Step 4: Shaping Ideas and Facts in English

Exercise 1: Render the piece of information below into Russian without consulting a dictionary.

A. MONET, Claude (1840-1926). If you look closely at a piece of material such as twist you will see that it is made up of threads of different colors woven together a piece that looks a plain greenish sо when you see it at a distance may really have blue, brown, yellow, and even orange and red threads in it. The painter Claude Monet realized how the eye “mixes up” the scraps of color from a distance in this way. Therefore when he wanted to give certain impressions, or ideas, of color and light to his pictures he painted in tiny dots of different colors to gain the effect he aimed at, whether it was brilliant dazzling light or soft mistiness.

Monet was born in Paris and studied painting under the guidance of well-known artist of the day. However, he did not want to paint in the way that was then thought correct and soon began to try out his own ideas. In 1863 one picture of his called Impression—Sunrise was shown in an exhibition in Paris, and this title was what gained for Monet and his friends the name Impressionists. The Impressionist painters wanted to paint the look of things at particular moments, not necessarily what they really were. For example, if some trees in the distance looked a bluish color because they were far away, they painted them blue and not green.

Often Monet painted the same scene at differ­ent times of the day and at different seasons of the year, to show how the various kinds of light could change the look of it. He painted as many as 17 pictures of the front of Rouen Cathedral.

For many years the public did not like his work, but he persevered until at last people began to try to understand him and to buy his pictures. By 1891 he was a prosperous artist. Among Monet's best-known works are The Seine at Lavacourt (1880), Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Autumn at Argenteuil (1873), Courtauld Institute Galleries, London; and a series of Rouen Cathedral (1892-1894), five of which were moved to the Musee d’Orsay, Paris, in 1986.

B. The early decades of the twentieth century witnessed the rise and fall of numerous schools of art – Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, and others. The history of modern art in both Europe and America is, however, most eloquently written in the works of individual artists whose technical, intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic innovations speak of and for their times.

Since its founding in 1870 the Metropolitan Museum has been concerned with the art of its own time as well as that of the past. This involvement with contemporary art was strengthened early in the twentieth century with the establishment of two funds by the trustee George A. Hearn for the purpose of acquiring paintings by living American artists.

Masterpieces by Renoir and Cézanne were purchased as early as 1907 and 1913, and the recent acquisition of several important collections of European Modernism has immea­surably enriched the Museum's holdings in this area.

Avant-garde modernism in American painting began when a handful of artists – most of them associated with the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his Gallery 291 – started to emulate advanced Parisian art of the early 1900s. In 1913 the Armory Show presented an exhaustive survey of works by Futurists, Dadaists, and Cubists. Assembled for the first time in America, these works outraged critics but astounded artists. Following the outbreak of World War I, many important European modernists arrived in America, but by the time of the Great Depression, a strong American reaction to modernism had emerged in realist art, emphasizing what artists saw as truly and typically American.

In the 1930s and early 1940-s it seemed that American native realism would dominate painting indefinitely, but events proved otherwise. Interest in modernism had not died but had simply gone underground. In 1936 a group of artists formed the American Abstract Artists, which contributed to the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s. Also of major importance was the arrival of a wave of European masters seeking to escape World War II.

The selection of works suggests that by the middle of the twentieth century national distinctions in art had ceased to have much meaning. Willem de Kooning, born in Rotterdam, was twenty-two years old in 1926 when he arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey. Pablo Picasso, a Spaniard, lived and worked most of his life in France. Balthus, born in Paris of Silesian parents, was raised in Berlin and Geneva, worked in France and Italy, and now resides in Switzerland.

When the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for 20^th Century Art opened in 1987, the Museum's collection of modern design was given a permanent exhibition space, along with paintings and sculpture of Europe and America. For the first time, the extent and richness of the Museum’s modern-design holdings – perhaps the most comprehensive collection in the western hemisphere – were apparent to the public. As with modern American painting, the Museum began to acquire fine objects soon after they were made, a tradition that continues today on an international scale.

Exercise 2: Give exact equivalents for the words and word combinations in italics. Use them in effective English sentences of your own, but change the reference of your statements (speak of other subjects, though they may be closely related to that of the piece of information above).

Exercise 3: Translate into English.

