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Файл:Английский язык для профессионального общения. Искусство и дизайн = English for Professional Communication. Art and Design. Учебное пособие
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PART II. MISCELLANEOUS
SUPPLEMENTARY READING
TEXT 1. A THING OF BEAUTY
1. You are going to read the last chapter from the book A Thing of
Beauty by A. J. Cronin. Read very short information about the writer
and say what books by A. J. Cronin you have read.
Archibald Joseph Cronin was born in 1896. In 1919 he graduated from
Glasgow University where he took a medical course. After that he
practiced medicine for over ten years and gained a lot of experience of
life. Though Cronin was an excellent doctor, he hoped some time to take
up a literary career. The opportunity to write came when his medical
practice was interrupted by illness. His first novel came out in 1931. It
was followed by a number of other novels.
A Thing of Beauty was published in 1955. It is a story of Stephen
Desmonde, the son of a clergyman who wanted him to follow in his steps.
But Stephen was fond of painting and devoted his life to art. Against his
father’s will he left England to study painting in France. He became an
artist and created several masterpieces. The excerpt [ʹeksɜ:pt] given below
is taken from the last chapter of the novel.
2. Read the excerpt of the novel. Pay attention to the text passages
describing paintings. Find the senesces you liked most. Explain why.
A Thing of Beauty
after A. J. Cronin
On an April afternoon in the year 1937 a man, to be exact, an elderly
clergyman, and a boy descended from a bus at the north end of Vauxhall
Bridge, and soon they were both inside the Tate Gallery. Few people were
about. They made their way through the central gallery, past the glowing
Turners and silvery Whistlers, the Sargents, Constables and Gains
boroughs, and finally sat down in a room, fretted by sunshine, on the
-
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II. Miscellaneous
west side. Upon the wall, directly opposite, exquisitely framed and hung,
were three paintings.
At these, silently, the boy as in duty bound, his elder with remote and
meditative vision, gazed. Presently, without removing his eyes, Bertram
spoke.
“ Stephen, you are settling down quite well at school?”
“Quite well, thank you, sir.”
“You like it there?”
“It’s not at all bad, sir.”
“Of course, the first year is always difficult. But afterwards you’ll get
into the swing of things. You’ve made some friends, I hope?”
“Yes, sir.ˮ
“Good.”
“We expect fine things of you, my boy. You must stick in and do credit
to your name. Are the lessons coming along?”
“Pretty fair, I think, sir. We had a test before we broke up for the
holidays.”
“How did that come out?”
“I did all right in English and arithmetic.”
A shadow crossed Bertram’s mind, he scarcely could bring himself to
ask the question.
“Do they give you drawing?”
“Yes, sir. But I did badly in that. It seems I can’t draw at all.”
Unconsciously, Bertram gave out a little sigh of relief, glanced towards
his grandson, who continued – “but Mother said I must tell you I got full
marks for Scripture knowledge.”
“Well done... well done,” Bertram murmured. Who could tell?
Perhaps even at this late hour the great hope of his life might be
fulfilled, if the good Lord would only let him survive to realize it.
He laid his blue-veined fingers on the boy’s hand and patted it
approvingly.
A party of school-girls entered the room, under the escort of their
mistress. There were about a dozen of them, the mistress, in restrained
tweeds and flat-heeled shoes, was pale and earnest, bareheaded, bespectacled, and carried a little sheat of notes, to which, as the guide conducting
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Supplementary Reading
the tour, she referred from time to time. Exactly opposite Bertram and
Stephen, but without taking any notice of them, she drew up.
“And now, girls,” she announced, “we come to the Desmondes, three
representative paintings purchased in 1930. The first, entitled Circus,
distinguished by a marvelous sense of colour and composition, is of the
artist’s early French period. Note in particular the grouping of the clowns
in the foreground and the manner in which a sense of movement is given
to the figure of the young woman on the bicycle”.
“The second painting, The Blue Wrapper, which I am sure you have
seen reproduced many times, is a portrait of the artist’s wife. Here you
will find the freedom of arrangements and unconventionality of design
which characterized all Desmonde’s work. As you see, the subject is
neither pretty nor young, yet by subtle colouring and a rhythmic flow of
simple lines, an extraordinary feeling of beauty is created. Observe, too,
that through the window at which she sits, there is an exquisitely suggested
vista (перспектива) of the street outside, with some poor children
engaged in a game of ball. This, incidentally, was the subject of another
well-known Desmonde known as Children at Play, which may be seen in
the Luxembourg, Paris”. “The third, and largest painting, was the last
work accomplished by the artist and is considered to be his finest. It is, as
you see, a large composition of the estuary of the Thames, showing all
the crowded, turbulent movement of the river.”
