MISIA SERT : THIRD MARRIAGE TO ARTIST JOSE MARIA SERT and THE ACCOMMODATION OF ROUSSADANA MDIVANI

NOTE: April 2020
I got a comment that said two things that I question.  The link to the person who posted showed him on blogger but not to a blog.  The commenter first said that Serge Diaghilev was not a ballet dancer.  This is what Wikipedia says:  Serge Diaghilev was a Russian ballet impresario.  He was a Russian promoter of the arts who revitalized ballet by integrating the ideals of other art forms - music, painting, and drama - with those of dance.  From 1906 he lived in Paris, where in 1909 he founded the Ballets Russes.  Thereafter he toured Europe and the Americas with his ballet company, and he produced three ballet masterpieces by Igor Stravinsky: The Firebird (1910),Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913.)

The other thing this poster said was that Misia did not get a settlement from her marriage, that she was, in so many words, too proud.  I'm basing my account on the book noted.

And not publishing this comment.

Please back up any statement you make with some reference such as a book title and page, an article on the internet, or otherwise.  I realize that in some cases there are very many books that contradict each other.  Thanks, Missy

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ORIGINAL POST STARTS HERE:

Misia met and became the mistress of famous and accomplished artist Jose Maria Sert, who was patronized by the Spanish royal family. They lived together for twelve years before they married in 1920 when he was 45 and she was 48. She knew he had a lifetime habit of affairs. Two marriages behind her, she was finally with a man who wanted and needed more than a playmate or wife to show off. She was finally with an equal. Misia was said to be - for the first time - "Sexually overwhelmed" for the first time.  And she became serious with Sert quickly, so quickly that he seemed to want to back out of a relationship.  But she followed him to continue the affair and they went on an art and architecture tour where he played tour guide. She was now considered a liberated woman but she did not want to go it alone. Her money came from a settlement with her last ex-husband, Edwards, in their divorce.  (Before he died in 1914 he had even begged her to marry him again.)

Her life was continually entwined with the up and coming and the renown artists, sculptors, ballet dancers, choreographers - the biggest talents in arts, culture, and society in France. Together the couple were friends with ballet dancer Serge Diaghilev, who had been born in Russia in 1872.  He was a fashion "dandy," a homosexual and he and Misia gossiped and intrigued for the next twenty years as special friends.  Friends even said that she was the only woman Diaghilev could ever have married. By 1910-1911 Paris season his ballets were considered to be a "revelation" attended by aristocrats, royals, high society, and homosexual society, (Including Isadora Duncan, the dancer, who has also been a Mistress of the Month here at Mistress Manifesto.)

Misia rarely visited Sert at his studio, thinking of it as his sacred space but it is there that the young Georgian Princess Roussadana Mdivani, called Roussy, as a neophyte sculptor herself appeared, looking for advice in 1925.

For some reason, Misia did not initially feel threatened when she heard about her.  But then the young woman was young enough to be a daughter and so Misia felt that she and her husband could take the playful Roussy underwing. The day came though when she showed up at the studio hoping to meet her.  She was enchanted. Misia had grown up without her birth mother and Roussy's mother was dead.  The Serts were childless.  

Misia and Jose Maria had a Catholic marriage in Spain, considered impossible to divorce and had been married for 20  plus years and Misia loved the girl too but the idea that she would remain a surrogate daughter to the couple was ridiculous. The girl had once even crept in on all fours and watched Misia and Sert have sex!  The girl claimed she loved Misia as well. Would they go on as three?

They sure didn't want Misia along on their honeymoon.

Was it an act of love on Misia's part to let him go to the girl?  She cooperated with civil divorce and an annulment (considered invalid in France) so her old husband and the girl could marry.  She agreed there was something wrong with her sexual organs and he said he had married Misia in order to have an heir!  (Well, we wonder, how the childbirth adverse Misia managed to perhaps never become pregnant at a time when contraception was not what it is today.)

As the truth came to her, Misia became depressed, even driven insane.  She even took a job in a dress shop in New York to get away and it was there that she got the letter from Sert saying he had married again and in the Catholic church.

Roussy died of what sounds to be a throat infection that she went to Switzerland to cure, not having created an heir, and then Misia and her ex-husband lived separate but became friends.  They visited daily and sometimes went out to dinner.

Sert died November 27, 1945 and she didn't make it to his death bed. He left his property to others but he did give Misia his apartment and everything in it on the rue de Rivoli including paintings, furniture, and the library.  Over the next five years Misia sold whatever when she needed money as she herself had little.  It was there she died.

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References for this post are Misia's own memoir and the book about her by Fizdale and Gold.