Word: eiffel
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Alas, that grande dame of the Paris skyline, the 1,052-ft.-tall Eiffel Tower, is ailing. Parisians fretted last week as the French press disclosed that their cherished 88-year-old monument was in need of $10.5 million worth of repairs. Most alarming is the condition of one of her antique hydraulic elevators that take visitors from the second to the third observation platform. The newsmagazine L 'Express quoted from a confidential 1970 report by the tower's chief engineer, who had warned of the lift's "serious fatigue." A cylinder might burst, he contended, causing...
Excessive and Exaggerated. The tower's infirmities came to light just as the Société de la Tour Eiffel, a private and profitable management company, made a bid to negotiate a loan for the repairs that would be guaranteed by the city of Paris. The resulting outcry in the press appalled the Société. Scare headlines like WILL THE EIFFEL TOWER DIE? were termed "excessive and exaggerated." Still, tourism is down about 10%, while visitors scanned the struts with nervous attention...
...most imposing symbol was the Eiffel Tower, erected when Robert Delaunay was four years old: now a venerable cliche of tourism, but to Parisians then the tallest structure on earth and a cathedral of modernity. "The Eiffel Tower is my fruit-dish," Delaunay liked to say, in a dig at cubist still life. From 1909 onward, he painted it at least 30 times: close up or on the skyline, seen from above or below, aggressively sharp or half-dissolved in mists of color, broken, dislocated, twisting upward, a veritable Tower of Babel. No painter had dealt with this emblem...
...most of the 35 years since he died of cancer in 1941, Robert Delaunay has been an anomaly, slightly blurred in silhouette-the Cubist Who Wasn't. He painted the Eiffel Tower over and over again. He made a series of compositions based on brightly banded circles, one of which-The First Disc, 1912-is almost certainly the first abstract picture painted in France by a Frenchman. Born in 1885, a few years after Braque and Picasso, he tended to be conventionally pigeonholed by art historians as one of their more gifted epigones. And yet, as one can plainly...
...Sing under the Occupation) was an 80-minute documentary on the good life in Paris under Nazi rule in 1940-44. Interspersed among shots of Chevalier mugging and clowning were newsreels of Wehrmacht troops marching up the Champs-Elysées, the swastika fluttering on the Eiffel Tower, and German soldiers ogling nudes at the Lido nightclub. Even grimmer was the shot of the roundup of 13,000 Jews at the Velodrome d'Hiver for deportation to Nazi death camps...