Word: britishism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...faraway and long ago; visitors were hard put to assess them by contemporary-and so often geometric -standards. One critic noted that Dame Laura painted like a man. Said she in London when she heard of it, "What man?" Another called her a "popular painter," which roused her British ire the more: "Don't call me popular. I paint what I see, and I don't gild the truth." The truth through her eyes could be seen in the show's best canvas: a pain-racked image entitled Convalescent Gypsy. She had made no secret...
...thirties and forties she was off traveling with the circus, camping with gypsies, setting up easels in the ring at Blackfriars, hanging over the stalls in Covent Garden, sleeping under tent flaps, recording on canvas her impressions of the entertainment world. At 51 she was named Dame Commander, British Empire. Seven years later Dame Laura became the third female in 200 years to crack the hallowed full membership of the Royal Academy of Art. When the British government wanted someone to record the evil and drama of the Nürnberg trials after World War II, it chose Dame Laura...
Growing old and a trifle gnarled, the grand dame of British art still paints every day in her London "workshop." "It's not grand enough to call a studio," she insists, adding, rightly, that she is "not a great painter." But, she says, "it's not for lack of darned hard work. I never had more money than I needed. I am thankful to have known the facts and struggles of a common life." Humility shines through Dame Laura's art-and so does humanity...
...have returned disillusioned to Germany, Italy, Great Britain, France, Canada. What soured them on doing business behind the Bamboo Curtain was no political change of heart, but the best reason a businessman can have: unbusinesslike methods of doing business, developed by the Chinese into an exasperating art. Snapped a British trader: "Why go? It's a damned waste of time...
...Chinese further infuriated Western businessmen with high-handed, independent business practices. Businessmen ordering goods were forced to undergo long,, pompous lectures on Marxism. Prices and offers changed from day to day at Peking's whim, and officials often tried to play one trader off against another. A British businessman who went to Canton to buy 500 tons of vegetable oil was told it was not available. Then he was awakened at 4 a.m., told that Peking had decided to give him the oil. The next day Chinese authorities sold half the shipment to his competitors...