Word: xv
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...those rare artists who come to epitomize their age: when the society goes down, so do they. An extreme case in point was François Boucher. The son of a French needlework designer, he became the most successful French painter of the 18th century, the favorite of Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour. Born in 1703, Boucher lived through the climax of the ancien régime and died less than two decades before it did. "In him," wrote Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, in their great defense of rococo art published almost a century after...
...every passing manifestation of fashion." The tumbling, rosy cupids and tiny pastoral scenes with shepherds in knee breeches that are the cliches of rococo chinaware decoration were largely Boucher's doing. He painted on fans and carriage doors, snuffboxes, escritoires and ostrich eggs. And when Louis XV put Boucher in control of the state tapestry factories at Beauvais and Gobelin, he brought about the last flourish of grand-scale European weaving. No designer since Boucher has managed to raise tapestry to that pitch of worldly exuberance and erotic charm...
...aura of remoteness. Boucher's nude was small, full and rounded: a compact little machine à plaisir, borne up like a plump rose on tumultuous puffs of cloud or sprawled, replete with the matter-of-fact enjoyment of her own narcissism, on a tangled day bed. Indeed Louis XV's true escutcheon was the round, dimpled bottom of Boucher's favorite model, an inhabitant of the Deer Park (as the villa where the royal mistresses lived was called) known as la petite Morfil. Miss Murphy was an Irish girl whom the Pompadour pro cured for her flagging...
...Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced the new exam schedule yesterday: Exam Groups New Date Day I, VII, IX Jan. 24 Thursday XIII Jan. 25 Friday XI Jan. 26 Saturday X, XV, XVI Jan. 28 Monday IV Jan. 29 Tuesday II Jan. 30 Wednesday XII Jan. 31 Thursday III Feb. 1 Friday VII, XIV Feb. 2 Saturday V Feb. 4 Monday VI, XVII, XVIII Feb. 5 Tuesday...
...Regis hotel, the '30s notion that hearts were made to be broken was revived. The spiritualist: former Liverpudlian Mabel Mercer, 73, who began singing 60 years ago and went on to become the Madame de Sévigné of the supper clubs. Seated in a Louis XV armchair, Mercer held the kind of wry musical conversation on affairs of the heart that has made a minor art form of ballad singing and influenced singers from Billie Holiday to Barbra Streisand. Aware that it is her phrasing and timing rather than her voice that turns the most banal ballad...