THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012
STYLE
PAGE 7
Local retail offers affordable fashion
CHRISTINE STANWOOD
cstanwood@kansan.com
Fall is quickly approaching and many would like to have a new wardrobe for the season. However, with a shirt costing more than $40, if you're like me, you're probably thinking to yourself, "Ain't nobody got time for that!" So in the midst of buying textbooks, drinks at The Wheel and All Sports Combo passes, chances are you want to look good on a budget.
To help you dress for less, I found six Lawrence retailers that have deals this week. At Kieu's, all denim bottoms are 25 percent off and last call dresses are 30 percent off. Envy's sale rack includes summer dresses and colored pants. They are also selling camis and trees for $5. As an added bonus, everything in the store is under $40. Fortuity is selling their cowboy
boots for 50 percent off and you'll find savings of up to 75 percent off their sale rack and jewelry table.
Plato's Closet has a mini clearance sale on every football game day, including away games, with 15 percent off all KU apparel. Find them during games at 1025 Alabama where they will also be giving out beer pong starter kits and $5 coupons to the store.
Ditto Boutique is offering buy one, get one half off on camis. All jewelry is buy three pieces get one free. You can also buy two items and get one free on their clearance rack. Finally, dresses and tanks are buy one get one half off. Don't forget to put Urban Outfitters' College Night on your agenda for Sept. 19. It will be giving Kansas students additional discounts on regularly priced items and sale items.
uited by Duncan McHenry Pictured above is an outfit that can be purchased in Lawrence at an affordable rate. Several local retail stores have fashionable clothes on sale at reasonable prices.
BROOK BARNES/KANSAN
ART
Van Gogh painting identified after long wait in attic
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Van Gogh Museum director Axel Rueger, left, and senior researcher Louis van Tilborgh, right, unveil "Sunset at Montmajour" during a press conference at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands on Monday. The museum has identified the long-lost painting which was painted by the Dutch master in 1888, the discovery is the first full-size canvas that has been found since 1928 and will be on display from Sept. 24.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
AMSTERDAM — A painting that sat for six decades in a Norwegian industrialist's attic, after he was told the painting was a fake, Van Gogh was pronounced the real thing Monday, making it the first full-size canvas by the tortured Dutch artist to be discovered since 1928.
Experts at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam authenticated the 1888 landscape "Sunset at Montmajour" with the help of Vincent van Gogh's letters, chemical analysis of the pigments and X-rays of the canvas. Museum director Axel Rueger, at an unveiling ceremony, called the discovery a "once-in-a-lifetime experience." "This is a great painting from what many see as the high point of his artistic achievement, his period in Arles, in southern France," Rueger said. "In the same period, he painted works such as 'Sunflowers,' 'The Yellow House' and 'The Bedroom.'"
Museum officials would not identify the owner who brought the artwork to them in 2011 to be authenticated. Van Gogh paintings are among the most valuable in the world, fetching tens of millions of dollars on the rare occasions one is sold at auction.
The artwork will be on display at the museum beginning Sept. 24. The roughly 37-by-29-inch "Sunset at Montmajour" depicts a dry landscape of twisting oak trees, bushes and sky, and was done during the period when Van
Gogh was increasingly adopting the thick "impasto" brush strokes that became typical of his work in the final years of his short life. It can be dated to the exact day it was painted because he described it in a letter to his brother, Theo, and said he had painted it the previous day — July 4, 1888.
"At sunset I was on a stony heath where very small, twisted oaks grow, in the background a ruin on the hill and wheat fields in the valley," Van Gogh wrote.
"It was romantic. ... The sun was pouring its very yellow rays over the bushes and the ground, absolutely a shower of gold."
But then Van Gogh confessed that the painting was "well below what I'd wished to do." Later he sent it to Theo to keep. Van Gogh struggled with bouts of mental distress throughout his life and died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1890. He sold only one painting during his lifetime. According to a reconstruction published in The Burlington Magazine by three researchers, the painting was recorded as number 180 in Theo's collection and given the title "Sun Setting at Arles." It was sold to French art dealer Maurice Fabre in 1901. Fabre never recorded selling the work, and the painting disappeared from history until it reappeared in 1970 in the estate of Norwegian industrialist Christian Nicolai Mustad. The Mustad family said Mustad purchased it in 1908 as a young man in one of his first forays into
art collecting, but was soon told by the French ambassador to Sweden that it was a fake. Embarrassed. Mustad banished it to the attic.
