Word: marquet
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When Albert Marquet and Henri Matisse were art students in Paris, they used to load their canvases into the same pushcart, hopefully trundle them off to the Autumn Salon. On one return trip, no canvases sold, Marquet lamented, "If only a bus would crash into our pushcart, we could at least collect the damages." Matisse soon trundled his own brilliant, revolutionary canvases into the front ranks of modern French art. Marquet settled down to painting workmanlike studies of boat-filled harbors and rivers, lagged far behind. He died in 1947, at 72, little known outside his native France...
Last week a Paris exhibit of unknown Marquet drawings showed that he was not always the serious, hard-working rearguard painter most people thought him. As relaxation from his more ambitious oils, Marquet had strolled the streets of Paris, doing maliciously observant sketches of the people he saw. In a few deft strokes, a blob of black ink or a casual crosshatching, he caught the posture and movement of a speeding cyclist, a barmaid scratching her head, an old fiacre driver waiting for a fare, a bemused, potbellied pedestrian...
Matisse compared old friend Marquet's sketches to those of Master Japanese Draftsman Hokusai. Said Paris-Presse Critic René Barotte: "It is difficult to express more life in fewer lines . . . impossible to use black and white better...
...prison gates opened to admit prisoners returning from work. "Their sentry followed. . . . Four hands were stretched towards me behind my comrades: Marquet held my brief case; Finot held a wallet with my money and papers in it. Moineau and David held nothing but their fingers. . . . They felt rough, warm and kind. At this moment the ball hit the ground, two of the players slipped and fell, and Duclos ran towards Desprez with his fists raised . . . knocked him down brutally." The guards rushed up to intervene. Shedding his prison overcoat, Hélion "shot out" of the gate...
...Britain; cession of the French Fleet to Germany; occupation of free France by the Germans; replacement of Petain by such outright pro-Germans as French Fascist Jacques Doriot, Pierre Etienne Flandin (notorious for cabling Hitler congratulations after Munich), Marcel ("Die for Danzig?") Deat, Super-Cop Adrien Marquet; use of French naval bases by the German Fleet; surrender to Germany of the League of Nations mandate over Syria; cession of Alsace-Lorraine, French Morocco, Tunisia, the Riviera; German use of French native troops in Equatorial Africa to take the Sudan from the rear; peace drives; war drives; the kitchen sink...