Word: bretons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
LIFE AMONG THE SURREALISTS, by Matthew Josephson (403 pp.: Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $6). Matthew Josephson roared through the '20s like the New Culture Special, stopping here for some Dada nihilism, there for surrealistic analysis and along the way meeting up with Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Ernst, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Malcolm Cowley, Katherine Anne Porter and Hart Crane. With these qualifications, his memoirs might be expected to say something significant. But although his anecdotes are amusing and interesting, they are only dimly illuminating. Somehow the fact that Hart Crane was a drunk and had a penchant for throwing...
Hypnotic Gas. A quiet, secretive, self-educated, 39-year-old intellectual who is calm and courteous on the set and an utter mystery to his friends, Resnais was born in Vannes, the son of a Breton pharmacist. He made his first motion picture, called Adventures of Fantomas, when he was 13, using 8-mm. film and proceeding on the lovely green theory that if he concentrated on closeups his child actors would look adult...
...Surrealist Poet André Breton, Moreau is "the great solitary of the Rue de La Rochefoucauld who carried farthest the power of evocation." U.S. Abstractionist Mark Tobey said of his work: "There are 200 years of painting here." Other observers might feel more inclined to agree with the art critic of Lettres Françaises: "I don't believe there is a public in 1961 that could lay claim to being drawn to this parade of dandies, she-animals, androgynes and all the comics of mythology. The form is thin, compromised by heavy preoccupation with detail. The landscapes...
...movement." But what began as a serious if wild attempt to break new ground tended to deteriorate into mere sensationalism, and Ernst moved on to surrealism. Though he formally broke with the movement in 1938 in protest against the highhandedness of its self-appointed leader, Poet Andre Breton, he has remained a surrealist in spirit ever since...
Originally, the aim of the surrealists-aside from the aim to shock and to make publicity-was to open up the realm of hallucination, of legend, dreams, and even madness. "The marvelous is always beautiful; any facet of the marvelous is beautiful; indeed, only the marvelous is beautiful," wrote Breton. In one way, time has been kind to the movement, for the best of its members were good artists. But in a world so inured to artistic high jinks, much of the marvelous is gone...