Brigitte Bardot@90

Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Stars and Stardom in French Cinema: In-Depth Studies of Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Juliette Binoche, and More ‘, 2000:

“…Bardot undoubtedly ushered in a new femininity in 1950s France. Her spectacular youthful looks, her insolent wit, her blatant promiscuous lifestyle and her outspokenness were unlike any other star of the time, in France or elsewhere. Yet, at the same time her appeal depended on 'old' values: on traditional myths of femininity and on the display of her body, though a body repackaged for the times: nude, more 'natural', on location, in colour and Cinemascope. Bardot's stardom rested on the combination and reconciliation of these opposed sets of values. My analysis in this chapter concentrates on Bardot's period of high stardom, which was surprisingly short - from the release of Et Dieu ... crea la femme in 1956 to La Verite in 1960, her highest grossing film in France1 —though I will refer to earlier and later films, in particular her two New Wave films, Vie privee (1961) and Le Mepris (1963). As discussed in Chapter 1, in box-office terms alone, Bardot's ranking is relatively low. Yet, she outstrips all the stars in this book in fame. Both during her film career and since it ended in 1973, Bardot has been extraordinarily visible through press, television shows, documentaries, postcards, books, internet sites, etc. Original posters of her films are among the most expensive, and outside France they are among the few French posters available….”

 1956

Her husband Roger Vadim directed her for the first time in 1956’s Et Dieu...Crea La Femme (...And God Created Woman). The film gained notoriety worldwide due to her overt sexuality and she became an international star.

Photograph: Allstar

 

Marcello Mastroianni@100...He Never Really Knew How to Lie and He was Lazy

Shawn Levy, "Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome", 2016:  

 

"...Two things distinguished the young Marcello Mastroianni, according to those who knew him best and longest, and they remained essential truths about him, in important ways, throughout his varied and extraordinary life and career.

One, in the words of his mother, was “He never really knew how to lie. . . . I’d tell him not to bother to go on. He had such a simple face, like an open book.”

The other he himself declared in interviews for decades: “I am,” he would say, explaining some decision he’d made (or, more often, hadn’t made), “lazy.”

Both traits—an inability to dissemble and an inveterate indolence—were, it happened, perfect tools for the profession in which Mastroianni would become famous. On the one hand, he was at his absolute best as an actor when cast as someone whom he understood instinctively, someone whose experiences and attitudes were so natural to him that they might as well have been his own. On the other, his aversion to preparation, to study, even to learning scripts, lent his work an air of spontaneity, discovery, and immediacy that might have been lacking if he had put in more effort...."

 

 with Claudia Cardinale in "Il bell'Antonio", 1960

... तेंव्हा जीएंनी सुद्धा Vermeer च्या चित्राच्या कॉपीत स्वतःचे रंग भरले असणार! ...A Likeness is Never the Only Reason an Artist Paints a Picture

जी. ए. कुलकर्णी:

"... अद्यापही एखाद्या Rembrandt किंवा Vermeer सारख्या अद्वितीय चित्रकाराच्या कृतीची मी Tolerable copy करू शकतो..."

 

Laura Cumming, "Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death", 2023:

"...This is the exact opposite of what I was taught at school, which was that Golden Age Dutch art was all about things, and the way those things look. My father laughed when I told him what my teacher said, which was that the Dutch just loved stuff, and commissioned paintings of that stuff so they could look at it forever. Here is a Dutch tulip, red-and-white-striped, and here is a painting of it meticulously preserved for the day the real flower dies. Paintings are not substitutes, he said, they are something else altogether. A likeness is never the only reason an artist paints a picture.

Why did he paint the way he did, what was in his head? His pictures held other versions of peaches and planets than anything he might draw for a child; his art was closer to abstraction..."

 Johannes Vermeer's 'View of Delft', 1660-61

"...In fact, if you look closely, you can often catch them embroidering a true-seeming scene with details that are less than true. Even Vermeer, renowned for his verisimilitude, shifted the placement of some buildings in his “View of Delft.”..." Diane Cole, WSJ, Aug 4 2023

... तेंव्हा जीएंनी सुद्धा Vermeer च्या चित्राच्या कॉपीत  स्वतःचे रंग भरले असणार!

लिहून भिंतीवर भुजंग भरला रंग चिताऱ्याकडून...It has been my Lifelong Dream to Paint Walls

द ग गोडसे , पृष्ठ ४३, "नांगी असलेले फुलपाखरू", १९८९:

",,, बहुधा पांढऱ्या फटफटीत कपाळाची भिंत अशुभ समजण्यात येत असावी..."

Colin B. Bailey, The New York Review of Books, May 11 2023:

"...Although he never undertook a mural decoration, Edgar Degas confided to his dealer, Ambroise Vollard, that “it has been my lifelong dream to paint walls.” “Painting is done, is it not, to decorate walls; so it should be as rich as possible,” Pierre-Auguste Renoir explained to Albert André as he was completing his last monumental figure painting, The Bathers (1919)....

...Both books survey a number of decorative cycles, from Paul Cézanne’s early series The Four Seasons (1860–1861) to Claude Monet’s twenty-two glorious panels of Water Lilies (1915–1924). They redirect attention to canvases executed for specific interior spaces, as overdoors and decorative panels for dining rooms, salons, galleries, even stairwells, and occasionally as insertions into actual doors. And they reveal how deeply engaged many of the Impressionists were, in the late 1870s and early 1880s, in experimenting with new techniques in a variety of media: painting fans and ceramic tiles, pioneering the use of colored mats and frames, and even patenting colored cement as a medium for portraiture and decorative accessories..."

 Decorative panel: Monet's The Luncheon, 1873

"...Both books are on much firmer ground in their analyses of the small but significant number of Impressionist paintings that were conceived of and exhibited as “decorations.” Monet’s large, glorious Luncheon, painted in 1873 but held back until the Second Impressionist Exhibition of April 1876, shows the aftermath of an elegant luncheon at his villa in Argenteuil (see illustration on page 43). In a garden full of flowers, sunlight dapples the white tablecloth on which are visible the remnants of coffee and dessert. An early reference to the picture described it more accurately as “after the luncheon.” Relegated to the background at the upper right are the hostess, Monet’s companion, Camille Doncieux, in a white summer dress, and her parasol-bearing guest. Also easy to overlook is the little boy in a straw hat—the six-year-old Jean Monet—seated in the foreground at left, playing with his toy. The dynamic angle of the circular table and the garden bench propels the bedazzled, even disoriented, viewer into this sundrenched scene. With its deep purple shadows, syncopated dabs of color, and figures relegated to the margins, The Luncheon discourages narrative or anecdotal interpretation. In the catalog of the Second Impressionist Exhibition, Monet listed the work as “un panneau décoratif” (a decorative panel)..."