Word: pascin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...past half-century, School-of-Paris art has been an international product. Among those who contributed most to it were six expatriate Jews: Amedeo Modigliani, Jules Pascin, Ossip Zadkine, Jacques Lipchitz, Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine. Philadelphia Art Collector Albert C. Barnes once bought 50-odd Soutines at a swoop, called him "a far more important artist than Van Gogh...
...every drink that Chaim Soutine refused, Jules Pascin downed twelve. Ulcers did not bother him, though his overworked liver did. In 1930, when he was 45, it became clear that his liver would soon give out altogether. Pascin slashed his wrists, wrote "Lucy, pardonnez-moi" in blood on the wall, and, for good measure, hanged himself. The girl friend of the message, Lucy Krogh, subsequently opened an art gallery. Last week she staged a retrospective show of Pascin's paintings and drawings...
...pictures were superb, so far as they went. Almost all of them were of Montmartre floozies in various stages of undress. A master draftsman, Pascin employed the sfumato (blurring of lines) dear to Da Vinci. His models were not so much outlined as enmeshed in delicate, shifting parentheses. Being no great shakes as a colorist, he avoided strong hues, tinted his figures with light dabs of pearly paint. No other artist, except Lautrec, ever mixed sweetness and sordidness more successfully. What kept Pascin out of Lautrec's league was that he had no bite; his paintings were pale...
...Pascin (rhymes with askin') was born rich, the son of a Bulgarian grain merchant. He traveled widely, became a U.S. citizen during World War I, but always returned to his Montmartre studio. A heavy-lidded, pasty-faced little man, he was the listless center of thousands of wild parties...
Some time after noon he would rise and begin opening bottles for a new day. By dusk the studio would be crowded, and Pascin would be ready to paint. He worked quickly and easily. As his guests got gayer, his canvas would get greyer, misted over with the tender twilight sadness that characterized his art. At nightfall he would encase his prematurely aged body in a dapper black suit, jam a black bowler hat on his head and announce that he was ready to go out on the town...