Word: pompidou
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...Giscard d'Estaing took office in 1974, he promised to loosen the tight control that the Elysée Palace had maintained over French life, especially the press. Battle-weary French journalists looked forward to a new era of peaceful coexistence. As Finance Minister under President Georges Pompidou, the accessible Giscard had long been a favorite with reporters covering an otherwise chilly Elysée government. As President, he brought a refreshingly relaxed approach to the office, dining with workers' families and playing tennis. But after six years, a markedly different Giscard has emerged...
...destruction was done. To this day the most brilliant moment of revolutionary aspiration in the history of Russian art remains not only unofficial but actively repressed within the borders of its own country. Last year the U.S.S.R. sent a mammoth consignment of modernist Russian art to the Pompidou Center's exhibition, "Paris-Moscow, 1900-1930"- while at the same time ensuring, by the threat of cancellation, that no proper discussion of the relations between art and politics in postrevolutionary Russia could be raised in the catalogue. (Needless to say, the show could not be seen in the Soviet Union...
Many diplomats complain of lost "elbow room" and of having been transformed into an "executive manager" at best, and, to quote one former French ambassador, a combination "messenger boy, travel agent and innkeeper." Reduced responsibility has also meant falling prestige. No French diplomat reacted kindly when President Georges Pompidou imperiously commented that an ambassador's role consisted of balancing "a cup of tea and a slice of cake." Nonetheless, after each election in the U.S., hope still springs eternal among political beneficiaries that they might be rewarded with choice ambassadorial appointments...
...Salvador Dali retrospective of 436 works from 1920 to the present day, which opened at Paris' Pompidou Center in December and will run until mid-April, is-one need not hold one's breath-a resounding popular success. The number of people who crowd into the show on the Beaubourg's top floor every day is between 8,000 and 12,000, a remarkable turnout for a live artist in a country whose public has never much liked modern art. Only Tut could pack them in like this. Culture votes with its feet, ratifying Dali...
...difference between a madman and me," Dali is often quoted as saying, "is that I am not mad." Indeed, he is not; and that is why the Pompidou Center is crowded. Dali's public hopes to meet a mind which fulfills its two ruling clichés about artists-the painter as old master (Raphael, Rubens) and the artist as freak (Van Gogh, Rimbaud). Dali gives his public a tacky, vivid caricature of both while fulfilling neither. No modern painter has armored himself more assiduously in mediocrity...