Word: sketches
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...sketch this scene to convey something of the spirit of the Rue de Salaud--approximately sixteen blocks of cold-water flats, back stairs, and cracked plaster stretching from the Radcliffe Graduate Center to Central Square. This is the Left Bank of the Charles, the garret-estate of the unwashed literati, the tenements of the night-crawler--that interim period creature who walks the Cambridge streets between Commencement and Summer School...
...painting that is not only a masterful work of art but also a fascinating footnote to an old mystery goes on display this week in Richmond's Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It is Peter Paul Rubens' 10|½-in.-by-15-in. oil sketch for his Pallas and Arachne. The finished painting is long lost, and presumably destroyed-but still to be seen in a copy made three centuries ago by the Spanish painter Velàsquez...
...picked most of his themes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, including the famed story of the weaving match between Pallas Athena and Arachne. Bested in the contest, the goddess Athena was doubly angry because mortal Arachne dared to weave scenes of the scandalous loves of the gods (Rubens' sketch shows a scene from the Rape of Europa). Athena ripped the design to shreds, turned on Arachne, who was trying to hang herself in despair, and metamorphosed her into a spider (thus giving spiders their zoological classification: Arachnida...
...most important and knowing clients." Secondly, Rubens at the time was running one of the greatest picturemaking factories in all Europe, and most of the work was carried out by Rubens' apprentices. But, notes Director Cheek, "there's no doubt about our sketch. Its proven pedigree goes back to the moment it left Rubens' hand, which is more than we could say of the finished painting, even if it exists...
...most enterprising artistic coup cost nothing. Knowing that many of Paris' famed artists amiably sign the guest books kept by most Paris cafés and often add a quick sketch, Plimpton and Du Bois spent weeks going from café to café to search the books, turned up a fascinating collection of spontaneous sketches by Matisse, Picasso, Dufy, Derain, Buffet and even the long dead Toulouse-Lautrec...