Word: goncourt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...critic and historian Ian Dunlop, Degas (Harper & Row; 240 pages; $37.50) is by far the best introduction to the life and work of the painter of boulevards and ballet dancers now in print. A student of Ingres's and the great contemporary of Manet, Flaubert Sand the Goncourt brothers, Degas was one of those ocular witnesses without whom the cultural life of France in the 19th century cannot be understood; and no writer has done a better job of placing this tetchy, formidable genius, with his astonishing powers of observation iand his bitter tongue ("Whistler, you behave as though...
...they tell him about the representation of nature, the science of color and harmony! How freely the air flows around these objects!" Few painters have ever had such a press as the one which, interrupted by a few decades of neglect after his death, greeted Chardin from Diderot, the Goncourt brothers, Gide, Proust and dozens of others...
Dostoyevsky thought him a haughty poseur; the Goncourt brothers found him an amiable giant. He wrangled with Tolstoy, befriended Zola, intrigued Carlyle, enchanted Henry James. He was at once a hunter of game and celebrity, a well-traveled man of letters, and a provincial Russian. Ivan Turgenev's life is several lives, and by now several biographies should have recounted them. Yet, as Critic V.S. Pritchett notes, there has not been a definitive biography of Turgenev in any language...
...grief-stricken Adam and Eve in Masaccio's Expulsion from Eden, and that turns the enormous grainy effigy of John Kennedy (then dead), with its repeated pointing hand, into a type of vengeful deity. Rauschenberg has had great moments of social irony. "The day will come," Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his journal in 1861, "when all the modern nations will adore a sort of American god, about whom much will have been written in the popular press; and images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of each individual painter may fancy...
Understandably, the experience has in stilled in Konig a morbid determinism that makes the Goncourt brothers look like Harpo and Chico Marx: "Gone now are February and March, season of drowned men, when ice on the frozen rivers melts, yielding up the winter's harvest of junkies, itinerants and prostitutes. Soon to come are July and August - the jackknife months. Heat and homicide. Bullet holes, knife wounds, fatal garrotings, a grisly procession vomited out of the steamy ghettos of the inner city...