Word: djuna
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...answer lies in Mielziner's versatility, resourcefulness, taste, feeling for detail. He may not have the creative power of such an old master as Robert Edmond Jones, the freshness of up-&-coming George Jenkins, the occasional witty elegance of Howard Bay. But he is seldom commonplace. To Writer Djuna Barnes his unique gift is "to lay age upon his settings," give them "a rich patina of occupancy...
...When Djuna Barnes showed her first oil painting, Portrait of Alice, at Peggy Guggenheim's Manhattan gallery last week, many critics were surprised to find that the woman who wrote Nightwood (1937) could paint with similar distinction. In Nightwood no less magisterial and exacting a critic than T. S, Eliot found "the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy...
...output of original and talented Djuna Barnes consists of a total of six paintings and six peculiar books. The Portrait of Alice is a full-length study of a woman in a burgundy robe standing against a background of gold. It suggests the quality as well as the style of the great Italian primitives. Asked last week how she came to paint Alice (1934), Djuna Barnes said: "I asked myself one day, why not paint a painting? ... I painted most of it on my hands & knees, because I couldn't afford an easel...
Thin, pale, 50-year-old Djuna Barnes was born in Cornwall-on-the-Hudson. Her father was a jack of all talents who played five musical instruments, so disliked his father that he changed his name Buddington to Barnes. Djuna was named after Prince Djalma in The Wandering Jew, but her young brother's mispronunciation changed everything. She prefers to call herself The Barnes...
...Guardia, the balance of this over-long issue is little more than a tribute to the editor who single-handled amassed this list of famous names, but who apparently could not reject the cast-offs to those authors who print their best elsewhere. The contributions of William Carlos Williams, Djuna Barnes, and Horace Gregory are less than shamefully insignificant. Marya Zaturenska's "Organ, Harp, and Violin," a palpable parroting of Dryden's "song for St. Cecilia's Day," combines with a host of insignificantly obscure poetry to bewilder the reader and to detract from the worthwhile portions of the issue...