A. Индустриальная революция являлась движущей силой стремительных изменений в XIX веке. Художники реализма этой эпохи изображали простых людей с их повседневными заботами, хотя, конечно же, изменения коснулись и людей искусства. Реалистические застывшие изображения сменили работы, запечатлевавшие мимолетные впечатления. Новая группа художников – импрессионисты – решили совершить фундаментальный переворот в искусстве. В XIX веке картины импрессионистов с изображением садов и парков пользовались особой любовью и признанием. Эти художники часто находили вдохновение в своих собственных садах. Импрессионисты боролись против простого воспроизведения и других правил академического искусства.

Такие художники, как Моне, Ренуар, покидали свои студии и выходили рисовать на открытом воздухе прямо с натуры. Целью художника импрессиониста было зафиксировать световой эффект на объекты и всю окружающую действительность. Они не смешивали краски на полотне, а располагали отдельными цветовыми вкраплениями на холсте. Большинство картин импрессионистов, написанные чистыми, яркими красками, несут на себе отпечаток свежести и спонтанности.

С другой стороны XIX век – это эпоха прославления промышленных достижений. Многие художники конца XIX века знали, что если настоящее отвратительно, обязанностью искусства является обнаруживать эту жестокую реальность. Основные течения того времени – кубизм, формализм, экспрессионизм – выявляли новые пути восприятия вещей. Изображаемые предметы были разбиты на фрагменты и помещены в многомерной перспективе. Художники трансформировали окружающий мир, чтобы отразить свое внутреннее видение мира. Жизнь представлялась цепью случайностей. Для многих сомнение стало основой восприятия. Только предметы, которые можно было постичь или ощутить, считались реальностью.

Б. XX век – это время необычных изменений в технике, двух катастрофических мировых войн, многочисленных социальных экспериментов, информационной революции. Как и в предшествовавшие эпохи, художники ХХ столетия попытались отразить весь положительный и отрицательный опыт в своих произведениях. Возникли новые, часто противоположные, формы художественного выражения. Захватывающий прогресс коммуникации привел к появлению таких художественных течений, как дадаизм, сюрреализм и футуризм. Одни стили занимают видное положение и тут же сменяются новыми, такими как модернизм и пост-модернизм. В то же время наследие Древней Греции и Рима и других знаменательных художественных течений продолжили свое развитие.

Изменения являются неотделимой частью культуры ХХ века. В начале столетия широкое распространение получила новая форма музыкального выражения – джаз. Неотъемлемым элементом джаза является импровизация и чувство спонтанности. В джазе так же, как и в современном мире, все открыто и зыбко.

Абстрактность – другая немаловажная черта искусства и жизни ХХ столетия. В искусстве абстракционизм подразумевает процесс анализа и упрощения окружающей реальности. Как и математик, художник собирает формы в аккуратные и последовательные структуры.

Механизация, а не гуманизм стала движущей силой (импульсом) для человека. Главным мотивом и темой в искусстве стала машина, механизм, а не человек. В целом современное искусство – это новое подтверждение иррационального и уникального, тайны творчества и самой жизни. Современная история – наглядное подтверждение прогрессирующей разрушительной силы человека. Современный человек уязвим и одинок. Его явное одиночество в механизированном мире – это основная тема современной литературы и искусства.

Exercise 4: Design a completed piece of judgement to make certain statements from the above extract more relevant. The point is to resort to evidence where necessary and not to make your text too long.

Exercise 5: Study the information about writing a précis in the Reference Section. Strip the text “The Pre-Modern Era” down to its leading ideas and re-cast it in the smallest number of words possible and write a précis on the topic. Keep the logical order in which the ideas have been presented in the original, but avoid following the exact wording too closely.

Exercise 6:

1. Study the information.

A summary is the expression in a condensed form of the principal content of any piece of writing. In other words the summarizer should briefly render the main idea in his own words.

A summary is a good test of your ability to understand what you have read. If you can pick out essential points and then find your own ways of expressing them, you have really understood the passage.

The procedure for preparing a summary of any kind consists of four steps: 1) reading, 2) selecting, 3) writing, 4) comparing. First you must read the passage carefully to understand its meaning, then picking out the essentials, put the idea expressed into your own words.

Having grasped the essentials you now re-read the passage to see how well you have understood the details. Another problem in summarizing is that you should omit examples when possible.

The last step in writing a summary is comparing the written summary with the original passage to make sure that the essence of the original has been reproduced in a distinctly different language, that no idea, which was not in the original has been introduced in the summary.

2. Write a summary of the text “The Twentieth Century” following the instructions.