he moved into a large apartment just off the street that Gustave Caillebotte had immortalized in his painting Street in Paris on a Rainy Day (1877) – you can see the perspective in the background in the portrait photograph on this page, taken by Helmut Fricke recorded on Bermbach’s balcony. The couple with the umbrella in the painting are walking roughly under the balcony.
In this apartment, until recently, a rare oil painting by the French romantic Auguste-Barthélémy Glaize from 1839 hung above a Biedermeier chest of drawers: “Faust and Mephisto with Gretchen and Frau Marthe in the garden”. Bermbach doesn’t find it all that strange that he found a painting with a Goethe motif in France; “Faust” was a well-known subject, for example for an opera by Charles Gounod. But it took time for the picture to find him. One day his friend Jacques pointed out the painting to him in a gallery in Montmartre. The gallery owner has no idea what kind of famous garden scene it is. But when he went, the shop was closed, and soon after, forever.
Two years later, Bermbach was walking through Nice with his friend and saw the picture in a shop: Faust with Gretchen, in the background Mephisto with his wife Marthe. However, the dealer demanded so much money that Bermbach gave up. Another year later, at the Paris auction house Hôtel Drouot, it was offered under the title “Lovers”. The price was higher than in Nice, but this time Bermbach struck.
For three decades he now spent his nights in the bedroom with the “lovers” invented by the oldest son of his first favorite city. The ninety-year-old recently bequeathed the painting to the Städel. It now hangs where Bermbach’s history with art began.