Word: rousseau
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...sold as Christmas cards, but even today, when it sells color prints, no artist draws royalties; the latest Metropolitan card dates from about 1860. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art sells cards (at three for 10?), none of which has any connection with Christmas: the artists are Rousseau, Rivera, Picasso (two classic drawings). The San Francisco Museum of Art has ten cards, including a Foujita, a Rivera. To its patrons the Associated American Artists Gallery in Manhattan sells cards in limited editions; its sales last year totaled 350,000. Of its 16 subjects, the four in color...
...Rousseau's Social Contract substituted an agreement among anarchic individuals for the Christian brotherhood of man; his optimism created a delusive new god, Progress...
...France it was a brand-new dogma embroidered with brand-new catchwords and justified by brand-new reasoning. Rousseau's "natural equality of men," for which Frenchmen once fought a bloody revolution, would be discarded for a "social hierarchy" under which rich & poor, high & low, would have equal opportunities to prove their worth by serving the totalitarian State. The only "right" accorded impartially to all Frenchmen would be to work. Liberty, Pétain told his countrymen, had not existed in France for 20 years. "Besides, what would abstract liberty be worth in 1940 to an unemployed workman...
Long-distance autopsies are risky. French Scholar Denis Saurat enraged the high-minded by "demonstrating" that blind John Milton (like deaf Ludwig van Beethoven) suffered from hereditary syphilis. Diagnostician Moorman finds Milton tuberculous. Other famous consumptives: Pope, Dr. Johnson, Shelley, Goethe, Schiller, Descartes, Balzac, Rousseau, Spinoza, Kant, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Chekhov, Dostoevski, a brow-wrinkling list of other writers and thinkers. Doctors suspect that tuberculosis develops genius because 1) apprehension of death inspires a burning awareness of life's beauty, significance, transience, 2) the bacillus breeds restlessness and an intoxicated hypersensitiveness...
...Rousseau windows, which he had already tried out in Hollywood, Saks's perky window designer James David Buckley chose six typical lush, salad-like Rousseau paintings, reproduced them in life-sized scenes with the help of rag-doll manikins, props of paper, cloth and wood. Window Dresser Buckley made each window represent a phase in the life of a woman. Rousseau's Portrait of a Young Girl, bloatedly enlarged, became "Her Awkward Age"; his Sleeping Gypsy, complete with mandolin and prowling lion, "Her Bohemian Period." Unlike previous art-conscious window displays, Buckley's contained no merchandise. Sole...