Word: napoleons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Fernandel, 67, elastic-featured French comedian who mugged his way to international cinema fame in The Little World of Don Camilla (1951); of cancer; in Paris. His real name was Fernand Contandin, but he preferred "just one name. Like Napoleon." He won an amateur singing contest in 1928, eleven years later was voted the most popular screen personality in France. His lantern jaw and Grand Canyon grin once prompted Actor Sacha Guitry to inquire with impeccable Gallic politeness: "Has anyone ever told you, monsieur-how odd-that you look like a horse...
...better plays is a kind of psychosocial profile of a man with a raging obsession, a feverishly disordered imagination. He may be a hypocrite, a miser, a misanthrope. In Molière's view, such a man is as mad as a man who claims to be Napoleon; the only cure is a cascade of laughter and the bracing tonic of common sense...
...future. There are, after all, lessons in history, aren't there? Not always. Looking back to the English Civil War of the 17th century and the Restoration of Charles II, French royalists, for example, expected an early return of the Bourbons after their own revolution. They got Napoleon instead. Some social prophets today have suggested that the sexual permissiveness of the 1960s will be followed by a puritanical reaction during the '70s. That, after all, is what happened in England after the licentiousness of the Restoration, and in the U.S. after the giddiness of the '20s. Perhaps...
...Tenth Street. But by the end of the '60s, his virtues had to an extent rebounded on his reputation. His astounding skill as a traditional, realistic draftsman looked vaguely suspect to some critics. The ironical love with which he raided the beaux-arts tradition for such images as Napoleon, a reworking of David's 1812 portrait of the hero, struck them as literary but in the wrong way: not philosophical enough, unconcerned (unlike Johns and Rauschenberg) with the semantics and sign structure of art. The new celebrity artist was the cool and silent Andy Warhol...
...Rome in 1806 with a scholarship he had won to the French Academy there. He was 26, already known as a Parisian prodigy; he came to a town whose social and intellectual life seems to have struck him as a mere echo of what he had known in Napoleon's Paris. A few weeks after settling into the Villa Medici, he wrote to his fiancee in Paris, Julie Forestier: "I cordially loathe Rome ... it is very beautiful, but, in a few words, everything is provincial compared to the great city of Paris." Rome slowly seduced him. Soon afterward Mile...