Neo-impressionism

English Reader for Students of Art

Специальности:

Графика;

Информационные технологии в дизайне.

Москва

Аннотация

Данное учебное пособие предназначено для изучения основ искусствоведения на английском языке и адресовано студентам факультета графических искусств. Оно также может быть использовано для занятий с аспирантами и соискателями. Пособие содержит обширный информационный материал и включает активно употребляемую лексику английского языка по искусствоведению.

Цель пособия – привить навыки чтения, перевода и аннотирования оригинальных английских текстов, познакомить с новейшей специальной терминологией и заложить базу для профессионально ориентированной коммуникации.

CONTENTS

MODERN ART……..

Neo-Impressionism…..

Symbolism…..

Abstract Art…..

Fauvism…

Henri Matisse…..

Cubism…..

Pablo Picasso…..

Orphism

Futurism….

Expressionism…

Suprematism…

Kazimir Malevich…

Vassily Kandinsky…

Constructivism…

Metaphysical Painting…

Dada…

Surrealism…

Salvador Dali…

SCHOOL OF PARIS…

Amedeo Modigliani…

Plot Summary of the film Modigliani 2004and opinions of its viewers…

Marc Chagall….

Other Painters…

AFTER WORLD WAR П…

Social Realism…

Abstract Expressionism…

Pop Art…

Op Art…

Minimalism…

Neo-Expressionism…

Предисловие

Данное учебное пособие предназначено для изучения основ искусствоведения на английском языке и адресовано студентам факультета графических искусств, а также аспирантам и соискателям. Оно представляет собой хрестоматию, составленную из тематически подобранных текстов, отражающих исторический период с конца 19-го до середины 20-го века во всем многообразии художественных течений и направлений. Пособие содержит обширный информационный материал и включает активно употребляемую лексику английского языка по искусствоведению.

Цель пособия – привить навыки чтения, перевода, аннотирования и реферирования оригинальных английских текстов, познакомить с новейшей специальной терминологией, заложить базу для профессионально ориентированной коммуникации по актуальным проблемам современного искусствоведения. Вторая важная задача – расширить кругозор студентов, углубить их знания в области изобразительного искусства 20-го века, познакомить с творчеством известных художников, как русских, так и зарубежных.

Изучение каждого раздела предполагает как аудиторную, так и самостоятельную работу учащихся и может включать следующие этапы:

- знакомство с новой специальной терминологией;

- чтение, перевод и лексико-грамматический анализ текстов;

- выполнение лексических, лексико-грамматических и коммуникативных упражнений (как устно, так и письменно) по заданию преподавателя.

Может быть рекомендована следующая последовательность этапов работы над текстами пособия:

1. Прочитайте название текста и определите его общую проблематику;

2. Прочитайте текст целиком, чтобы составить представление о его содержании;

3. Разбейте его на смысловые отрезки (по абзацам).

4. Найдите в каждом абзаце опорные (ключевые) слова и предложения, раскрывающие смысл текста.

5. Выделите основную мысль в каждом абзаце.

6. Дайте заголовок каждому абзацу.

7. Кратко изложите содержание каждого абзаца.

8. Составьте план текста.

9. Подготовьте аннотацию и реферат текста.

Работая над каждым текстом, пользуйтесь системой коммуникативных заданий:

1. Внимательно прочитайте название текста и предположите, о чем говорится в тексте.

2. Прочитайте первый абзац, выделите его основную мысль. Сделайте то же самое с другими абзацами.

3. Сократите перечисление в тексте, оставив только самые важные элементы.

4. Выпишите из текста ключевые слова и выражения. Используйте их при составлении плана текста.

5. Укажите абзацы, в которых говорится об основных идеях текста.

6. Сформулируйте по-английски общую мысль всего текста.

7. Укажите, какие идеи, высказанные автором текста, кажутся вам наиболее существенными и почему.

8. Изложите содержание текста по-английски.

