Word: artiste
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...initials in the dining table. Last week, at the famed Punch Round Table, the ghosts of onetime Punchinellos Tennyson, Thackeray and Mark Lemon might have quit the premises in disgust. For the first time in its history, the venerable humor magazine was to have an editor who was an artist instead of a writer...
...When I visit the museum of fine arts and look at the pictures, and when I happen to admire them, I don't first assure myself that the painter was a good man . . . [But] is it possible that the visible presence of the artist makes a relevant difference? For in applauding his performance we are applauding the whole man there before us-the man with his entire past peering through his present. . . I admit that I keep away from performances by [Nazi] collaborators; I don't want to go . . . [but] the point is that while my feelings point...
Connolly is chiefly concerned with "the artist," and with what makes him tick, and stop ticking. Why, asks Connolly, does young "Mr. Shelleyblake" write a first novel that the critics hail as bursting with "promise"-only to find that in his next novels young Shelleyblake fails to deliver the promised goods? Is the broken promise the fault of Shelleyblake himself, or of his critics, or of the world in which he writes...
What fatally distorts Critic Connolly's frank and intelligent book is his conception of "the artist." To Connolly, art is a fragile thing, and its maker a highly vulnerable esthete. Gide, Proust, Strachey, Rimbaud and other artists of a particularly tortured and susceptible nature are his inspiration; he draws none from more robust types such as Dickens, Trollope, Shaw, Dostoevsky, Thackeray. His artist is a creature entirely different from the rest of humanity-a fact that makes Connolly regard Mr. Shelleyblake's failure as something horrifying and unusual, as though it were not a common fate...
Indeed, the one terrible enemy of promise that Connolly ignores is the third degree to which the "artist" is subjected today by lovers of the arts such as Connolly himself. A glaring spotlight, directed by dogmatic esthetes, assures the artist of his isolation and triumphantly detects his childhood scars and disfiguring pockmarks. Esthetic policemen suspiciously sniff his every breath and lay down chalk lines which they order him to follow; he is never released, only paroled. A similar attitude toward a baker would alone be enough to ruin any promise of good bread...