Word: academicians
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first modern man. This tremendous two-volume biography, written in 1962 by French Academician Jean Guehenno and now translated into English for the first time, succeeds expertly in establishing Rousseau's tortured assertion of individualism as well as his complicated genius. Rousseau raised his own character to the status of dogma and almost to an object of veneration. "He believed he was unique," writes Guehenno, "and for this reason answerable only to his own jurisdiction...
When the last exam of the spring term is over, most well-esteemed university professors are likely to be already en route to the airport with their luggage. Carrying a wad of traveler's checks courtesy of some big foundation or Government agency, today's academician is off to dispense advice to a foreign government, finish a book in the splendor of the English countryside, burrow in the site of an ancient ruin, or pursue his research to tropical Islands, glacial lakes, laboratory ships, remote capitals or perhaps even the Great Barrier Reef...
...transformation from academician to Ambassador appears wrought with difficulties. The problem of changing from an idealist's to a practical realist's approach, while at the same time being forced to accept the White House foreign policy line, has torpedoed many good-willed scholars and kept them from becoming effective politicians...
...Newport. La Farge belonged to the genteel tradition. Born in 1835, the son of a Napoleonic soldier of fortune, he was brought up in the aristocratic red-brick atmosphere of New York's Washington Square. At 21, he was sent to Paris, where he studied briefly with the academician Thomas Couture, then hunted down the greatest old masters from Copenhagen to Dresden...
...precisely glazed look of a "finished" painting. He wanted his paintings to show virtuoso brushwork (sometimes he even daubed with bread rather than bristles). Before exhibitions opened at the Royal Academy, artists traditionally varnished their canvases in sight of the public. Turner, instead, completed his. Spectators gawked as the academician, in top hat and frock coat, stood on a bench daubing away at his already hung oils. With his color box beside him, he mixed pigments in whatever was handy, even stale beer, to touch up details that would provide some visual reference for his baffled viewers. Once, a colorful...