Meet the woman who shot up with Coco Chanel, inspired Proust, and was painted by Renoir
Misia Sert had a ‘legendary pair of legs and a bosom that kept strong men awake at night’
Over the course of her unusual and long life, Misia Sert achieved something truly rare: a kind of immortality. The coquette of Belle Époque Paris, Sert was painted by some of the best known artists in the world, including Renoir, Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vuillard. “The painters had the privilege of immortalising her miraculous looks,” wrote critic Clive James in the London Review of Books, “which included a legendary pair of legs and a bosom that kept strong men awake at night thinking.” She was a confidante of Picasso’s, and a friend of Proust, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Cocteau, Gide, Monet, Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes. She and Coco Chanel were “soul sisters,” and likely lovers.
Many of the culturati — men and women — were rumored to be in love with Misia Sert, Vuillard most hopelessly — he painted tender portraits of her with titles like “Misia’s Nape.” She was the inspiration for two characters, Princess Yourbeletieff and Madame Verdurin, in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
She was born Maria Zofia Olga Zenajda Godebska at Tsarskoye Selo, the Russian imperial residence outside St. Petersburg , where her father, Polish sculptor Cyprien Godebski, was working on a reconstruction project. Her mother died in childbirth, leaving Godebski to raise her. Except he wasn’t particularly interested in the job, so she was shipped to Brussels to live with her grandparents, and then sent to a convent boarding school. Throughout her childhood, Misia played piano, sometimes while sitting on the lap of Franz Lizst, a family friend. Her piano teacher, famed composer Gabriel Fauré, considered her a prodigy. She would go on to teach piano lessons in Paris.
But piano lessons were too pedestrian to keep Misia’s interest for long. Her passion for the arts was far broader and deeper, and her interest in surrounding herself with the creative luminaries of the day was powerful. A member of the haute bourgeoisie by birth and marriage, she became a central figure in Paris’s arts and intellectual scene, paving her way with patronage. Few who knew her accused her of feigning interest in the arts simply to get close to famous artists. Still, many of those artists knew she was always good for a little infusion of cash.
And she was a treasured benefactress, both for her tireless support and her charisma. As Tracy McNicoll wrote in Newsweek, “Dinners chez Misia were coveted affairs, from titled nobility to teenage poets.”
Sert claimed she took “only husbands, never lovers.” Of course, her rumored affair with Coco Chanel tells a different story. But Misia was married three times, to dynamic, successful men. The first was Thadée Natanson, a Polish emigré and socialist. Natanson launched a magazine, La Revue Blanche, where he featured the work of new painters — many of the very same who were so taken with Misia. She soon ran off, however, with Albert Edwards, founder of Paris’s major daily newspaper, Le Matin, and a supporter of La Revue Blanche. Misia continued her lavish entertaining, now from Edwards’ grand Rue de Rivoli flat. But not long after their nuptials, she divorced him. (She kept the flat.)
Her third husband was José-Maria Sert, a Spanish painter of bold murals, with whom Misia had a passionate and difficult relationship and, reportedly, a sexual awakening. It was also with Sert that Misia expanded her influence on the Parisian art scene. But their marriage was undermined when José fell in love with the beautiful Roussy Mdavi, a member of the family known as the “Marrying Mdavis” for their success in landing rich and famous European spouses. Misia tried to get over it the best way she knew how, by sleeping with Roussy and embarking upon a ménage à trois, but it didn’t ultimately work.
Perhaps owing to the limitations of her marriages, Misia reserved her most ardent affections for her closest friends, namely Serge Diaghilev and Coco Chanel. Of Misia and Diaghilev, Clive James wrote, “They reigned as autocrats of taste, giving the word its full sense of adventurous critical discrimination.”
She met Chanel at a 1917 dinner party at the apartment of actress Cécile Sorel, and was immediately drawn to her. In an unpublished memoir, Sert wrote, “She seemed to me gifted with infinite grace…when I admired her ravishing fur, she put it on my shoulders, saying with charming spontaneity she would be only too happy to give it to me.”
Of course, those who draw people to them often possess the ability to repel them as well.
Of Misia, Chanel would later recall, “She was a rare being who knew how to be pleasing to women and artists. She was and is to Paris what the goddess Kali is to the Hindi pantheon — at once the goddess of destruction and creation.”
The two women had an intense lifelong friendship, and Chanel is said to have designed the pink dress in which Sert was buried in 1950. They were also united by a morphine habit. James writes that Sert had the “bad habit of injecting morphine straight through her clothes.”
In spite of her darker proclivities, Sert was often a lifeline for friends under duress. Diaghilev called on her multiple times to bail out the underfunded Ballets Russes, which she did happily. She sat by his deathbed in Venice in 1929, and bankrolled his funeral, to which she and Chanel rode in the first gondola.
Arguably, Sert was more than a muse or a patron. As Clive James wrote, “Without directly creating anything, she was some kind of artist herself….She gave the artists the gift of her sublime ephemerality and they made it last.” He claims that dynamism like hers could never be adequately represented or preserved. Still, Misia Sert gave of herself in the present tense so that her likeness could be captured for posterity, even if her vitality couldn’t possibly be.
