Language Focus: Vocabulary

Activity 1. Match the words underlined in the texts to their synonyms or synonymous expressions:

premise lampoon boisterous abject rebuff avidity scintillating mundane loll glaze

very impressive, brilliant, dazzling ridicule, mock, satirize refuse, reject, snub, turn down lounge, relax, sprawl noisy, loud, unruly, rowdy assumption, assertion commonplace, banal, routine total, complete, hopeless enthusiasm, ardour, zeal, eagerness gloss, polish, shine, varnish

Activity 2. Match the words underlined in the texts to their dictionary definitions:

to jeer graft implausible to embroil roll call to flare to flank to vindicate to speckle volatile to conscript squashing bustle awning to loot

to steal things from houses or shops during a war or after a disaster such as a fire or flood to cover with a lot of small spots or marks to shout or laugh at someone in an unkind way showing you have no respect for them to deeply involve oneself in a difficult situation or argument to suddenly become angry or violent to make someone join the armed forces a sheet of cloth hung above a window or door as protection against rain or sun to be at the side of something pushing or pressing something so that it fits into a small place dishonest or illegal activities in politics or business that involve giving people money or advantages in exchange for their help or support to prove that someone is right difficult to accept as true can suddenly change or become more dangerous, angry or violent the process of reading out an official list of people’s names to check who is present a frame warn by women in the past to hold out the back of their skirts

Activity 3. Rearrange the text given below. Make sure you read through the completed text to check that the order of the paragraphs makes sense. Add new words which may come in handy when speaking about painting as a supplement to your vocabulary list:

1. Manet gave no name to the style he had created; when his followers began calling themselves Impressionists, he refused to accept the term for his own work. The word Impressionism had been coined in 1874, after a hostile critic had looked at a picture entitled Impression: Sunrise, by Claude Monet (1840-1926), one of the leading Impressionist painters, and it certainly fits Monet better than it does Manet.

2. Scenes from the world of entertainment – dance halls, cafes, concerts, the theatre, Paris streets and street life with its characteristic bustle, commotion and endless flow of traffic and pedestrians were favourite subjects for Impressionist painters. Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), another important member of the group, filled his with the joy of life of a singularly happy temperament. The flirting couples in Le Moulin de la Galette dappled with sunlight and shadow, radiate human warmth that is utterly entrancing, even though the artist permits us no more than a fleeting glance at any of them. Our role is that of the casual stroller, who takes in this slice of life as he passes.

3. In the landscapes River Bank (1873) and London Fog (1903), the canvas is filled as it were with the subtle, barely perceptible movement of currents of moist air, in which outlines of things melt into nothing. But Monet’s multi-coloured landscape paintings never fall apart in compositional terms, because for all the freedom of their painterly transposition the artist always subjected them to the same organizational pattern: the light of the sun, which illuminates all the elements of the picture and connects them together like a net cast around them.

4. Of course, Renoir at his best embodies the principles and methods of Impressionism in portrait painting. He did not attempt to reveal in his portraits intricate feelings and emotions; he caught the spontaneous movement, the half-smile, the gentle reverie of his model. Unaffected animation and simplicity characterize his Girl with a Fan and Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary. Renoir's colours are notable for their freshness, the richness of hues, and the extremely delicate transition from one tone to the next.

5. What brought about this “revolution of the colour patch”? We do not know, and Edouard Manet (1832-1883) himself surely did not reason it out beforehand. It is tempting to think that he was impelled to create the new style by the challenge of photography. He wanted to prove that a canvas was a surface covered with paints, flat patches of color.

6. Monet’s The River (1868) is flooded with sunlight so bright that conservative critics claimed it made their eyes smart; in this flickering network of colour patches, the reflections on the water are as ‘real’ as the banks of the Seine. Monet’s painting is a ‘playing card’; were it not for the woman and the boat in the foreground, the picture could hang upside-down with hardly any difference of effect. The mirror image here serves a purpose contrary to that of earlier mirror images: instead of adding to the illusion of real space, it strengthens the unity of the actual painted surface. This inner coherence sets The River apart from Romantic ‘impressions’ like Constable’s Hampstead Heath even though they share the same on-the-spot immediacy and fresh perception.

