Rosamond Bernier was a world-renowned art lecturer who was a close friend to some of the most important artists of the twentieth century.  When Henri Matisse, for example, was bedridden, he invited Ms. Bernier to his home to show her his new creations from miniature cut-outs.  Picasso had urged her to travel to Barcelona and report on a collection of his early work.  Her interviews regularly appeared on television, and in 1955 she had co-founded the art magazine L’OEIL, which featured the works of the masters of the School of Paris. Leonard Bernstein, a close friend,  had proclaimed that she had a gift for instant communication, and she had lectured at the Louvre in Paris.  She’d begun a career as a lecturer in 1971 and gave yearly sold-out lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.      Ms. Bernier and Diana Vreeland, friends since the late 1940s through their connection working with Vogue¸ bonded “over little shots of vodka” in the 1970s when the world was behaving badly for them.  In 1975 it was a wonderful world, when Ms. Bernier married the love of her life, New York Times art critic, John Russell. Ms. Bernier was a role model to women who had suffered personal and professional misfortunes; the feminist admired her comeback in middle age, taking charge of her life, and not becoming a victim. At her last lecture at the Met on March 13, 2008, Ms. Bernier said, “In a naughty world, the Metropolitan Museum has been an oasis of civility and civilization.”