Word: ledouxes
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There have been only a few private art collections in this century that have managed to define a period, a style, a mood. One of them was put together by a wealthy New Yorker named Louis Vernon Ledoux; at its peak, before he died in 1948, it contained no more than 250 Japanese wood-block prints...
...Ledoux, a scholar who made fundamental contributions to the study of the print, was obsessed with absolute quality, if so chimerical an idea can be called "absolute." In the case of 18th century Japanese wood blocks, this quality lies in nuances of inking, registration and condition that are barely visible to the amateur. If Ledoux bought, say, a Utamaro, something had to be dropped from his chosen 250 to make room for it. Ledoux was a polisher, not a grabber; and as a result, any print that provably comes from his collection has enormous cachet for collectors of Japanese...
...short, Ledoux set an unsurpassable standard of taste...
...brain. This is the stock liberal ploy of separating Hitler from history for fear of contaminating history itself. In fact, the grandiosity of his architectural fantasy belongs to a whole tradition of visionary architecture, which encompasses idealist architects like the 18th century Frenchmen Boullée and Ledoux as well as the great Italian engraver Piranesi, who saw grandeur in prisons, glory in ruins. (In his memoir, Inside the Third Reich, Speer notes that Hitler took into account how his edifices might look as ruins a thousand years later.) And a debased 18th century neoclassicism, in fact, has long been...
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806), a protégé of Madame du Barry's who was appointed one of Louis XV's official architects in 1773, designed a spherical county ranger's house, 50 royal toll houses and observation posts, and a workers city for the state-owned saltworks of the Franche-Comté. The French Revolution intervened before any of his projects were built; but his company towns have long since been translated into reality...