Part VII. The New Times

The Pre-Modern Era

STEP 1: Understanding the Information

Picture 15

a) 300 metres.

The 984-foot iron-framed Eiffel Tower (named in honor of its designer, bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel) was erected in Paris in 1889.

Step 2: Spelling and Vocabulary

Exercise 1: Developing spelling skills. Fill in the blanks with missing letters. Remember the spelling and the pronunciation.

Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Victor Emmanuel, Kaiser Wilhelm, Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Mary Cassatt, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Paul Cézanne.

Exercise 2: Pronounce the words below. Match a word with a picture (not all the pictures have their names!)

Plate 6

Historical Costumes

a) lady [ca. 1880] 68

b) bustle 69

Exercise 4: Guess the word from its definition and the first letter.

1. of the present time, modern - contemporary;

2. a particular way of doing smth. - technique;

3. allowing no freedom, causing smb. to feel very uncomfortable - oppressive;

4. a picture that shows a view of the countryside - landscape;

5. the effect that a person or thing produces on smb. else - impression;

6. connected with the sense of sight - optical;

7. a series of actions that you do for a particular purpose, a series of changes that happen naturally - process;

8. coming before smth. else that is more important - preliminary;

9. not showing friendly human feelings, cold in feeling or atmosphere, not referring to any particular person - impersonal;

10. the art of drawing on a flat surface so that some objects appear to be farther away than others - perspective;

11. to love or admire smth./smb. very much - worship.

Exercise 5: Put one of the linking words or phrases from the box into each gap.

• The Pre-Modern Era began about 1865 and was a period of sweeping change.

• Even more than in the “enlightened” 18th century, men were now trying to control the world around them.

• And now, they had the advanced tools of science and technology with which to work.

• By the end of the nineteenth century it was industry which produced much of what is now considered art.

• The engineer Eiffel constructed his famous tower to commemorate the great Paris Exposition of 1889, but he had earlier made his reputation as a builder of bridges.

• But inside, Romantic Byzantine domes were made of sheet metal, a product of the new industrial age.

• Thus prefabricated with interchangeable parts, the whole Exhibition Hall was put together in only a few weeks' time.

• As man increasingly concerned himself with the technical world, the subject matter of painting moved away from these emotion-filled Romantic scenes, which had predominated in the first half of the century.

• Actually, the art world was even more upset by Manet’s technique.

• Moreover, the paint on the canvas was itself becoming as important as the subject.

• The eye of the spectator was obliged to fill in what was missing.

• Artists were fighting to free themselves from the artificial conventions and rules of academic art, such as the exact duplication on canvas of every detail in the scene they were painting.

• Also, the pursuit of literally capturing the external and objective world had inspired scientific and technological minds like Daguerre's to the invention of the photographic process.