After Mustad's death in 1970, the distinguished art dealer Daniel Wildenstein said he thought the painting was a fake Van Gogh or possibly the work of a lesser-known German painter, and it was sold to a collector. The museum would not say who bought it or whether it had been resold since then. In 1991, the museum declined to authenticate the painting when whoever owned it at the time brought it to them.
"That may be a painful admission, given that the same museum is now attributing it to Van Gogh, but it is understandable," since experts had no information about what the painting depicted, the Burlington Magazine article said.
Teio Meedendorp, one of three experts who worked on the project, said his predecessors might also have been confused because the painting was done at a "transitional" moment in Van Gogh's style. "From then on, Van Gogh increasingly felt the need to paint with more and more impasto and more and more layers," he said. Among other reasons experts had their doubts: The painting was unsigned. Parts of the foreground were not "as well-observed as usual," the researchers said. And part of the right side of the painting used a different style of brush strokes. But when the museum took a fresh look at the work in 2011.
But when the museum took a fresh look at the work in 2011, its experts had the advantage of
a new compendium of all Van Gogh's letters, and they were able to identify for the first time the exact location "Sunset" depicts: Montmajour hill, near Arles. The ruins of Montmajour abbey can be seen in the background. Van Gogh mentioned the painting in two other letters the same summer.
The number 180 on the back of the canvas was an important clue, and new chemical analysis techniques showed the pigments were identical to others Van Goob used on his palette at Arles.
Gogh used on his palette at Arles. Also, an X-ray examination of the canvas showed it was of the same type Van Gogh used on other paintings from the period. Meendordd said "Sunset" belongs "to a special group of experimental works that Van Gogh at times esteemed of lesser value than we tend to do nowadays." He said it's not impossible another unknown or lost Van Gogh could be found someday. The artist is believed to have completed more than 800 works. While he destroyed some when he wasn't satisfied with the results, the whereabouts of others that are mentioned in his letters or early catalogs of his work are unknown. The Van Gogh Museum houses 140 Van Gogh paintings and receives more than a million visitors a year.
MUSIC
New 2 Chainz album sticks with unique party rap
DUNCAN MCHENRY
dmchenry@kansan.com
Love him or hate him, rapper Tauheed Epps, more commonly known as 2 Chainz and less commonly as Tity Boi, is impossible to ignore. Known for years as the industry's favorite unsigned rapper who never blew up, 2 Chainz finally got his mainstream breakthrough when he laced up the gold Cuban links alongside Kanye West with the 2012 smash hit "Birthday Stone."
A year later, the Atlanta emcee known for offbeat interviews about abstaining from red meat is still the same quirky pimp draped
Oh, and the album even comes with a 28-page cookbook entitled "#Mealtime," which states that 2 Chainz is "reaching into his deep, flavorful pockets to hook you up with recipes you'll need for your time out on the road." Seriously, this is an actual cookbook with recipes for dishes from garlic mashed potatoes to beer-steamed snow crab legs.
in jewels and Versace. His new album, "Based On A T.R.U. Story II: Me Time", is typical 2 Chainz: equal parts grimacing cocaine rap and hilarious couplets.
So why does the pendulum often swing towards hate when hip-hop fans talk about 2 Chainz? For one
of two reasons: they don't understand him, or haven't taken the time to really listen to his lyrics. Sure, "B.O.A.T.S. II: Me Time" features plenty of the standard women, drugs and weapons subject matter that some despire—not to mention an awful Fergie cameo on the track "Netflix"—but in many songs his wordplay is downright clever.
Take a line on "Black Unicorn," for example, in which 2 Chainz proclaims, "I switch gears, my yard so big I got pet deers." And on "I Do It" he drops the line, "I tried to get a tan but I'm black already. Your pockets on a diet, my pockets fat already."
DEF JAM RECORDS
Lines like these are why 2 Chainz is unique. Unlike other trap rappers such as Young jeezy and Yo Gotti who built careers sounding like they were indicted on murder charges five minutes ago, 2 Chainz takes that gritty attitude and flips it on its head, "Fork," the opening song on the album, is a menacing ATI beat complete with low-end organ and machine gun sares. Yet, true to form, he raps in his trademark loose drawl, "God blessed me, like I'm 'finna sneeze.'"
If Talib Kweli lyrics are what you want, go somewhere else. But if you're looking for entertaining party rap on the surface with hidden lyrical gems underneath, show 2 Chainz some love.
Edited by Chas Strobel