Word: lasse
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...Mark Lass, plump, solemn and 61, claimed he had been a Red general. His brother Boris, 64, he said, was a concert violinist and had been the Soviet Union's top art official in the early 19205. They left Russia for Japan in 1926, taking with them 200 "masterpieces" collected by their mother. Settling finally in Manhattan, they became naturalized citizens in 1945. By then their collection totaled some 280 canvases, which they valued at about $25 million, included paintings with such signatures as Gauguin, Van Gogh, Soutine, Cezanne and Monet. But money was running out. Nine months...
Warned by the Better Business Bureau, police forwarded photos of two Lass "Picassos" to Picasso himself, and the master labeled both fakes. Museum experts declared the older pictures largely student efforts, with signatures clumsily painted in. The Lasses stood firm under fire, protesting that an international art cartel was out to get them. But the brothers' own art tastes seemed confused. "Picasso," said Mark Lass, "is a mere cartoonist." But when he was asked how much he would take for one of his "Picassos," he answered: "I would not sell under half a million dollars. I would destroy instead...
...fact, it seemed possible that their prospective customers were shrewder than the bumbling brothers. For in the nine months the Re-Mi Gallery was open, the Lass brothers did not sell a single picture...
...curtain-raiser, the Guild offered Menotti's The Telephone (1947), an oft-done two-character farce about a lad on the make for a lass; but, alas, her auricular and ventricular concerns are maddeningly telephonic...
...poets and composers of the day-Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Haydn, Beethoven. Between 1806 and 1818 Beethoven set more than 100 songs for Thomson for an estimated ?550. In this album the towering German genius is improbably linked to such folksy titles as Faithful Johnie and The Lovely Lass of Inverness. All the tunes have a willowy charm, and occasional instrumental passages sound unmistakably vigorous echoes of Beethoven's more familiarly muscular style...