Word: poet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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After a brief skirmish with cubism, Vlaminck in 1924 began striking out against the current trend, retired to Normandy and started painting the dozens of landscapes, golden wheat fields and chilly, windswept winter scenes (opposite) that earned him the title, "poet of stormy skies." Vlaminck today has nothing but contempt for most modern art, calls Picasso "the gravedigger of French art." Says he: "I still look at things with the eyes of my childhood; I am still moved by the same old sights: a forest path, a long country road flanked by poplars, the banks of a river...
Victor Hugo was born (1802) to lead, and France still groans under his leadership. Asked who is France's greatest poet, Andre Gide made a famed reply: "Victor Hugo, alas!" His answer sums up precisely the pain and resentment still felt by many Frenchmen when they bow the knee to the man who wrote an end to the old traditions. In this excellent biography, Andre Maurois explains why. Subtlety, precision, restraint are French gods, but enthroned above them all sits the immortal Hugo, passionate antithesis of subtlety, precision and restraint...
...poet he was, but a public one. In politics he ran a banner-waving, pamphlet-strewn, populace-stirring course-monarchist, Bonapartist, finally a rebel and exile who came to be called "Grandfather of the Republic." "It is ill praise to give a man that his politics have never changed for 40 years," he explained. "That is no more than to praise water for being stagnant, a tree for being dead...
Fresh Without Parsley. Hugo, having made himself the first poet of France, craved further honors. First, he aspired to (and got) the green uniform of a French Academician ("I can keep you fresh without any sprigs of parsley," complained Juliette). Next, he affronted his disciples by persuading King Louis Philippe to make him a vicomte. Three months later the new peer was caught in bed with the wife of a fresco painter, and that ditched his hope of becoming a minister. "Adultery at that time was severely dealt with," and Peer Hugo would have been prosecuted if the King...
Victor Hugo has survived primarily because everything he did, no matter how ludicrous, was translated by him into inimitable poetry. But he has survived, too, as Paul Valery said, as "the very embodiment of power"-a power that no French poet since his day has been able to shake off. "Never," concludes Maurois, "has a nation been so closely knit with one single body of writing . . . Paris, whole and entire, sounds one great consistent Ode to Victor Hugo's honor...