Word: bazin
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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...
Strolling over the Louvre's polished parquet floors, Bazin likes to philosophize on two great portraits. Titian's Francis I (who seems to be examining the jewel of his collection, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa) and Hyacinthe Rigaud's Louis XIV (loftily surveying the great expanse of the 300-yard-long Grande Galerie). Both have a right to their proprietary air. Bazin feels, since, along with Napoleon, they are among the Louvre's greatest benefactors...
...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...
...Curator Bazin utters a proud Frenchman's protest against comparing Napoleon's vacuum-cleaner sweep of European art with the wholesale robbery by Hitler and Goring. Napoleon, Bazin insists, was motivated by the lofty ideal of creating a new and universal European culture, and was within the ethics of his time. But after Waterloo, Napoleon's conquerors saw Napoleon's operation uplift in another light, stripped the Louvre of 5,233 precious art objects, left little more than 100 canvases and 800 drawings...