Word: bazin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...When Life Was Agreeable." With opening-day attendance more than 1,700, there was no question that the impressionists are a greater drawing card than ever before. Louvre Chief Curator Germain Bazin thinks he knows the reason. First, he points out in his forthcoming book, Impressionist Paintings in the Louvre, "impressionism has not yet become part of history. It is still a living legend." Second, at a time when France is sore beset on all sides, "impressionism gave back to us the vision of the days when life was agreeable, back in the 19th century, when Man, as always when...
...their ostracism from the Beaux-Arts' controlled annual Salon exhibition (the art mart of its day), the impressionists were men of their age. "Their poverty irked them especially," Bazin points out, "because it prevented their living that normal life, that stable existence, to which they aspired. It was quite different with Gauguin and Van Gogh. It was these two lunatics who started the rupture between the artist and society. To the 20th century they were the models for geniuses beyond the law, possessed by superhuman power, which . . . laid them...
Footlights & Picnics. Within the impressionists' circle, Manet and Monet together set off what Curator Bazin calls the "Cycle of Picnics," notes: "No school of painting has ever taken so much trouble to describe the life of its contemporaries, to show them their own pleasures, to help them forget their sorrows. No school of painting was ever so optimistic...
...triumph in bringing the ever-increasing harvest of impressionists together, Curator Bazin, with French pride, adds this footnote: "Those who deny that the French possess a sense of civic responsibility are advised to visit the Jeu de Paume. The impressionist gallery at the Louvre is not the accomplishment of the French government but of the people of France...
...greatest windfalls and lost opportunities. When Louis Philippe was forced to abdicate, he claimed the works as royal property, and they were sold in London after his death. "One does not dare to think of what the museum would have been if this collection had been retained," says Bazin mournfully. "It is the source of most of the Spanish pictures now dispersed in the galleries of Europe and America...