She began here to consult her notes.
“Observe, girls, that it is no mere pictorial representation. Note the
skillful deformations, the audacity and subtlety of the colouring, the
expressive divided tones, the projection upon the canvas of an interior
drama of the spirit. See also how the light seems to emanate from the
canvas, gleaming and vibrant, a luminosity that gives great intensity to
the work. In a way it is reminiscent of the radiance of expression found in
the great paintings of Rubens. Desmonde was not altogether a revolutionary painter. Just as the Impressionists drew from Turner, he drew, in
his early years from Manet, Degas, and Monet. There are some, indeed,
who have contended recently that the Spanish period of his art stems
from the painter Goya. But although he studied the masters, he went
beyond them. He knew how to recognize beauty in all its forms, and his
conscience forced him to reject any technique but his own. He was in
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II. Miscellaneous
every sense of the word an individualist whose work, even when most
specialized, seemed to cover the whole span of life, a great original artist
who, resisting every temptation to be repetitious, opened up a new era of
expression. When we look at these works we know he has not lived in
vain.”
Here the mistress discarded her notes and became human again.
Looking around her pupils she asked briskly: “Any questions, class?”
One of the girls, who stood close to the teacher, spoke up, in the
manner of a favourite pupil.
“Is he dead, Miss?”
“Yes, Doris. He died as quite a young man, rather tragically, and
almost unrecognized.”
“But, Miss, didn’t you just tell us he was a great painter?”
“Yes, Doris, but like so many others he had to die to become great.
Don’t you remember what I told you about Rembrandt’s poverty, and
Hals, buried in a pauper’s grave, and Gauguin, who could scarcely sell
a single picture when he was penniless, and Van Gogh....”
“Yes, Miss... people didn’t understand, were mistaken about them.”
“We can all make mistakes, dear... Gladys, do stop sniffing.”
“Please, Miss, I have a cold.”
“Then use your handkerchief... as I was saying, Doris, England may
have erred over Stephen Desmonde, but she has made up for it handsomely. Here are these paintings in the Tate for all of us to admire. Now
come along, follow me, don’t lag behind, girls, and we’ll take the
Sargents.”
you read any of his biographical novels of noted artists?
work his way through the University of California. He majored in political
science, graduating with honors in 1923. Like many American intellectuals
of the period, he spent some time in Paris, where he chanced to see an
exhibit of van Gogh’s paintings that forever changed his direction. He
immediately embarked on extensive research into the life of the nineteenth
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TEXT 2. DEPTHS OF GLORY
1. Read about Irving Stone, the famous American writer. Have
Irving Stone was born on July 14, 1903, in San Francisco, California.
After graduating from high school, Stone took a variety of odd jobs to
Supplementary Reading
century Impressionist painter and later he researched the life of another
prominent artist – Camille Pissarro. The excerpt below is taken from his
novel Depths of Glory devoted to Pissarro’s life.
2. Read the excerpt of the novel Depths of Glory by I. Stone.
Spe
culate on what Pissaro told Cezanne. Was he right? Give
arguments.
Depths of Glory
after I. Stone
The opening of the official Salon on April 30, 1863, was attended by
several thousand Parisians interested in art exhibitions. The jury gave
a prize to the picture called The Pearl and the Wave, a young woman
voluptuously extended on the bank receiving the embraces of the
caressing waves. Corot and Millet were described by the judges as “foremost”. Gustave Courbet was infuriated because he had been described as
“fading and passing away”. Portrait of the Emperor was judged “the
most important work of the exhibit”.
Le Figaro’s critic was disappointed with the Salon. He wrote: “It is an
honest and prudent French school. The general effect is sleepy.”
The two weeks preceding the “Salon des Refuses” dragged unmercifully. When, a couple of days prior to the opening, the Emperor announced
that he and his Empress would attend the showing of the unwanted artists,
a shock wave went through Paris. Everyone who had been at the opening
of the official Salon would have to attend this second Salon to see and be
seen by their Majesties. It was expected that there would be an enormous
crowd.
“We’ll have a great success,” cried Claude Monet. Camille Pissarro
responded, “You see, to be rejected is not the same as being ignored.”
On the day of the opening he and his colleagues assembled in the
passageway between Palais de Industrie and the adjoining building
shortly before the opening hour. They found the exhibit as luxuriously
mounted as that of the official Salon. Antique tapestries hung in the doorways. The benches were made comfortable with red velvet cushions. The
skylights were covered with white cotton screens to cut the glare. There
was a long series of display rooms. All like the official Salon... except for
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II. Miscellaneous
the pictures. The brightness of their colour, the mood, the authenticity of
the figures and the presence of fresh air. The feeling of youth, of gaiety.
