Word: bric-a-brac
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...finder. Equal division in quantity is relatively simple, but equal division in quality offers great problems. In 1912 German Archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt quietly extracted from Tel-el-Amarna, and removed to Berlin, a gracile bust of Queen Nefertiti which was more precious to Egyptians than tons of jeweled bric-a-brac. First, it was supposed to possess magical properties. Second, it was pronounced by worldwide experts to be among the loveliest creations of the ancient dynasties. For a few dollars, the Berlin museum supplied plaster reproductions (colored) to all who asked. Innumerable Egyptians became enraged, challenged Germany's right...
...typewriter, and this defect, which he parades as did the fox in the fable, has stood in the way of his writing a great play. He despises love, and therefore cannot appeal deeply to mankind." Wagner's Parsijal is dismissed as "that bizarre compound of rickety Buddhism and bric-a-brac Christianity." When Maupassant, mewed in his asylum, waited for death, "he became a mere machine, and perhaps the only pleasure he experienced was the hallucination of bands of black butterflies that seemed to sweep across his room." Oscar Wilde "was a born newspaper man." Critic Huneker was never content...
Like a great mausoleum the Metropolitan Museum of Art over an acre of Central Park in Manhattan, facing houses of the rich on Fifth Avenue. Inside are many tombs-tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs, of exalted bric-a-brac, of Art. In the art tombs are laid away examples of the work of the great painters and sculp- tors of other times. There are Rubenses, Rembrandts,* Rodins, Titians, Tintorettos, Tiepolos, scores of time-proven mediocrities, one Botticelli. Progressive artists throughout the East have long given up hope for modernity in the Metropolitan. Few of them ever visit its vaults. Scathingly they...
...Thomas O. Marvin, wife of the U. S. Tariff Commissioner, told last week how, upon entering a Boston antique shop, she found $3,000 worth of bric-a-brac which had been stolen early in June from the Marvin summer home near Portsmouth...
...quietly in Great Neck, L. I. Sir Joseph Duveen and others were commissioned to start an Italian collection for the Hamilton home. They bought paintings by Veneziano, dei-Conti, Francia, Perugino, Melzi, Desiderio, Botticelli. Titian. The Hamilton home became a Renaissance rarity, authentic in painting, sculpture, tapestry, velvet, bric-a-brac. When it proved too small to hold the collections, Collector Hamilton moved to a 14-room apartment on Park Avenue, Manhattan...