Word: actaeon
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...Oilionaire J. Paul Getty shook up the British art establishment last June with his acquisition at auction of Titian's The Death of Actaeon for about $4,200,000. Just the year before, New York City's Metropolitan Museum had walked off with another British-owned masterpiece, Velasquez's portrait of Juan de Pareja, for a record $5,544,000. Officials of the National Gallery and others raised a din, acting as if those rich Americans would soon leave Britons nothing to look at but the telly. At last, with considerable reluctance, the government blocked the removal...
...table is not an isolated case. In its upper reaches, the art market has been afflicted with a kind of collective hysteria, a St. Vitus's dance of zeros across the checkbook: $5,544,000 for a Velasquez; a Titian, The Death of Actaeon, sold to Paul Getty for a little over $4,000,000; last week a Renoir, purchased for $16.80 a century ago, fetched $1,159,200 at a London auction. The list could be prolonged almost indefinitely, and will be: before the '70s are out, the first $10 million painting will probably have gone under...
...profoundly explored in Cheever's Wapshot Chronicle. These stories are in his lesser mode. In fact, the stratagem of treating suburbia as if it were a sacred grove, with every flowering tree an imprisoned nymph, works best when it is worked least. One story, for instance, begins: "Larry Actaeon was built along classical lines . . ." and the reader, with the help of a mythological dictionary, recalls that Actaeon observed Diana at her bath and was punished by being turned into a stag and torn apart by hounds. All too patly, Larry Actaeon sees a lady partner in his investment-banking...
...Proxmire Manor, the suburban region is subjected to terrible metamorphosis. It is not Sing Sing Prison straddling the New York Central tracks by the Hudson shore that is the worst destination of the inhabitants, but a netherworld of damnation. In Metamorphoses, one neighbor has suffered a magical transformation into Actaeon, torn to pieces by his own hounds. In another story, his wife has become the enchantress who converted her daughter into a swimming pool. Even the A. & P. supermarket has been peopled by Cheever with a crowd "moaning and crying" as they are "reviled and taken away" to some enigmatic...
...always a surrealist at heart," Gugel says, "When I was a child I drew all kinds of transformations. Things like Daphne turning into a tree, and Actaeon into a stag. Surrealism is a very beneficial revolution in painting. It results in conscious exploitation of elements which used to be overlooked because of bourgeois shame...