Of innovation.
In the two areas termed “the place of dishonor” were Edouard Manet’s
Luncheon on the Grass, two gentlemen fully clothed in vests, jackets and
cravats, and two women entirely naked, sitting and gathering flowers,
beside them the picnic basket and its luxurious contents overflowing into
the foreground. James McNeill Whistler’s The White Girl presented
a
copper-haired young lady dressed in white, standing in front of an
allwhite curtain, a massing of white on white, telling no story as did the
pictures of the time. They were the two most original canvases in the
exhibition. Nothing similar had ever been painted.
Camille’s three pictures were a short distance away. On the opposite
wall were scenes by Claude Monet and the oils by Paul Cezanne. The
succeeding rooms represented a hundred other artists. Many might be
thought dull but they were reasonably safe from ridicule.
There were biblical and military subjects; classical myths, Greek and
Roman themes.
The exhibit conveyed an atmosphere of youth, determination, even
the exotic odor of fanaticism. There was an equally charged expectancy
on the faces of the painters, the alert, coiled-spring stance of their figures
giving the exhibition rooms a feeling of buoyancy.
For a long time after the noon-hour opening the artists were largely
alone. Emile Zola, Cezanne’s schoolboy friend, made a tour of the exhibition, taking notes. He aspired to be an art critic and to place the article in
an important journal. He observed:
“The walls are covered with a mixture of the excellent and execrable.
Representatives of the historical school cheek by jowl with youthful
fanatics of realism. Colorless mediocrity next to blatant originality.
Nothing has been left out, not even medieval subjects. Superficially it is
an incoherent jumble, but there is truth and sincerity enough about the
landscapes and most of the portraits to give it a healthy atmosphere of
youthful passion and vigor”.
The early visitors stood in front of Luncheon on the Grass and The
White Girl, saying nothing, their faces masks of doubt and confusion. It
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Supplementary Reading
was not until three o’clock that the people began to pour in. When his
Majesty arrived, the crowd grew dense. There was an increasing crush of
hundreds of viewers before the Manet and the Whistler, pushing,
elbowing, everyone wanting to get closer. It grew increasingly hot; the
dust from the earthen floor cogged Camille’s nostrils. He was captivated
by the ominous silence. Then it started: grunts, expletives, roars of
laughter filled the exhibition hall. It was loudest before Manet’s Luncheon
on the Grass.
“The painter is mad.... He’s immoral!... We’re being made fools of. It
should be cut into shreds. No wonder it was rejected....”
The outburst in front of The White Girl was not because she was
obscene, for the young woman was fully clothed. There was deeper,
ominous note in the ridicule and irreverent disparagement. Fear. Not the
fear of their exposure to immorality, but a challenge to everything they
knew and accepted in painting. If Manet and Whistler were right, the
public had been wrong. It was frightening to know that the world had
passed them by and their taste was junked.
The abuse filled the hall more densely than the dust, the laughter was
hysterical in an attempt to deride the new art into oblivion. The ribald
derision which engulfed Luncheon on the Grass and The White Girl
swept over the entire “Salon of Infamy”, as it began to be called, leaving
the painters bruised, bewildered, shrinking inside themselves. Camille
heard his paintings called “stills capes”. When Camille reached home, he
found Julie eagerly awaiting him.
“Tell me what happened?”
“Nothing happened. We were laughed out of court.”
“All of you?”
“Those of us they thought worthy of desecration.”
She picked Lucien up from his crib, fitted herself and the boy into his
arms. The warm feeling of the child, the sensation of the life he and Julie
had created, set his pulse beating faster. He smiled at her, a faint smile.
“As I told Cezanne, do not attempt to convince your contemporaries.
The next generation will understand you. We have only to survive.”
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II. Miscellaneous
TEXT 3. THE MOON AND SIXPENCE
1. Read about Somerset Maugham. Have you ever head the name
of the author? Have you read his books or seen films made after his
book?
William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874. After graduating from
Heidelberg University he worked at a hospital, but the success of his first
novel Liza of Zambeth (1897) encouraged him to give up medicine and
become a professional writer. Somerset Maugham is the author of several
well-known novels and plays, and a lot of short stories. Somerset
Maugham died in 1965 at the age of 92.
One of the most famous of his novels, The Moon and Sixpence (1916)
follows the story of Charles Strickland, a stockbroker who became an
artist, in his quest for truth and beauty.
2. The novel is in part based on the life of the French artist Paul
Gauguin [ʹpɔ:lɡǝɡɪ:n]. Read the excerpt and answer the question
Would you like to read the whole book?