9. Задайте вопросы своим коллегам по содержанию текста, чтобы убедиться в правильности понимания.

10. Обсудите в группе содержание текста и его основную проблематику (по-английски) в форме диалога или дискуссии.

Заключительным этапом изучения каждого раздела может быть обсуждение проработанного материала на основе подготовленных студентами докладов на изученные темы.

МОDERN ART

The term modern art has come to denote the innovating and even revolutionary developments in Western painting and the other visual arts, such as sculpture, architecture, and graphic arts characteristic of the second half of the 19th century and the 20^th century. It embraces a wide variety of movements, styles, theories, and attitudes the modernism of which resides in a common tendency to reject traditional, historical, or academic forms and conventions in subject matter, mode of depiction, and painting technique in an effort to create an art more in keeping with changed social, economic, and intellectual conditions

. Not all the painting of this period has made such a departure; representational work, for example, has continued to appear, particularly in connection with official exhibiting societies. Nevertheless, the idea that some current types of painting are more properly of their time than are others, and for that reason are more interesting or important, applies with particular force to the painting of the last 150 years.

By the mid-19th century, painting was no longer basically in service to either the church or the court but rather was patronized by the upper and middle classes of an increasingly materialistic and secularized Western society. This society was undergoing rapid change because of the growth of science and technology, industrialization, urbanization, and the fundamental questioning of received religious dogmas. Painters were thus confronted with the need to reject traditional, historical, or academic forms and conventions in an effort to create an art that would better reflect the changed social, material, and intellectual conditions of emerging modern life. Another important, if indirect, stimulus to change was the development from the early 19th century on of photography and other photomechanical techniques, which freed (or deprived) painting and drawing of their hitherto cardinal roles as the only available means of accurately depicting the visual world. These manually executed arts were thus no longer obliged to serve as the means of recording and disseminating information as they once had been and were eventually freed to explore aesthetically the basic visual elements of line, colour, tone, and composition in a nonrepresentational context. Indeed, an important trend in modern painting has been that of abstraction—i.e., painting in which little or no attempt is made to accurately depict the appearance or form of objects in the realm of nature or the existing physical world. The door of the objective world was thus closed, but the inner world of the imagination offered seemingly infinite possibilities for exploration, as did the manipulation of pigments on a flat surface for their purely intrinsic visual or aesthetic appeal.

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The beginnings of modern painting cannot be clearly demarcated, but there is general agreement that it started in 19th-century France. The paintings of Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and the Impressionists represent a deepening rejection of the prevailing academic tradition and a quest for a more naturalistic representation of the visual world. These painters' Postimpressionist successors—notably Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, and Paul Gauguin—can be viewed as more clearly modern in their repudiation of traditional techniques and their expression of a more subjective personal vision. From about the 1890s a succession of varied styles and movements arose that are the core of modern painting and that represent one of the high points of Western visual culture. These modern movements include Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurisml, Suprematism, Constructivism, Metaphysical painting, de Stijl, Purism, Dada, Surrealism, Social Realism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism, and Neo-Expressionism.

. Despite the enormous variety seen in these movements, most of them are characteristically modern in their investigation of the potentials inherent within the painting medium itself for expressing a spiritual response to the changed conditions of life in the 20th century. These conditions include accelerated technological change, the expansion of scientific knowledge and understanding, the seeming irrelevance of some traditional sources of value and belief, and an expanding awareness of non-Western cultures.

An important trend throughout the 20th century has been that of abstract, or nonobjective, art—i.e., art in which little or no attempt is made to objectively reproduce or depict the appearances or forms of objects in the realm of nature or the existing physical world. It should also be noted that the development of photography and of allied photomechanical techniques of reproduction has had an obscure but certainly important influence on the development of modern art, because these mechanical techniques freed (or deprived) manually executed drawing and painting of their hitherto crucialrole as the only means of accurately depicting the visible world.

