Word: villone
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...given that plagiarism is not exactly new - Bertolt Brecht, one of Germany's most influential poets and playwrights, once famously admitted to a "laxity in questions of intellectual property" when he was accused of plagiarizing the French poet François Villon in his play Threepenny Opera - there must be another reason that explains why the Hegemann case has created a stir in Germany. Philipp Theisohn, a professor of literature at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Zurich and author of a book on the history of plagiarism, believes the case struck a chord because the literary world...
...field borrowed heavily from techniques found in Cubist paintings and Renaissance trompe l'oeil ("fool the eye") art, and it would eventually enlist the help of artists like Grant Wood and Jacques Villon, both of whom served as camoufleurs during wartime. When World War II broke out, applications from painters, sculptors, even ad men flooded Fort Belvoir, Va., the military's headquarters for camouflage development. "There must be something intriguing about the word 'camouflage,' " an officer told TIME in 1942 before cautioning, "There is no room for the esthetic color expert, or for any man who can't march...
...study of concealment, distortion and deception techniques begin. But it was art, not military science, that led the way. "Armies realized they could put artists' knowledge of form, perspective and color to use," says James Taylor, historian at the Imperial War Museum. So the dislocations of Cubism (Jacques Villon and Marcel Duchamp served as camoufleurs) were a huge influence, as were the visual disruptions of Vorticism in the Dazzle patterns applied to Allied ships during World War I. Dazzle made it hard for the enemy to get a fix - a trait that could also help explain the rebellious appeal...
...have readers," he once lamented, "but thousands of voyeurs." He might have added that it was he who raised the blinds and staged the spectacle -- a rabbity-looking thief rhapsodizing about transvestites and jailyard toughs. Not even the revered felons of French literary tradition, the poetes maudits from Villon to Rimbaud, had been so devoted to the triumvirate of personal virtues -- thievery, homosexuality and betrayal -- in Genet's great novels. First the French, then the world, couldn't tear their eyes away...
...eccentricity is so wide- ranging, so continually renewing and surprising, that it probably isn't fair to call it typical. Anyone who expects the morose, slightly spacy voluptuary who sang, most famously, on the sound track of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller -- the Cohen who sounded like Villon with frostbite -- is in for a mighty shock encountering The Future...