Word: salons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...that grand and gloomy chronicler of The Decline of the West, once remarked that Edouard Manet (1832-83) was the last gasp of great Western painting. What Spengler failed to see was that Manet was not an end but a beginning. With a single picture, displayed at the Paris Salon of 1865, Manet fueled an artistic revolution that has shaped the course of modern art, for better or for worse, for nearly a century. At the core of the whole hurly-burly that rages through the art world today is the artistic proposition raised by Manet's saucy nude...
...admixture of comedy and farce, which destroys utterly the few intelligent, sophisticated bits, probably can be blamed on the cast. Director John Gerstad has taken a salon comedy and turned it into a circus-tent shriek show. Practically every player, with the exception of Tom Helmore, the seductive, Northern journalist, over-acts...
...mistress, Countess de Portes, whom nobody except Reynaud seems to have liked very much. He also had a wife. Anglo-Saxons believe that the French have a way of managing these things. Not so Paul Reynaud, who had the unhappy faculty of finding himself in the same salon with both ladies. It is possible to suspect that Paul Reynaud, for all his intelligence, lacked organizing ability. This is confirmed on the political level by the fact that as finance minister, in 1939, he was taken over by a smoothly operating squad of officials who should have been, but were...
Sargent learned the lessons of his chosen masters brilliantly and soon. It was in Paris, at a scant 27, that he proved himself a painter of felicity and not just flair. His Daughters of Edward D. Bolt (opposite) found a place at the Salon of 1883, and in the minds of men. One critic dis missed it instantly as "four corners and a void." Novelist Henry James was more discerning: "The naturalness of the composition," he wrote, "the loveliness of the complete effect, the light, free security of the execution, the sense it gives us as of assimilated secrets...
Paralyzing Paint. A year after his triumph with the Boit children, Sargent sent another painting to the Salon, which had a different sort of success. His subject was the reigning beauty of the hour, one Madame Gautreau (see cut). Sargent confided to a friend that Madame was "a uniform lavender or blotting-paper color all over," but justly added that she had "the most beautiful lines." He painted her with the accent on her low neckline and produced a succes de scandale...