Word: lions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is something incredibly pat and wonderfully sappy about the George Foreman story, a sort of factual mockery of the best-known work of Sylvester Stallone. This guy was bad, as he himself put it. He kept a lion and a tiger because they were bad. He had 47 fights and knocked out 42 men. He took the world title by half killing Joe Frazier in 1973 and then lost it the next year in Zaire to Muhammad Ali, who could not have been brought down that night by a tank. "I be alright when the swelling goes down," Foreman...
...first 17 days of wide release, Mask is this year's first strong entry in the weepstakes. Its subject, Rocky Dennis, was the butt of one of God's practical jokes. This bright teenager had a preternaturally sweet disposition--and the grotesque face of Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion. Rocky's rare disease, craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, ended his life at 16, in 1978. And yet (of course) he was one of nature's noblemen, loved by puppies, blind girls and the motorcycle gang his mother Rusty hung out with. "I look weird," says Rocky (Eric Stoltz, in a wonderfully authentic performance...
This reputation rests, for Americans, almost wholly on one painting. It was no slight thing to have painted The Sleeping Gypsy, by now perhaps the most famous dream image in Western art. The silhouette of a sniffing lion, with one unwinking yellow eye and a tail stiffly outstretched, its tip erect as though charged with static electricity, quivering like Rousseau's own paintbrush; the swollen, white Melies moon; the black nomad like a toppled statue, her feet with their pink toenails gravely sticking up; the djellaba, with its rippling stripes of coral, Naples yellow, cerulean; and the lute, like...
What we see in this wholly enjoyable show is a painter whose high moments (two owned by Paris' Musee d'Orsay, War and The Snake Charmer; two by MOMA, The Sleeping Gypsy and The Dream; and one by a private collector, The Hungry Lion) must be weighed against a good deal of medium-rate work and potboiling. Enjoyment of the lesser Rousseaus is usually tinged with condescension, though at least they are not cute or kitschy, like the truckloads of pseudonaive painting that would sprout from Montmartre to Haiti after his death. They have their period charm; you have...
...images of "natural" authority. Rousseau was less of a sweet fabulist than one is apt to suppose. His hero was Leo, king of the beasts, with vassals arranged in order of domination in their palm court. Some emblems of ferocity gave him trouble. The hero of The Hungry Lion, 1905, has a crescent of human dentures, and might be biting into a watermelon; the unhappy antelope, because of Rousseau's difficulty in drawing its head twisted at such an angle, is duckbilled; the eagle and owl, with their strips of meat, look stuffed. And yet the jungle--that lattice...