Word: gerring
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...seen such bustle and palaver on questions that only a few months ago were sacrosanct. European diplomats from both sides of the erstwhile Iron Curtain were talking again. Russia concluded an $800 million wheat deal with Canada, the largest such sale in history. West German Social Democrats and East Ger man Communists were preparing for open debates. The Vatican announced the resumption of relations with Communist Yugoslavia, a hint of ties to other Red nations in the future...
Sitting outside the famed Rotonde café in Montparnasse in 1921, the late Abstract Painter Fernand Léger spied what he described as "an extraordinary mobile object" bicycling alone, dressed in clergyman's black and a derby hat. Wrote the painter: "He advanced quietly, scrupulously obeying the laws of perspective." It was Le Corbusier...
...ger later had good cause to recall this first meeting with the angular man in black, who died last week of a heart attack at 77. Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret to a family of Swiss watchmakers, Le Corbusier adopted one of his mother's family names as an artistic signature and set out to become an architect and painter. He embraced the cult of purism, an art style so puritani cal that it purged even the strict geometries of cubism of any traces of anecdote or decoration. And he became a student of Auguste Perret, the pioneer of building...
...fact, at first Le Corbusier eliminated walls. His Domino house schema used floors like open terraces connected by cantilevered stairs and supported by interior columns. No longer load-bearing, walls could become curtains of glass; interior partitions could fall where whim or esthetics wanted them. Said Léger: "Corbusier made us a present of the white wall"-the perfect neutral setting for art. He hung stairs outside to leave interiors uncluttered. He lifted buildings on stilts, or pilotis, to free pedestrian space underneath, then doubled the available ground plan by building sheltered gardens on the roofs...
...there is an occasional cloud, it is the thought of how swiftly time has flown since he first arrived, a bedazzled Russian Jew, to greet Paris a full half-century ago. Of the pre-World War I luminaries that were then his contemporaries-the Frenchmen Braque, Matisse, Léger, Rouault, Delaunay, Villon, the Spaniard Juan Gris, the Rumanian Sculptor Brancusi, the Italian Modigliani, the Russians Kandinsky and Soutine-only Picasso, now 83, remains of those who gave the School of Paris its start. Of the two principal survivors, Picasso is the most protean and cerebral, Chagall the most constant...