The Needle and the Brush

A sewing machine and a pair of pinking shears are the only clues that identify Michele Sapone's ground-floor flat on Nice's Rue de Chateauneuf as a tailor shop. Casual visitors are much more likely to mistake it for an art gallery: about 450 paintings and drawings --many by Europe's best-known contemporary artists -- crowd the walls of the waiting room, the workshop, the corridors and even the fitting room. As tailor to more than 100 leading French and Italian artists, Sapone, 56, accepts payment for his clothes in works of art. Says Sapone: "It has been a fruitful exchange between the needle and the brush."

Sapone's skillful needle has earned him paintings by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Massimo Campigli, Alberto Magnelli and Hans Hartung, as well as sculptures by Diego Giacometti and a collage by Clave. The exchange began by accident 14 years ago, soon after the mustachioed little tailor, an expatriate Italian from the mountain village of Bellona near Naples, and his wife Slava opened shop on the Riviera. One day the Florentine ceramist and painter Manfredo Borsi ordered a suit. "If you prefer," Borsi imperiously suggested, "I will pay you with one of my paintings." Sapone did not really prefer. "I had never looked at a painting in my whole life," he recalls. "I looked at women." Overwhelmed by Borsi's forceful manner, however, he reluctantly agreed.

Audacious Initiatives. One artist led to another. Poet-Painter Andre Verdet ordered a sport coat of grey velvet curtain material. Picasso took one look at Verdet's coat and was off to see the tailor. The two men hit it off instantly, and after Sapone had cooked Picasso some Neapolitan spaghetti, the artist gave him three lithographs and an order to "sew something for me."

"He never tells me what he wants," says Sapone. "He leaves that entirely up to me. I search for special cloth in Naples, or I wander through mountain villages in Yugoslavia and Italy looking for 'homemade' materials like Dalmatian felt or an Abruzzi velvet. Picasso loves velvet." Once Sapone delighted Picasso with a pair of cuffless, horizontally striped trousers. "I've always wanted them," said the master. "Courbet had a pair just like them."

Other Sapone contributions to Picasso's wardrobe include a white silk suit, which the artist wears to bull fights, and a brown velvet smock with a collar so high and broad that the tailor told Picasso: "Your head emerges from the collar like a flower from a pot." In return, Picasso has given him about 50 paintings and sketches -- including a powerful War and Peace pastel contrasting dancing nymphs with a hideous fire-belching monster. According to a Riviera dealer, the work, which Picasso gave in payment for a pair of trousers, would now fetch $20,000.

Strutting Peacocks. Sapone's flourishing trade belies the image of the painter as a rather threadbare chap. The younger and more impecunious may seem indifferent toward clothes, but the more prosperous often prove to be strutting peacocks. Before Sculptor Jean Arp died in 1966, recalls the tailor, "he would walk through a party in Paris, twiddle with his lapels and say to people, 'Sapone, eh oui, un Sapone!' " The definition of un Sapone varies widely.

It can be anything from velvet slacks (Magnelli) and collarless tweed jackets (Hartung) to felt capes (Alfred Manessier) and black leather suits (Campigli).

Sapone says that a few of his painter-customers "dress like bourgeois gentlemen" and concedes that he has trouble satisfying them. Joan Miro never did accept his suggestions for a suit, and Jacques Villon confided: "Sapone, I'm really too old for you to dress me." As Picasso told him: "Your suits are like my paintings. In the beginning people found them strange and extravagant. Now they admire them."

Over the years, Sapone has earned 2,300 paintings, drawings, sculptures and other works by the artists he has dressed. Since he has no bank account and little cash, he has reluctantly sold 1,850 of them in order to live. Still, Sapone has rejected offers of $20,000 for a pointillist abstract dancer by Gino Severini and $60,000 for an exceptionally sensitive Alberto Giacometti portrait of the tailor's daughter Aika.

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