Word: breton
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...travel, so in art: the painters looked to foreign sources, inside and outside France, for inspiration-Breton carvings, the crude popular woodcuts known as the images d'Epinal and, above all, the Japanese wood-block prints that had been arriving in France in a steady trickle for the quarter of a century since Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay. What these influences produced, in the work of Van Gogh, Gauguin and the various painters who were, at one moment or another during the late '80s, linked to their work (among them, Maurice Denis, Louis Anquetin, Emile Bernard, Paul Serusier...
...transformation as abrupt as Picasso's switch from the soft-edged, attenuated figures of his blue period to the African ferocities of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Miró launched into his "dream paintings." These were derived partly from his fascination with his new surrealist friends in Paris, Breton and Eluard, and their talk of dream imagery, free association, irrational juxtaposition. And partly from plain hunger. As Miró explains, "Sometimes I hadn't had any supper. I saw things ... I saw shapes in the chinks in the walls and shapes on the ceiling." Typical of this period...
...real spice of the islands is talk-and very good talk it can be. The lingua franca of the Lesser Antilles is English, though it is not always understood on St. Barts, where the blacks also speak Creole and villagers of Breton and Norman descent converse in varied patois. While Dutch is their official language, few Statians or Sabans ever use it. Many, however, do speak Papiamento, the merry island melange of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, English and African dialects ("Bon tim ni un quenta ta coppé tras mi mucha muhé; bai hombre sushi, i lagele...
...elegant boutiques and enough local eccentrics to fill a Truffaut film. However, St. Barts-named by Columbus for his brother Bartolomeo-is more than a transplanted French beach resort. It is a beautiful, pastoral island, whose inhabitants-95% of the population of 2,800 are white-are mostly of Breton and Norman descent. In villages perched on the hillsides, older women still wear quichenottes, the starched white bonnets of Brittany. Some of the countryfolk have never traveled the dozen miles to Gustavia, the capital and only town. They are fisherfolk, sailors, carpenters and masons; the women weave delicate hats...
...example, one's understanding of the motives of the Pont-Aven painters, Paul Gauguin and the artists who gathered around him in Brittany?Emile Bernard, Maurice Denis, Paul S�rusier and others?can only be enriched by seeing how their more traditional contemporaries dealt with the same subjects of Breton life. Brittany pervaded the salons of the 1880s. Its landscape of tight villages, stony shorelines, near primitive Christian rituals and crude effigies was visited by artist after artist, in the hope of finding not only good local color for genre scenes but plenty of metaphysical symbolism as well. "Atheist that...