Frank Browning: Art-Ecstasy-Death-In the Sun

Auguste Renoir, The Boulders at l'Estaque, 1882, Boston Museum of Fine Arts I couldn't have been more than 10 or 12 when I first heard tales of the Midi, recounted by my fruit-growing father in Kentucky, about his sun-dappled, post-college dreamlife in what he called -- in a single slurred phrase -- thesouthafrance. No one else, neither my teachers nor my dirt-farm school mates had ever seen, smelled, tasted or likely imagined what magic and mystery lay in that single phrase. Some three decades ...