Word: lifeness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...general consent, Jean-Siméon Chardin was one of the supreme artists of the 18th century, and probably the greatest master of still life in the history of painting. Yet there has not been, until now, a full-dress retrospective of his work. To mark the 200th anniversary of his death, at the age of 80 in 1779, a huge Chardin show opened in January at the Grand Palais in his native Paris, with 142 paintings, drawings and pastels, and a catalogue by one of Europe's most distinguished art historians, Pierre Rosenberg. Two American institutions took part...
...special place. One does not need to be a historian to know how narrow his field of social vision was. He ignored the public ostentation of his time, as well as the private misery. Most of his paintings are condensed sonnets in praise of the middle path, the sober life of the Parisian petite bourgeoisie, especially as embodied in his own household. He is said to have had a chirpy sense of humor, and there is certainly a sly and robust irony in his singeries, or monkey paintings, where hairy little parodies of man play at being painters and connoisseurs...
...installation, which denies the paintings the daylight they need, and bathes everything in electric glare. What remains unmistakable is the way Chardin extended his ideal of the family to include groups of objects as well as people. Once one has been through the show, the props of his still lifes, which were also the normal appurtenances of his home life, become like familiar faces: the patriarchal mass of his copper water urn, perched on its squat tripod; the white teapot with its rakish finial; the painted china that signaled his growing prosperity, and so on down to the last stoneware...
...emblems of an oppressed proletariat on the eve of the French Revolution are simply beside the point. A sense of social precariousness is the last thing one could expect to meet in a Chardin; indeed, one can hardly imagine him working without the conviction that his way of life was immutable-that there would always be nurses to make beef tea, scullions to bargain for chickens, and governesses to scold the children; that the kitchen skimmers and casseroles and spice pots that he painted, over and over again, were in some important sense as durable as the Maison Carr...
...with assistance from beaming teammates and friends like Franco Harris, O.J. Simpson and Sam ("Bam") Cunningham. As part of the mostly traditional ceremony, Swann, who writes poetry on the sidelines, recited one ditty composed for his bride ("My soul is your soul and time is our instrument to build life upon love"). He also explained the Swanns' way: "We're both very oldfashioned. That's why we didn't live together before we got married...