Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...short, a hero. He was born in 1819 the son of a farmer, lived as a socialist, and died in 1877 exiled in Switzerland, his paintings deemed unexhibitable in France on political grounds. In the end, Courbet was financially crushed by a judgment imposed on him by the French government of more than 300 million francs -- precisely the cost of re-erecting the Vendome Column, the imperial symbol for whose toppling, during the Paris Commune of 1871, he was unjustly blamed...
...Orsay. Such things can no longer be moved. Without them, can a Courbet retrospective make full sense? Emphatically yes. The character of Courbet the painter is richly distributed through his work, not just in its most famous images; in any case, the curators have secured other magisterial works from French museums, such as his great image of lesbian love, Sleep, 1866, and The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer...
...surprise of the show is Courbet's Origin of the World, 1866, by far the most transgressive image in 19th century painting. Long presumed lost, it turned up appropriately enough in the collection of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. It is a frontal view of a woman's pubes, painted with vast enthusiasm: the symbolic climax, one might say, of the series of dark caverns Courbet painted in his native countryside, The Source of the Loue, 1864. The objectivity of Courbet's work connotes a deep and sensuous love of whatever he painted. Sometimes his portraits of dead birds...
...maze of subplots, Durand allows a sex scene or two, but his real love story is filial. As Daddy nears the end game, the book presents its sole ambiguity as father and son compete for the title role. Is the innocent American fit for parentage? Or has the little French garcon acquired a more mature knowledge of human treachery and altruism? Debating the question, Europeans have driven Thomas' adventure to the top of their best-seller lists. It is likely to have a commensurate success in the U.S., where some people fondly remember Father Knows Best and the rest...
Folk traditions of quite another, although not dissimilar, sort animate a second fluky hit, The Gipsy Kings. The record, sung in a Gypsyfied merging of Spanish and French, sold well over a million copies in Europe and interested the intrepid Elektra in a U.S. release. All members of the same family, the Gipsy Kings make up a jolly band that combines the sly funk of salsa and the brio of flamenco with some of the blowout intensity of rock. The band does have mainstream appeal. The "adult contemporary" step-uncle of MTV, VH-1, recently chose the Kings' video...