7. Towards the 1870s Impressionism reached its peak in France, the movement having originated as a protest against the rigid convention which prevailed in official art. The Impressionists emerged as heirs to the realist traditions and enriched painting with their fresh, joyful colours, their representation of light and exquisite rendering of atmosphere. They drew only from life capturing the spontaneity and naturalness of the first visual impression. In conveying the wealth of colour in the real world around them the Impressionists attempted to catch and to record its face, forever changing under the play of light.

8. But it is important to stress that Renoir never felt obliged to adhere strictly to one particular method; we know him to change his technique whenever he felt like it. As a result, it is sometimes not at all easy to date some of his canvases; after painting several pictures in one fashion, he would paint another in which he went back to an earlier way of working, just when one would have been justified in thinking that he has abandoned it for good.

9. Monet had adopted Manet’s concept of painting and applied it to landscapes done out-of-doors. An early work of his, Lady in the Garden (1860s), reflects the first success of the new manner of painting. Abandoning black and subdued tones, Monet painted the shade in colour depending on the surrounding milieu. The woman’s white dress in the shade of the parasol, for example, acquires a bluish hue against the background of the green foliage and the blue sky.

Activity 4. Read the texts below and complete them using the words from the boxes:

phenomena apparent vanguard exclusively easel streamed fleeting platform memories lively financial reality public atmosphere developed

Monet at the Peak Of Impressionism

Despite his occasional successes, Monet’s …¹… situation did not improve. But he did increasingly enter the …²… eye, and was also perceived as being at the …³… and finally as being a main representative of Impressionist painting.

Around this time he discovered the vitality and splendid colour of city life for himself. Like the English artist Turner, Monet now …⁴… an enthusiasm for the new technology, which was now …⁵… everywhere and had a great influence on people's lives. Thus he set up his …⁶… in the Parisian Gare St Lazare, and in a series of paintings he captured the moments in which powerful steam locomo­tives reached the …⁷… and hundreds of people from the suburbs …⁸… out of the carriages. With the same blurring style, and the same …⁹…, brightly-coloured contrasts that characterize his landscape paintings, Monet managed to capture the hectic, noisy and confusing …¹⁰… of a station hall.

But his true love, more and more, turned …¹¹… to landscape painting. For Monet, landscape paintings were not painted …¹²… or captured moods within the landscape itself, rather they were to grasp the purely visual, experienced impression of an object or landscape. Monet was not concerned with the 'objective beauty' of things, but mainly with the momentary, …¹³… impression. He wished to capture the transitory aspect of …¹⁴… as in a 'snapshot'. He believed that Impressionist painting depicted the …¹⁵… of the moment. In this sense Monet saw his art as Realism.

cheerful vibrate leaves comprehensible unpleasant discerned vague stored confidence synthetic reflections elements abstract countless

Renoir

“For me a painting must above all be beautiful, loveable and delightful, something really pretty. There are enough …¹… things, we don't need to make new ones”, wrote Renoir. Accordingly, he is seen as the painter of the …²… side of life. The play of sunlight and the reproduction of …³…, but particularly the human figure in natural light, form the central content of Renoir's paintings. In the pleasure-garden ‘Moulin de la Galette’, the light shines through the …⁴… of the trees, and dances over the ground and the figures in …⁵… little patches of glimmering colour. The people as well as the ground seem to …⁶… in the play of light between the light and dark patches. Renoir had absolute …⁷… in the descriptive effect of colour: with short, soft strokes and delicate grades of colour, he produced gentle, vague contours, so that all the picture …⁸… seem to blend, to blur. Details can no longer be …⁹… among these veils of colour.

