Word: gauguins
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...show also offers two rare plaques by Thomas Eakins, some magical shadow boxes by Joseph Cornell, a fine head by Gauguin, some abstractions by David Smith, whom Hirshhorn began buying 20 years ago. From A (for Archipenko. Armitage and Arp) to Z (for Zadkine, Zajac and Zorach), the exhibition provides a splendid survey of modern sculpture, all the more refreshing because Hirshhorn collected it with no pretensions and no esthetic doubletalk, but simply out of his own compulsive love. When asked why he bought Epstein's Visitation, he explains: "It was a serene, beautiful piece which excited...
...impressionism, he was responsible for the perception with which Cezanne observed nature, and for his devotion to inner construction. When a pompous friend, expecting him to laugh, took him to an exhibition of Henri Rousseau, Pissarro astonished the gallery by praising the primitive warmly. It was Pissarro who aided Gauguin after he gave up the Bourse for a fulltime career in art, and it was Pissarro who taught the young Van Gogh to open his canvases...
...against all the ready-made standards of beauty and proportion handed down year after year by the powerful Art Students League. Davis' next teacher was the 1913 Armory Show, which he saw when he was not yet 20. It was sheer emancipation to see that Van Gogh and Gauguin used color, not as nature had it, but almost arbitrarily in accordance with artistic instinct. Davis also discovered that "cubism allowed you to form the concept of the object as you saw it from different views." When he had absorbed the show, he knew what direction he would take...
...morality of the biographical novel as practiced by Somerset Maugham (Gauguin is called Strickland) and Irving Stone (Van Gogh is called Van Gogh) is shaky but probably defensible; the gross offense of distorting a man's life can be justified to some extent if it helps the novelist to capture the quality of the man's spirit. But there is no literary or historical justification for the cynical trespass Herman Wouk has committed in Youngblood Hawke. It is not merely a distortion; it is an act of violence...
Between October 1958 and July 1959, the gross at Sotheby's was $16 million, including $770,000 for a Peter Paul Rubens (see opposite page), until last week the highest price ever paid at an auction. A Gauguin Tahitian scene, owned by George Goodyear of Buffalo, fetched $364,000. Cezanne's Peasant in a Blue Blouse got $406,000; and Gainsborough's Mr. and Mrs. Robert Andrews brought $364,000, the top price ever paid at an auction for an English painting...