Word: manet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Written by the British art critic and historian Ian Dunlop, Degas (Harper & Row; 240 pages; $37.50) is by far the best introduction to the life and work of the painter of boulevards and ballet dancers now in print. A student of Ingres's and the great contemporary of Manet, Flaubert Sand the Goncourt brothers, Degas was one of those ocular witnesses without whom the cultural life of France in the 19th century cannot be understood; and no writer has done a better job of placing this tetchy, formidable genius, with his astonishing powers of observation iand his bitter tongue...
Charles Saxon's One Man's Fancy (Dodd, Mead; unpaged; $10.95) is a collage of upwardly mobile Americana. "Is it Manet or Monet who isn't as good as the other?" asks a culture-hungry matron. A father holds his little girl's hand: "What did you learn in school today?" She shows him: an over-the-shoulder judo throw...
...somewhat differently than a young one? This may be explained by the pure accident that there are very few of them on the market just now, so it is possible that the artist did make weird and wonderful journeys in the tangled warren traversed by the successors of Manet, Degas, et al., but here, now, it is hard to trace a great deal of development...
...EDOUARD MANET painted At the Railroad Station; four years later Claude Monet painted a similar scene. Manet chose to depict two pretty women sitting under a sunny sky with the station creating a bland industrial backdrop. Monet omitted the smiling women, painting only the dark, smoky blue train station; and the opening shot of Julia is a technicolor replica of his ominous image--an image that is repeated frequently throughout the film. Julia is the story of Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda) and her childhood friend (Vanessa Redgrave) whom she christens "Julia," who together lost the insular beauty of their adolescence...
Exactly a century after Manet painted his picture, Hellman published Pentimento, a series of autobiographical vignettes. Julia's story, included in the book, is at times both sentimentally nostalgic and self-righteous, but Hellman recounts it without becoming offensive. In this filmed version, Alvin Sargent's adaptation and Fred Zinnemann's direction usually retain Hellman's balance. At times, however, the women's deep friendship becomes cloying, subtly but soppily suggesting an adolescent lesbian relationship, an implication Hellman worked to avoid. And in the movie Hellman-and-Julia's admittedly courageous antifascist actions are presented as historically unequalled acts...