The Moon and Sixpence
after W. Somerset Maugham
I did not know why Strickland had suddenly offered to show his
pictures to me. I welcomed the opportunity. A man’s work reveals him.
As I walked up the endless stairs of the house in which Strickland
lived, I confess that I was a little excited. It seemed to me that I was on
the threshold of a surprising adventure. I looked about the room with
curiosity. It was even smaller and more bare than I remembered it.
I wondered what those friends of mine would say who demanded vast
studios, and vowed they could not work unless all the conditions were to
their liking.
“You’d better stand there,” he said, pointing to a spot from which,
presumably, he fancied I could see to best advantage what he had to show
me.
“You don’t want me to talk, I suppose,” I said.
“No, blast you; I want you to hold your tongue.’
He placed a picture on the easel, and let me look at it for a minute or
two: then took it down and put another in its place. I think he showed me
about thirty canvases. It was the result of the six years during which he
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Supplementary Reading
had been painting. He had never sold a picture. The canvases were of
different sizes. The smaller were pictures of still-life and largest were
landscapes. There were about half-a-dozen portraits.
“That is the lot,” he said at last.
I wish I could say that I recognized at once their beauty and their great
originality. Now that I have seen many of them again and the rest are
familiar to me in reproductions, I am astonished that at first sight I was
bitterly disappointed. I felt nothing of the peculiar thrill which it is the
property of art to give. The impression that Strickland’s pictures gave me
was disconcerting; and the fact remains, always to reproach me, that
I
never even thought of buying any. I missed a wonderful chance. Most of
them have found their way into museums, and the rest are the treasured
possessions of wealthy amateurs. I try to find excuses for myself. I think
that my taste is good, but I am conscious that it has no originality. I know
very little about painting, and I wander along trails that others have blazed
for me. At that time I had the greatest admiration for the Impressionists.
I longed to possess a Sisley and Degas, and I worshipped Manet. His
Olympia seemed to me the greatest picture of modern times, and
Luncheon on the Grass moved me profoundly. These works seemed to
me the last word in painting.
I will not describe the pictures that Strickland showed me. Descriptions
of pictures are always dull, and these, besides, are familiar to all who take
an interest in such things. Now that his influence has so enormously
affected modern painting, Strickland’s pictures, seen for the first time,
would find the mind more prepared for them; but it must be remembered
that I had never seen anything of the sort. First of all I was taken aback
by what seemed to me the clumsiness of his technique. Accustomed to
the drawing of the old masters, and convinced that Ingres was the greatest
draughtsman of recent times, I thought that Strickland drew very badly.
knew nothing of the simplification at which he aimed. I remembered
I
a
still-life of oranges on a plate, and I was bothered because the plate was
not round and the oranges were lop-sided. The portraits were a little
larger than life-size, and this gave them an ungainly look. To my eyes the
faces looked like caricatures. They were painted in a way that was entirely
new to me. The landscape puzzled me even more. There were two or
three pictures of the forest at Fontainebleau and several of streets in Paris;
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my first feeling was that they might have been painted by a drunken cabdriver. I was perfectly bewildered. The colour seemed to me extraordinarily crude. It passed through my mind that the whole thing was
a
stupendous, incomprehensible farce. Now that I look back I am more
than ever impressed by Stroeve’s acuteness. He saw from the first that
here was a revolution in art, and he recognized in its beginnings the
genius which now all the world allows.
But if I was puzzled and disconcerted, I was not unimpressed. Even
I, in my colossal ignorance, could not but feel that here, trying to express
itself, was real power. I was excited and interested. I felt that these pictures
had something to say to me that was very important to know. They were
strangely tantalizing. They said something that words were powerless to
utter. I fancy that Strickland saw vaguely some spiritual meaning in
material things. It was as though he found in the chaos of the universe
a new pattern. I saw a tormented spirit striving for the release of expression. I turned to him.
“I wonder if you haven’t mistaken your medium,” I said.
“What the hell do you mean?”
“I think you’re trying to say something, I don’t quite know what it is,
but I’m not sure that the best way of saying it is by means of painting.”
When I imagined that on seeing his pictures I should get a clue to the
understanding of his strange character I was mistaken. They merely
increased the astonishment with which he filled me. I was more at sea
than ever. The only thing that seemed clear to me – was that he was
passionately striving for liberation from some power that held him. But
what the power was remained obscure. Each one of us is alone in the
world. He can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs
have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We
seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have
not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side-by-side but not
together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like
people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with
all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned
to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with
ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener’s aunt
is in the house.
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