Word: davids
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Hurry, hurry, my dear friend, thumb over your Plutarch and choose a subject familiar to everyone-it counts a great deal." Jacques-Louis David, the painter prophet of the French Revolution, was advising a favorite pupil. "Now give yourself to what really constitutes history painting," he went on. "All other sorts . . . will disappear; only this is safe from men's passions...
...curly-maned old lion could never have dreamed it, but his kind of painting, which put ideas ahead of emotions, was on the verge of obscurity for a century or more. The romantic French masters who followed him, from Courbet and Delacroix on, were apt to consider David more of a pedant than a painter-and a passionless clod to boot. They were wrong, as a huge David exhibition, the biggest showing of his work ever held, proved last week in Paris...
...centuries after his birth, David's place in art history was finally assured. He had lived through an age when history marched with a heavy and decisive tread, and he had stamped it with the mark of his genius and his will. His austere neo-classicism helped set the tone, and even the fashions of the First Republic and later of Napoleon's Empire...
Last week, in the musty old Observer office, there was hardly a ripple when a bright young man took over as editor. He was forthright David Astor, 36, whose grandfather bought the paper from Lord Northcliffe one year before young David was born. He took the tiller from Editor Ivor Brown, who returned to his favorite pursuits of drama critic and essayist. In Brown's six-year term, the Observer had gone nonpartisan, and become a better all-round paper (except to Tories) than Lord Kemsley's rival Sunday Times...
...Openers. As editor, David Astor had more to recommend himself than the family name. No man to let his schooling interfere with his education, he took six months off between Eton and Oxford to roam Germany. In Heidelberg one day in 1931, he saw and was shocked by a prenatal symptom of the police state: lines of trucks packed with truncheon-bearing police, ready to charge if unionists clashed with rowdy Nazi paraders. His mother, Nancy Astor, and her Cliveden Set didn't want to be beastly to the Germans during the Munich era, but David Astor was already...