Word: renoirs
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Among the bleak, soot-smudged buildings in Paris' Malakoff suburb, one small factory shines out like a beacon. Its neat brick walls are covered with vines; the windows are immaculately clean. Inside the red iron gate there is a courtyard filled with bronze statues. Plump Renoir and Maillol nudes stand side by side with muscular Bourdelle torsos, Rodin figures, and a host of lesserworks. On most of the statues, two names are inscribed. The first is the sculptor's; the second is that of the man who turned it into bronze, Eugene Rudier, the foundry...
Reporter Elaine St. Maur found the former model a modest, sincere woman, "still a subject, 35 years later, to interest an artist." Gabrielle glowed, said Newswoman St. Maur, when she spoke of her old life with the Auguste Renoirs. The artist was easy to pose for, let her talk as much as she wished, Gabrielle recalled. He sketched in his compositions lightly and went right to work with his colors, worked fast, knew exactly what he wanted. Asked whether she had liked the many paintings Renoir had done of her, Gabrielle shrugged, said: "Oh yes, but really I didn...
...when she was shown a color print of the Renoir to be unveiled in San Francisco, Gabrielle studied it for a long time, then said she was not the woman in the picture and that the baby was not Coco. She even doubted that it was a real Renoir...
Museum officials and dealers knew they had an actual Renoir, but after hearing Gabrielle's story, retreated halfway. TIME's checking had convinced them that the painting needed a new name-perhaps the jawbreaking title used by a previous owner: Woman Guiding a Child's First Steps Toward a Chair on Which There Is a Kitten...
During the war years, Laughton was restless. He tried to lose himself in his collection of art (Renoir, Cezanne, Utrillo), and in organizing classical jam sessions. Then he began dropping into U.S. Army hospitals, where he read aloud from Charles Dickens, James Thurber, Aesop, Thomas Wolfe, the Bible. Says Laughton: "The men in the hospital, unlike the people in the theaters, when they didn't understand said so out loud and if I didn't understand either I learned to admit it . . . And when I did understand and they did not, I knew I wasn't doing...