Diaries
name: label: Collection Creator
content: Lanux, Eyre de
setName: label: See more items in
content: Eyre de Lanux papers
physdesc: label: Extent
content: 3.5 Linear Feet (Boxes 4-7)
unitdate: label: Date
content: 1922-1988
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: Archives of American Art
identifier: label: Identifier
content: AAA.lanueyre, Series 4
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
arrangement: label: Arrangement note
content: Diaries are arranged chronologically. Titles of diaries are handwritten by Eyre de Lanux and typically refer to the places in which she travelled during the span covered by the diary.
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents note
content: There are 64 volumes of Eyre de Lanux's diaries dating from 1923 to 1988. There are no diaries for the period 1927 to 1947, with the exception of two small notebooks from 1938 and 1945. The diaries resume regularly in 1948, with Eyre's arrival in Rome, and continue, with multiple volumes for most years, until the late 1980s when her eyesight failed. The handwriting is difficult to read and she moves from one language to another within entries, writing in English, French, and Italian. Eyre de Lanux used her diaries to record her impressions of the world rather than to enumerate daily activities.

The diaries for her early years in Paris, from 1923 to 1926, are immensely detailed, containing verbatim transcriptions of recent conversations. The diaries can also be explicit in describing her encounters with her lovers of the period: Consuelo Urisarri, Natalie Barney, Louis Aragon, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. For instance, the 1925 diary (May to June) records a nighttime walk with Louis Aragon through the Park Buttes-Chaumont and the interruption of their kiss by the watchman.

She generally refers to individuals using initials rather than first names. The diaries after 1948 may be characterized as travelogues, as she often began a diary after arriving in a new locale. They contain numerous references to Paolo Casagrande, her lover from 1948. They are filled with notes for stories and sketches of the places they visited: Capri, Ischia, Sicily, Greece, and Morocco. While she traveled, she continued to develop her fresco technique, using her sketches as fresco studies.

In her 1949 journal, she jotted down from memory the advice Brancusi had given her on fresco painting twenty years earlier. He is the only one of her art teachers to appear in her diaries. The diary for March 1961 joyfully announces her discovery of an apartment at The Picasso on E. 58th Street in New York City, where she settled, inaugurating a new life in the United States. Subsequent diaries are filled with observations, notes for stories, and records of her travels to Rome, Bucharest, Paris and Japan. Her 1977 diary contains a chronology of her life which she may have prepared at the request of a dealer.