Word: easel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...artistic "house"' of Breton's poem. There are a stone terrace built by Tanguy (a do-ityourself fan), a pond with decoy ducks, and a rowboat for "harvesting the bull-rushes." Artist Tanguy works in a made-over barn. As he describes it, he simply stands before his easel and begins to paint?without plan, without thought of what he is doing. Says he: "I am still the prisoner of my skin while I am painting, but otherwise I am free...
What the four had in common was honesty and joy in life. Otherwise, they were as different as artists can be. Albert Pinkham Ryder best expressed their common joy when he remarked that "the artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance." Thomas Eakins expressed their straightforwardness while teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. For insisting on using nude models in class, he was forced to resign. (Later, in one of his most famed paintings of a nude-overleaf-Eakins soberly included the chaperone...
...still obsessed with despair. A hollow man sits in a Waste Land landscape daubing at a canvas on which is painted nothing but a big hole. Rats, which to Grosz represents man's conscience "always gnawing at him for the deed he did not do," chew at the easel. This painter once believed in something, explains Grosz, but now he paints only a hole, "without meaning, without anything - nothing but nothingness, the nothingness of our time...
...main element of Cremonini's paintings is force. His father cultivates a gentle sensibility while coaxing locomotives up to 75 miles an hour; the son works up power standing before an easel. Among his early subjects were slaughterhouse carcasses-gleaming slabs of meat and bone which caught his eye in the local abattoirs. Later came the fishermen and bathers of Ischia, where he is living, and rock-hard women like the one at right. He works on as many as 20 canvases at once, explains that "they are all slowly maturing...
John Singer Sargent, standing at the easel in his studio on London's Tite Street, used to mutter, "Gainsborough would have done it!" But in his heart he knew he was no Gainsborough. What Sargent had in abundance was a capacity for flattering his sitters in paint, and naturally they flocked to him. He complained that "portrait painting is a pimp's profession," and late in life he swore off it. "No more paughtraits," he wrote triumphantly to a friend. "I abhor and abjure them and hope never to do another, especially of the Upper Classes...