Word: buffone
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Picasso seemed like the last man in the world for the job. In 1937, art dealer Ambroise Vollard was looking for someone to illustrate Buffon's classic, 18th Century Histoire Naturelle. Picasso, who once remarked that "through art we express our conception of what nature is not," had just finished his grotesque, horribly unrealistic Guernica (TIME...
When Madame de Pompadour's pet Comte de Buffon began the first encyclopedic natural history, he simplified his task by casually describing each species in terms of one specimen. Two centuries later, Picasso has embellished the Count's manuscript in the same spirit: by etching each creature with easy, sometimes careless familiarity, as if it were an ancient inhabitant of his own private park...
Picasso's Oriental Deer is delicate and fleet enough to outrun one of Buffon's best rhapsodies. His Grasshoppers-which, like Buffon, he conceives as armored leaping machines-are pictured with the immediacy of a farmer awakening from a nap in the field to find them right under his nose. The vital, trembling Horse looks exactly like what Buffon must have meant when he said horses were "the noblest conquest man has ever made...
...mile Hollywood caricatures, manage, with the aid of some smooth dialogue to over shadow the big three on numerous occasions, Claude Raines, as the boot-licking, opportunistic Vichy chief of police is at his best. Conrad Veidt plays a Gestapo chief who, unlike the usual blustering buffon that Hollywood Nazis usually are, is more sinister than laughable. Peter Lorre, an unseen corpse after the first few scenes, and Dooley Wilson, playing "As Time Goes By" to repair broken hearts, complete the list of ingredients in this North African melting...
...Hahnemann Medical College, who looks like Harold Lloyd and has nuisance value among anthropologists because of his irritating lectures, was in fine, irritating fettle. He shocked his colleagues by declaring the whole concept of race to be "utterly erroneous and meaningless." He declared that early naturalists like Linnaeus and Buffon first tried to squeeze mankind into races according to complexion and other superficial traits, but anthropologists must now open their minds to the later discovery of genetic laws: Then the many differences among human groups will appear only as mutations within a single species. "Race" might perhaps have been redefined...