Modern architecture arose out of the rejection of revivals, classicism, eclecticism, and indeed all adaptations of past styles to the building types of industrializing late 19th- and 20th-century society. It also arose out of efforts to create architectural forms and styles that would utilize and reflect the newly available building technologies of structural iron and steel, reinforced concrete, and glass. Until the spread of Postmodernism, modern architecture also implied the rejection of the applied ornament and decoration characteristic of premodern Western buildings. The thrust of modern architecture has been a rigorous concentration on buildings whose rhythmical arrangement of masses and shapes states a geometric theme in light and shade. This development has been closely tied to the new building types demanded by an industrialized society, such as office buildings housing corporate management or government administration. Among the most important trends and movements of modern architecture are the Chicago School, Functionalism, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, the International Style, New Brutalism and Post Modernism.

Francis William Wentworth-Sheilds

NEO-IMPRESSIONISM

movement in French painting of the late 19th century that reacted against the empirical realism of Impressionism by relying on systematic calculation and scientific theory to achieve predetermined visual effects. Whereas the Impressionist painters spontaneously recorded nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light, the Neo-Impressionists applied scientific optical principles of light and colour to create strictly formalized compositions. Neo-Impressionism was led by Georges Seurat, who was its original theorist and most significant artist, and by Paul Signac, also an important artist and the movement's major spokesman. Other Neo-Impressionist painters were Henri-Edmond Cross, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Maximilien Luce, Théo Van Rysselberghe, and, for a time, the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. The group founded a Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1884.

The terms divisionism and pointillism originated in descriptions of Seurat's painting technique, in which paint was applied to the canvas in dots of contrasting pigment. A calculated arrangement of coloured dots, based on optical science, was intended to be perceived by the retina as a single hue. The entire canvas was covered with these dots, which defined form without the use of lines and bathed all objects in an intense, vibrating light. In each picture the dots were of a uniform size,calculated to harmonize with the overall size of the painting. In place of the hazy forms of Impressionism, those of Neo-Impressionism had solidity and clarity and were simplified to reveal the carefully composed relationships between them. Though the light quality was as brilliant as that of Impressionism, the general effect was of immobile, harmonious monumentality, a crystallization of the fleeting light of Impressionism.

Signac's later work showed an increasingly spontaneous use of the divisionist technique, which was more consistent with his poetic sensibility. Seurat, however, continued to adopt a theoretical approach to the study of various pictorial and technical problems, including a reduction of the expressive qualities of colour and form to scientific formulas. By the 1890s the influence of Neo-Impressionism was waning, but it was important in the early stylistic and technical development of several artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Henri Matisse.

SYMBOLISM

Most early cultures developed iconographic systems that included prescriptions for the site, design, function, form, medium, subject matter, and imagery of their painting. The siting of early Byzantine murals, for instance, echoed the symbolic, architectural planning of the basilica. Thus, a stylized, linear image of Christ, surrounded by heavenly hosts, occupied the central dome; the Virgin was represented in the apse; and stiff figures of apostles, prophets, martyrs, and patriarchs occupied the aisle walls. The format of early devotional paintings was also prescribed, Christian and Buddhist deities being placed in the focal centre of the design, above the eye level of the audience and larger than surrounding figures. And, in the conventional arrangement of a Christian subject such as the Holy Trinity, a central, bearded, patriarchal God, flanked by archangels, presented Christ on the cross; between them was a dove, representing the Holy Spirit. In a rendering of the risen Christ, the Son faced the audience, with the Virgin Mother on the left and St. John on the right of the design. In the Far East a traditional format depicted Buddha on a lotus throne or in a high chariot drawn by oxen across clouds, surrounded by figures representing the planets. Deities generally appear against undefined grounds of white (signifying eternity or nothingness), blue (the celestial vaults), or gold (representing heavenly light by radiating lines or the spiritual aura by a nimbus). The elaborate surface preparation of supports and the painstaking execution with the finest materials symbolized the intention that paintings dedicated to a deity should last forever. The imagery, subject matter, and form might also have a mystical function: the realistic rendering of animals in contrast to the perfunctory human representations in Ice Age rock paintings, thought to signify a wishful guarantee for success in hunting; the earthly pleasures depicted on ancient Egyptian tomb murals intended to secure their continuance for the deceased; and the North American Indian sand paintings designed for magic healing ceremonies and the Tantric (relating to Tantrism, a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism) mandalas used for meditation and enlightenment.

