Word: rousseau
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...four framboises after dinner with no decline of intellectual focus. Never eats breakfast. Is generous with money. Could organize and run even the French government. Was a choir boy . . . Has nervous blink . . Lives near Paris' Place de la Bastille (in an old building; you expect to find J.J. Rousseau sitting in bed writing when you enter...
...party was given in 1908, in honor of elderly Primitivist Painter Henri Rousseau, by a youthful admirer named Pablo Picasso, who decorated his Montmartre studio with Chinese lanterns and ordered in a "gargantuan supply of wine.'' When the party ended and the sun was rising, Rousseau had long since left his seat of honor (a chair on a crate) and gone home...
PAINTER HENRI ROUSSEAU (1844-1910) was the son of a tinsmith, became a customs officer and started in art as a Sunday painter. In middle age he developed enough confidence to resign from the customs (now it would be "Sunday all week long"). He lived on a tiny pension, in a one-room studio, but he did not mind the cramped quarters because, when he woke up in the morning, he could "smile a little at his paintings." His now famed works suggested the bright but prim world of a precocious child, its whims ranging from shaggy liona to mustached...
COMPOSER ERIK SATIE (1866-1925), like Rousseau, turned instinctively to the Hans Christian Andersen world in which fairy stories are meant less for children than for "unbelieving adults." Dismissing Richard Wagner's work as "sauerkraut," Satie spent his life creating tiny musical gems. To Rousseau's mannered childlike-ness, says Author Shattuck, he added a formal naughtiness that made his works almost "a fragile fabric of inanity." For Parade, a ballet on which Diaghilev, Cocteau, Picasso, Massine and Satie collaborated, he wrote a score including parts for typewriters, sirens, airplane propellers, Morse tickers and lottery wheels. An eccentric...
What emerges if these four types are added together? Dadaism, surrealism, stream-of-consciousness-ism and many another esthetic "ism" spring, obviously. from sources akin to those of Rousseau, Satie, Jarry and Apollinaire. Author Shattuck tries hard-and on the whole unsuccessfully-to cram all these tricks into a single bag. Despite the hearty, festive ring of the title, the "Banquet Years," says Author Shattuck, were essentially morbid. In his view they show the connection between modern art and a world that had lost its God and sprawled on the earth with many a gaping hole knocked through it. While...