Beverly & Her People

Four years ago, at 25, Beverly Pepper was the Hollywood image of a rising young career girl. Slim and sleekly tailored, she was vice president and art director of a Manhattan ad agency. But Beverly also suffered one of advertising's occupational diseases: she spent more than half her $16,000-a-year income on psychiatrists. One analyst finally gave her a piece of simple advice for her money: quit being a female executive and be just a female.

Last week Beverly Pepper showed what she had made of the doctor's advice: she had 1) got married, and 2) quit advertising and become a painter. At her first one-woman show at Rome's important Zodiaco Gallery, Roman art lovers quickly took to Beverly's relaxed, motherly views of ordinary people--churchgoing Negroes in Georgia, earthy peasants in France, broad-hipped laundry women in Italy. The canvases were done with easy grace and warm understanding of the hardships in everyday life. Wrote Virgilio Guzzi in Il Tempo: "At times melancholy, at times naive, the artist pictures the life of the poor ... in such a way as to give us a poetic image." Added Italy's top critic, Lionello Venturi: "I think she will become a notable painter."

The bravos were balm to Beverly, who remembers her advertising days with horror: "We used to sit around conference rooms for hours on end, waiting for a client to show up. And then we all had to bow down like he was God. I used to wear low-heeled shoes so I wouldn't be taller than the men." All that changed when Beverly took up painting and went to live in Paris. She studied with Painters Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger in Paris, then moved down to the Riviera, where she rented Pablo Picasso's former apartment and tried doing modish abstractions. A few months later, she was traveling in North Africa, and there, in the squalid, poverty-stricken towns, she discovered what she wanted to do. "I began to see people in a way I had never seen them before. I put the abstractions in the bottom drawer and started painting people."

Today, Beverly Pepper lives in a four-bedroom villa south of Naples, with her husband, Bill Pepper, a free-lance writer, and her two-year-old daughter. Her cooking has so improved since her executive days that she has written a book on the subject and is busy on another. By last week her paintings were selling well (six in the first four days). Next year, Beverly hopes to come home and paint. Says she: "There is so much to say about America, and if you say it so people cannot understand, you are cheating them."

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