The Owl, the Panther and the Pie, MATISSE, PICASSO, MIRO AS I KNEW THEM <i> By Rosamond Bernier</i> ; <i> (Alfred A. Knopf: $50; 273 pp.) </i>

Matisse, Picasso and Miro, as she knew them. As a title, it may seem overproduced, suggesting the memoir of a close companion or daily collaborator. The book itself, a prodigiously illustrated account of Rosamond Bernier’s encounters with the works and persons of the three great painters, may, at the outset, also seem overproduced.

Perhaps it comes from the effort to re-create in two dimensions the three-dimensioned experience of Bernier’s art lectures. They are, by all accounts, a mixture of warmth, discernment and wit; a friend whom you respect telling of her friends whom you revere. They are also quite fashionable, and since our times compel no link between fashion and taste, the book’s presentation and promotion may suggest that fashionable is mainly what it is.

Mainly, it is a lot more. Only I would have liked to substitute for that “As I Knew Them” a different phrase: “As I Passed By His Garden,” from “Alice,” and suggesting--as well but more coolly--the privileged vantage and close look:

As I passed by his garden

I marked with one eye

How the Owl and the Panther

Were sharing the pie.

The owl, rotund and particular, is Matisse. The panther is Picasso. The pie is the prodigal beginnings of modern art. And the eye, appreciative but clear--so that under it, the owl gets his full share, and the panther no more than his share--is Bernier’s.

Her eye was her serious work. For 14 years, she edited one of France’s most distinctive art magazines--entitled, of course, “L’Oeil”--and it is her considered contemplating that gives a quiet strength to the book’s agreeable manners and beautiful clothes.

These include some 350 illustrations, mostly in color, of works well known and frequently reproduced, but also rarer ones. For example, there is Picasso’s nakedly touching portrait of Dora Maar, lying on the beach and looking infinitely lost in his company. They are intimately joined to the text, with the immediacy of a lecture slide but with the advantage of being able to linger or turn back.

There are photographs that wonderfully complement Bernier’s anecdotes: the invalided Matisse elegantly arrayed in his bed, and Picasso’s septuagenarian sister, Lola, surrounded by her family in her Barcelona apartment. She is dressed in white and looks as childlike as she does in “First Communion,” painted 60 years earlier and hanging on the wall beside her.

Bernier’s five essays--two each on Matisse and Picasso, one on Miro--wander with seeming artlessness among the paintings, the painters and her own personal encounters with them. They skip and ramble, but only rarely is there an effect of self-indulgent musing or recollection. Her theme is the wandering; these are travel pieces, in a way, organized by association and the chances of the journey. The rigor is not in the route but in the watchfulness.

It is impossible to write of Matisse and Picasso without being caught up in the perpetual question of contrast. Matisse governed his kingdom, and if he warmed to you, he let you visit. Picasso sent out expeditionary forces to annex you. Bernier brings this out less by statement than by anecdote. She met them both in 1947, when she was writing for Vogue. With Matisse, it was like entering a pond and treading on a considerable rock; with Picasso, it was like treading on a shoal of fish.

Bernier’s account of the Matisse meeting is splendid. She was to be at his Provence house at noon. Her driver got hopelessly lost. The beautiful landscape “now looked like Dante’s Inferno as I panted and panicked and the hour grew late,” she writes. It was Matisse landscape and now, it seemed, she would never meet him. She was coming between a Frenchman and his lunch. When she arrived, two furious faces peered out; first, that of his companion, Lydia Delektorskaya, and then Matisse’s. The painter immediately demanded that she pay him $38--Vogue owed him the money--and when she protested that she had neither cash nor a checkbook, he gave her one of his own checks to write on. He softened when she presented him with her fountain pen. No longer was she an American who of course was late; now she was a lady who had the misfortune to be late. He gave her his own pen in exchange, and the association blossomed from then on.

Getting through to Picasso was more complicated. Bernier was obliged to do antechamber duty for some time before he would acknowledge her. She describes the court of hangers-on at the beach in Antibes, dressed in city clothes and trying to protect their white skins from the sun, while Picasso strutted among them, tanned and Pan-like. It was her ability to speak Spanish that got to him, she writes; more likely, it was her persistence, seriousness and charm, as well as the space she could provide in Vogue, and later in L’Oeil.

Over the years, she corresponded with both painters between visits. She reproduces a note from Matisse, not for the content but for the elegance with which the words are set upon the page. “His signature was as much danced as written,” she writes. As for Picasso, when he sent her a book, he would inscribe it not once but on each of the initial blank pages. It was not so much out of affection, she speculates, as from an inability to leave a space unclaimed.

The half-phrase makes a revealing portrait. Because Bernier’s writing is generally graceful but undemanding, the reader can be ambushed by a quietly remarkable line or two. She writes, as others have, of the mix of rivalry and admiration between the two painters. But she gives us a glimpse of it that is as incisive as any I know.

After Picasso had bought a Matisse painting of a basket of oranges, the latter occasionally sent him some real ones. Bernier tells of Picasso pointing them out. “ ‘These are Matisse’s oranges, you know,’ he would say, as if that made them completely different from any oranges ever grown before.” One feels, right there, that somehow the owl did better with the pie, that the panther suspected it, and that Bernier agrees.

Her account of Miro’s work, in the final chapter, is lucid and evocative. The personal account is quieter; the friendship was perhaps stronger and more enduring but harder to convey. Bernier places this gentle but enigmatic artist in the enigmatic culture of his country. It is a Catalonia that has kept itself separate from Spain while opening itself to Europe--not as Europe is, but as it might look if reflected back off the moon. Bernier writes with a reticence that manages to suggest mysteries without claiming to reveal them.