JUST PASSING THROUGH

A 70-year “Roman holiday” unfolds in photos and diary entries.

As the title suggests, we all just pass through life, but some travelers, for all their ports of call, find a congenial place to put down roots and have the world come to them. Gendel (1918-2018), art critic, photographer, diarist, and socialite, was an exemplar of the kind. Longtime friend Murphy, editor at large at the Atlantic, assembles a selection of the American-born expatriate’s vast diary entries and punctuates them with Gendel’s moody black-and-white photography, producing a retrospective of an age and social strata as well as a man. Gendel studied at Columbia University, immersing himself in the New York art and literary scenes, and then served in the Army in China before becoming Rome correspondent for ARTnews. He would live in the Eternal City for seven decades, making the most of it. Exceptionally well connected through his second marriage, art circles, and his own gift for friendship, as a photographer he was as interested in ordinary people as he was in the rich and famous. In a lengthy, deep-focus introduction, Murphy conveys some measure of this uncommonly cultivated man—his daughter once described him as “his own cultural microclimate”—and then lets Gendel tell his own story in arresting fragments. Is there anyone Gendel didn’t know? It seems that way sometimes, with his chronology of the lofty and titled who lunched, dined, or stayed with him in his various palazzos. No name-dropper, Gendel never intended that his diaries or his photographs be made public, though he finally acquiesced on the latter. It’s Murphy who does the naming, rather haughtily at times, clearly relishing identifying in footnotes all of the notables appearing in Gendel’s entries. Surprisingly, he includes few of the surrealist images for which Gendel was known, preferring the atmospherics of Gendel’s portraits, architectural shots, and candid stills.

A rich portrait of an alluring character with an enviable talent for living.