Thanks to the so-called ‘synthetic’ process of seeing, however, Renoir's paintings remain …¹⁰… to the viewer. With the vague painting on canvas that only hints and describes, the viewer automatically compares ‘typical’ images …¹¹… away in the unconscious, and thus completes it. Renoir – like his friend Monet – deliberately addressed the …¹²… process of reception, in order to make his paintings appear even more vivid through the viewer's own efforts. He made use of Leonardo’s sfumato technique of …¹³… contours, and at the same time created one of the bases for the …¹⁴… painting of the 20th century.

Activity 5. Read the texts below and complete them using the words from the boxes on the right in the correct form:

IMPRESSIONISM AND ITS PECULIARITIES Impressionist painters were considered radical in their time because they …1… many of the rules of picture-making set by earlier …2… . They found many of their subjects in …3… around them rather than in history, which was then the …4… source of subject matter. Instead of painting an ideal of beauty that earlier artists had …5…, the …6… tried to depict what they saw at a given moment, capturing a fresh, original …7… that was hard for some people to accept as …8… . They often painted out of doors, rather than in a studio, so that they …9… observe nature more directly and set down its most …10… aspects – especially the changing light of the sun. The style of Impressionist painting has several …11… features. To …12… the appearance of spontaneity, Impressionist painters used broken brushstrokes of bright, often unmixed colors. This practice …13… loose or densely textured surfaces rather than the …14… blended colors and smooth surfaces favored by most …15… of the time. The colors in Impressionist paintings have an overall …16… because the painters avoided blacks and earth colors. The Impressionists also …17… their compositions, omitting detail to achieve a …18… overall effect.

Break Generate Live Acceptance Definition Impress Visible Beauty Can Fleet Characterize Achievement Production Care Art Luminous Simple Strike

THE GARDEN AT GIVERNY Monet first rented the house and garden at Giverny, a small village where the river Epte and the Seine joined, early in the 1880s. Today its beautiful gardens, …1… when Monet bought the property in 1892, with its …2… outhouses, studios and greenhouses, have become a place of …3… for all lovers of art. There they find a large garden …4… disarrayed, full of clumps of flowers planted by the painter to ensure for himself an …5… vista of subjects for his paintings. By the end of his life, Monet’s garden at Giverny was his sole …6…; he would even say, in moments of …7 … at the way his paintings did not turn out as he …8… them, that his garden was his true masterpiece. Irises were among Monet’s …9… flowers and he went to a great deal of trouble to get the best bulbs for his garden, even importing special varieties from Japan. Apart from their …10… interest, Monet saw them as models for his paintings, either in great banks of colour or in single stems. As with his waterlilly pond paintings, Monet was totally …11… at this period of his life to the exploration of colour …12… in which each brushstroke was like a note in a piece of music. Its …13… and tone were in complete balance with every other brushstroke, thus creating a perfect …14… . Monet’s garden was a riot of colour in springtime, as he took good care to buy the …15… flower bulbs and instructed his gardeners how, when and where to plant them. Spring was a good time to paint his …16… and he did so with enthusiasm and liberal use of colour, though always controlled and carefully …17… so that the paintings retained their …18…, and look as clear and lively today as when they were painted.

Large Vary Pilgrim Romance End Inspire Desperate Imagination Favor Botany Commitment Combine Intensify Compose Necessity Create Application Fresh

Activity 6. Use these word combinations speaking about your favourite French painters and their famous works of art:

At their own peril; to be the fountainhead of art; sensuous richness of colouring; to reveal psychological penetration; daring use of colour; to paint vivid sensations of light; to make merry; to dissolve forms in light; to enrich painting with fresh, joyful, glowing, brilliant and luminous colours; to turn one’s back on something; one’s urge for emotional expression; to pave the way; to capture spontaneity and naturalness of the first visual impression; to establish a standard of representational accuracy; flat patches of colour; to fuse in the eye of the beholder; to set up a quivering vibration; to seize a fugitive effect.