Symbolism in Eastern painting—intended to deepen the experience of a picture's mood and spirituality—is more generalized and poetic than in Western art. Both the execution and the subject matter of Buddhist Chinese and Japanese painting have a religious or metaphysical significance: the artist's intuitive, calligraphic brush movements symbolizing his mystical empathywith nature and his cyclic landscape and flower subjects expressing his belief in the spiritual harmony of natural forms and forces. Much of Indian symbolism is visually emotive, images such as snakes, plantain leaves, twining creepers, and rippling water being overtly sexual. And, although symbolic attributes and colour codes identify Indian mythological characters (for example, the four arms of the terrible goddess Kālı and the blue skin of the divine lover Krishna), the formal character and colour scheme of settings generally reflect the narrative's emotional mood (for example, vibrant, dark-blue, cloudy skies and embracing, purple-black glades evoking amorous anticipation and red grounds expressing the passions of love or war).

Western symbolic systems, however, are more intellectually directed, their imagery having preciseliterary meanings and their colour codes intended primarily for narrative or devotional identification. The iconographic programs of the early Christian churches, for example, laid down complex formulas for the viewpoints, gestures, facial expressions, and positions of arms, hands, and feet for religious figures. An elaborate Ethiopian Christian iconographic system was followed until very recently, and elsewhere traditional methods survive of identifying archangels and saints by their attributes and by the symbols of martyrdom that they display: distinguishing white-bearded St. Peter from black-bearded St. Paul, for example, and portraying St. Catherine with a wheel and St. Bartholomew with a knife and skin. Christian iconography adopted and elaborated Greco-Roman and Jewish symbolic imagery: the pagan signs of the vine and the fish, forexample, and the image of Christ as the Good Shepherd based on the Greek Hermes Kriophoros. Medieval and Renaissance writings define an immense vocabulary of symbolic images, such as the crescent, sea urchin, and owl signifying heresy, the toad and jug representing the devil, and the egg and bagpipes as erotic symbols (all of which appear in Hieronymus Bosch's 15th-century narrative moralities). Angels and devils, hellfire and golden paradise, heavenly skies and birds in flight representing spirituality and rebirth are examples of the similarity of symbolic meaning for many religious, mythological, and allegorical traditions. The significance of images common to several cultures, however, may also be very different: the dragon representing avarice in European medieval allegory symbolizes friendliness in Japanese Zen painting; and the snake, symbol of temptation and eroticism in the West, signifies, by its skin shedding, the renewal of life in Far Eastern iconography.

ABSTRACT ART

also called Nonobjective Art, or Nonrepresentational Art, painting, sculpture, or graphic art in which the portrayal of things from the visible world plays no part. All art consists largely of elements that can be called abstract—elements of form, colour, line, tone, and texture. Prior to the 20th century these abstract elements were employed by artists to describe, illustrate, or reproduce the world of nature and of human civilization—and exposition dominated over expressive function.

Abstract art has its origins in the 19th century. The period characterized by so vast a body of elaborately representational art produced for the sake of illustrating anecdote also produced a number of painters who examined the mechanism of light and visual perception. The period of Romanticism had put forward ideas about art that denied classicism's emphasis on imitation and idealization and had instead stressed the role of imagination and of the unconscious as the essential creative factors. Gradually many painters of this period began to accept the new freedom and the new responsibilities implied in the coalescence of these attitudes. Maurice Denis's statement of 1890, “It should be remembered that a picture—before being a war-horse, a nude, or an anecdote of some sort—is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order,” summarizes the feeling among the Symbolist and Postimpressionist artists of his time.

