Word: artiste
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...when it finally does, the question that has been forming in your mind--why Shea decided to write about Lermontov and not Pushkin--begins to dissipate. Of course Lermontov is a tinhorn, a two-bit mock-up of Pushkin, a caricature of a radical artist who is grotesque rather than tragic (though, by some trick, he becomes almost tragic in the end). That is precisely the point; Pushkin was above revolution, though he was a friend of revolutionaries. He saw through it. Lermontov was beneath revolution; he was merely bored, dissatisfied with things the way they were for some vague...
...insane asylum. Yet his masterpiece, The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke, combines Boschian mystery with Alice-in-Wonderland fantasy in a way that makes it clear Dadd was a prophet of Surrealism. In a recent issue of the New Statesman, Critic Edward Lucie-Smith declares: "No 20th century British artist has succeeded in producing a picture as powerful yet as inexplicable...
...opiates were common. Dadd survived this hell for six years. In 1852, Dr. William Hood, a pioneer in England of modern mental therapy, was assigned to Bethlehem. Hood encouraged Dadd to take up brush and pencil once again. Hood's hospital steward, George Henry Haydon, was an amateur artist and encouraged Dadd further. Dadd dedicated The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke to Haydon, gave it to him before he died at the age of 67 in 1886. The late poet Siegfried Sassoon, who gave it to London's Tate Gallery in 1963, inherited it indirectly from Haydon...
...over the entire assemblage, to be broken only after the blade descends. Yet only an ax that severed the canvas itself could destroy the weird, calligraphic network of garlanded vines and leaves, giant blades of timothy and field grass that binds the picture together. It is as though the artist were striving to piece together a shattered world, unite natural and supernatural, impose method on madness. He hardly succeeds, but the effort carries its own fascination...
Then there is the 30th floor apartment of Sam (children's clothes) and Alyce Simon. Mrs. Simon, who describes herself as an "atomic artist," has ripped out all the original interior walls and floors, turned a six-room apartment into a three-room suite that gives the impression of a space platform suspended in the Manhattan sky. Equally intriguing is the eleventh-floor abode of William and Milly Johnstone. Johnstone is a retired officer of Bethlehem Steel Corp.; Mrs. Johnstone, who likes to be called "Milly-san," is a Zen disciple who religiously performs her daily Japanese tea ceremony...