Painting
Impressionism
LESSON 7. The aim of the lesson is to teach you to characterise a trend in pictorial art from the viewpoint of the painter’s purpose and the chief pictorial devices.
1. Reproduce the piece of information and enlarge upon it (the central object of the utterance should remain the same):
The true aim of Impressionism was to achieve even greater realism, by exact analysis of tone and colour and by trying to render the play of light on the surface of objects. The idea that an object of any given colour casts a shadow tinged with its complementary was one of the principle ways in which they animated the surface of their canvases.
2. Translate the following pieces of information at home into good Russian and offer them at the lesson to your partner for back translation:
a) The Impressionists didn’t form a homogeneous group. Their temperaments differed and their interests were on certain points opposed. But what they had in common was the rejection of all that was dear to academic painting, historical, mythological and sentimental subjects, over-polished, finished, dull tar-like colours. They also shared the determination to produce contemporary paintings; they took their subjects from the everyday reality of their time and tried to express their sensations with sincerity, even should this force them to go against the rules of time-honoured tradition.
b) Impressionism was not a school, with its discipline, rules and aesthetic code, but the vital and wayward expression of one of the most radiant moments in French art, the rebirth of landscape painting and of evocation of modern life, which led a critic to say that “the great lyric poets of the end of the 19th century were not the writers of verses but the Impressionist painters”, both the most orthodox and the most dissident among them.
3. Give distinctive characteristic features of Impressionism.
4. Render the following piece of information and go on speaking. You are to explain how the works of such painters as Corot, Delacroix, Ingres, Turner, Courbet influenced the art of the Impressionists. (Use the information from the video “The Masterpieces of Western Art” as well as other sources):
Когда импрессионисты организовали свою первую выставку, они уже не были неопытными, начинающими художниками; это были люди, перешагнувшие за тридцать, имевшие за плечами свыше 15 лет усердной работы. Они учились в Школе изящных искусств, обращались за советами к художникам старшего поколения, обсуждали и впитывали различные художественные течения своего времени. Однако, они отказались слепо руководствоваться методами прославленных мастеров и современных псевдомастеров. Из уроков прошлого и настоящего они извлекли новые концепции и создали своё собственное искусство. Хотя их попытки потрясали современников своим “бесстыдством”, на самом деле они были подлинными продолжателями практики и теорий своих предшественников. Таким образом, новый этап истории искусства, начавшийся выставкой 1874 года, не был внезапным взрывом революционных тенденций. Он явился кульминацией медленного и последовательного развития.