All the major movements of the first two decades of the 20th century, including Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism, in some way emphasized the gap between art and natural appearances.

There is, however, a deep distinction between abstracting from appearances, even if to the point of unrecognizability, and making works of art out of forms not drawn from the visible world. During the four or five years preceding World War I, such artists as Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin turned to fundamentally abstract art. (Kandinsky is generally regarded as having been the first modern artist to paint purely abstract pictures containing no recognizable objects, in 1910–11.) The majority of even the progressive artists regarded the abandonment of every degree of representation with disfavour, however. During World War I the emergence of the de Stijl group in The Netherlands and of the Dada group in Zürich further widened the spectrum of abstract art.

Abstract art did not flourish between World Wars I and II. Beset by totalitarian politics and by art movements placing renewed emphasis on imagery, such as Surrealism and socially critical Realism, it received little notice. But after World War II an energetic American school of abstract painting called Abstract Expressionism emerged and had wide influence. Since the 1950s abstract art has been an accepted and widely practiced approach within European and American painting and sculpture. Abstract art has puzzled and indeed confused many people, but for thosewho have accepted its nonreferential language there is no doubt as to its value and achievements.

FAUVISM

style of painting that flourished in France around the turn of the 20th century. Fauve artists used pure, brilliant colour aggressively applied straight from the paint tubes to create a sense of an explosion on the canvas.

The Fauves painted directly from nature, as the Impressionists had before them, but Fauvist works were invested with a strong expressive reaction to the subjects portrayed. First formally exhibited in Paris in 1905, Fauvist paintings shocked visitors to the annual Salon d'Automne; one of these visitors was the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who, because of the violence of their works, dubbed the painters fauves (“wild beasts”).

The leader of the group was Henri Matisse, who had arrived at the Fauve style after experimenting with the various Post-Impressionist approaches of Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat. Matisse's studies led him to reject traditional renderings of three-dimensional space and to seek instead a new picture space defined by movement of colour. He exhibited his famous Woman with the Hat (1905) at the 1905 exhibition. In this painting, brisk strokes of colour—blues, greens, and reds—form an energetic, expressive view of the woman. The crude paint application, which left areas of raw canvas exposed, was appalling to viewers at the time.

The other major Fauvists were André Derain, who had attended school with Matisse in 1898–99, and Maurice de Vlaminck, who was Derain's friend. They shared Matisse's interest in the expressive function of colour in painting, and they first exhibited together in 1905. Derain's Fauvist paintings translate every tone of a landscape into pure colour, which he applied with short,forceful brushstrokes. The agitated swirls of intense colour in Vlaminck's works are indebted to the expressive power of van Gogh.

Three young painters from Le Havre, France, were also influenced by Matisse's bold and vibrant work. Othon Friesz found the emotional connotations of the bright Fauve colours a relief from the mediocre Impressionism he had practiced; Raoul Dufy developed a carefree ornamental version ofthe bold style; and Georges Braque created a definite sense of rhythm and structure out of small spots of colour, foreshadowing his development of Cubism. Albert Marquet, Matisse's fellow student at the École des Beaux-Arts in the 1890s, also participated in Fauvism, as did the Dutchman Kees van Dongen, who applied the style to depictions of fashionable Parisian society. Other painters associated with the Fauves were Georges Rouault, Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, and Jean Puy.

For most of these artists, Fauvism was a transitional, learning stage. By 1908 a revived interest in Paul Cézanne's vision of the order and structure of nature had led many of them to reject the turbulent emotionalism of Fauvism in favour of the logic of Cubism. Matisse alone pursued the course he had pioneered, achieving a sophisticated balance between his own emotions and the world he painted.

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