Word: bretons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...French poet Andre Breton, leader of the surrealist movement, once defined surrealism as the juxtaposition of the familiar with the fantastic. As TIME correspondents moved through the strange netherworld of the arms trade for this week's cover story, they reflected on their own surrealist experiences - sometimes comical, other times ominous - of encountering weapons both familiar and fantastic, in places both ordinary and exotic. TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs recalled watching a multiple rocket launcher known as a "Stalin organ" being unloaded from a Soviet ship at Luanda harbor in 1975 during the civil war in Angola. To his surprise...
There were, of course, many degrees of intensity under the wide shadow of realism. Painters of rural life, like Jules Breton, idealized rather more than their urban counterparts. There was a lengthy tradition of peasant decor in French art, and artists tended to see the country as a happy escape from the grinding realities of the city-the great exception being Millet, with his unfaltering sense of the earth and its rigors, and the stupors it enforced on those who worked it. One may doubt whether the women's work of gleaning after harvest was normally as dignified...
...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...
...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...