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Article: BOOK OF THE WEEK HISTORY The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation by Frederic Spotts YALE, pounds 25, 283 pp Why should we expect artists to be more heroic than everyone else? asks Lucy Hughes-Hallett Stand first Lucy Hughes-Hallett ponders what artists should do or not do in the face of tyranny
- Article from:
- The Sunday Telegraph London
- Article date:
- December 14, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 2008 The Sunday Telegraph London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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'What should you do?' asks Frederic Spotts. 'You are the world's
best-known painter ... Your home of nearly 40 years has been
occupied by the army of a barbaric power ...' What Picasso did in
Nazi-occupied Paris was to stay put and carry on working - producing
nearly 400 oil paintings between 1940 and 1943. He has been praised
for his steadfastness (it's a popular delusion that great artists
are, or should be, heroes). Picasso himself, not a modest man but
no sentimentalist either, ascribed his staying to inertia: 'It is
simply that I
prefer to be here.'
It was as hard for artists, writers, musicians, actors and
intellos in France in 1940 to know what was the proper and
honourable thing ...
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Article: The fantasies of a failure
The Spectator;
September 28, 2002 ;
700+ words
...HITLER AND THE POWER OF AESTHETICS by Frederic Spotts Hutchinson, L25, pp. 320, ISBN 0091793947 Stalin terrorised people, Hitler seduced them. Or so suggests Frederic Spotts in this masterly and disturbing study of the uses that the Nazi state ...
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