Word: modiglianis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Oveta knew her faults and her talents better than father Culp did. She ironed out her central-Texas drawl with elocution lessons, cultivated a taste for Modigliani, Bartok and yellow roses-as well as gowns by Valentina and Bergdorf Goodman hats.* She learned how to manage a vast (27-room), vaguely Georgian mansion. She learned about arcchitecture and decoration, collected antique silver. She acted in amateur theatricals, became a leader in social work, a Junior Leaguer, a patroness of the symphony...
...drew sketches and wrote about herself and her friends. On Modigliani: "All he did was growl; he used to make me shiver from head to foot." On Jean Cocteau: "He gave me a necklace fit for a queen." On Utrillo: "Once, after I had been posing for him, I went around to take a look and was knocked off my pins to discover that he had been drawing a little country house...
...something to hang on the wall." Corporation Lawyer* Colin and his wife decided on modern paintings as "more appropriate in a modern apartment-old masters in the same surroundings would be chichi." Though they specialize in such safe school-of-Paris bets as Rouault, Picasso, Matisse, Miro, Soutine and Modigliani, the Colins admit to having made some poor purchases: "But we love our mistakes-we never sell or exchange them...
...Modigliani's paintings lack size, as those of a sick young man are almost bound to do. But the natural elegance and sharpness of his art and his warmth of feeling for the friends and bed-companions he painted come close to compensating, sometimes, for his weaknesses...
Trapped between the bottle and the sickbed, he had to find a fast way of painting, one that took no particular study and needed little development. Compounded of his strengths and weaknesses, the style he settled for was as personal as a signature. Anybody who has seen one Modigliani can recognize a second one at a glance: almost all his painted people have swan necks, seesaw eyes and ski-run noses. Surprisingly enough, he was able to characterize each one sharply within that arbitrary formula. For traditional draftsmanship he substituted clear, smoothly looping lines that divide the canvas into locked...