Западноевропейское искусство от Хогарта до Сальвадора Дали

I. Read the text. Make sure you understand it. Mark the following statements true or false.

1. Delacroix produced thousands of oil paintings.

2. Delacroix's idol in music was Chopin.

3. Delacroix painted scenes full of harmony.

4. Delacroix was loyal to Raphael and Rembrandt.

5. Colour was the major determinant in Delacroix's works.

6. Delacroix identified himself with the Assyrian monarch.

II. How well have you read? Can you answer the following questions?

1. What artistic movement did Delacroix embody? What did Delacroix write about illusions and reality?

2. What did Delacroix write about his projects?

3. What moment did Delacroix show in the Bark of Dante? What compositional principle did he use in this painting? How was this picture treated by the public?

4. What is the subject of the Massacre at Chios? How was this picture called? What did Delacroix do with the picture when it was brought to the Salon?

5. What painting became a manifesto of Romanticism? What is the subject of this work of art?

6. What was the only real adventure of Delacroix's life? What is realised in the Women of Algiers? What did Delacroix write about painting in 1854?

III. i. Give Russian equivalents of the following phrases:

to create the illusions; free colouristic movement; to produce water-colours; scenes of violence; to derive the subjects from poetry and from medieval history; sulphurous dimness; to break up the pyramidal grouping; Romantic spirit; centrifugal curves; to display the distant slaughter and conflagration; the richness of colour; a feast of violence; sketches in pencil; to derive a law.

ii. Give English equivalents of the following phrases:

свободное движение цвета; карандашные наброски; изобразить резню и пожар вдали; дух романтизма; вывести закон; богатство красок; сцены насилия; создать иллюзии; разрушить пирамидальную группу; черпать сюжеты из поэзии и средневековой истории; создавать акварели; основной композиционный принцип; центростремительные линии; разрушительная энергия.

iii. Make up sentences of your own with the given phrases.

iv. Arrange the following in the pairs of synonyms:

a) solitary; emotional; to admire; derive; conflagration

b) lonely; obtain; to praise; fire; passionate.

IV. Here are descriptions of some of Delacroix's works of art. Match them up to the titles given below.

1. This picture is a phantasmagoria with no real cruelty.

2. Delacroix illustrates a moment in which the poet is steered across the dark tides of the lake.

3. These fantasies point directly toward the twentieth century.

4. The subject was an incident from the Greek wars of libe-ration against the Turks.

5. This picture had a great influence on the Impressionists.

a) Massacre at Chios

b) Tiger Hunt

c) Women of Algiers

d) Bark of Dante

e) Death of Sardanapalus

V. Translate the text into English.

Выставленная в Салоне в 1824 г. картина «Резня в Хиосе» сделала Делакруа вождем романтизма. Картина получила неоднозначную оценку. Одни ею восхищались, другие называли картину резней живописи. Делакруа не признавал данное ему звание романтика. Романтизм противопоставлялся классицизму и имел расплывчатое определение. Однако, несмотря на отсутствие программы, стал мощным художественным движением XIX в.

В Салоне в 1827 г. Делакруа выставил большое полотно «Смерть Сарданапала», которое стало манифестом романтизма. Картину оценили должным образом только в 1921 г., когда она была куплена Лувром.

Эжен Делакруа жил интенсивной духовной жизнью. Его кумирами были: в живописи – Гойя и Рубенс, в музыке – Моцарт. Первая работа Делакруа «Ладья Данте», вдохновленная «Божественной комедией» Данте, подверглась сильной критике.

Поездки Делакруа в конце 1831 – 1832 г. в мусульманские страны вдохновили художника на создание прекрасных картин, одной из которых является «Алжирские женщины в своих покоях» 1834).

VI. Summarize the text.

VII. Topics for discussion.

1. Romanticism in art.

2. Delacroix's style and characters.

3. Delacroix's artistic heritage.

Unit VII Constable (1776-1837)

The mainstream of English painting in the first half of the nineteenth century was landscape. Constable and Turner, the greatest of the landscapists, approached nature with excitement. At that time nature was beginning to be swallowed up by the expanding cities of the Industrial Revolution.

John Constable, the son of a miller on the River Stour in Suffolk, honoured all that was natural and traditional, including the age-old occupation of farmer, miller, and carpenter, close to the land whose fruits and forces they turned to human use. He loved the poetic landscapes of Gainsborough, he studied the constructed compositions of the Baroque, he admired Ruisdael's skies. Rebelling against the brown tonality then fashionable in landscape painting – actually the result of discoloured varnish darkening the Old Masters – he supplemented his observations of nature with a study of the vivacity of Rubens's colour and brushwork.

As early as 1802, Constable started to record the fleeing aspects of the sky in the rapid oil sketches made outdoors. «It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which sky is not the keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment,' he wrote. Constable systematically studied cloud formation in 1821-22. These studies show his surrender to the forces of nature, a passionate self-identification with sunlight, wind, and moisture.

Constable never left England and made dutiful sketching tours through regions of acknowledged scenic beauty. His superb The Hay Wain, of 1821, sums up his ideals and his achievements. Composed as if accidentally – though on the basis of many preliminary outdoor studies – the picture, painted in the studio, shows Constable's beloved Stour with its trees, a mill, and distant fields. In his orchestra of natural colour the solo instrument and conductor at once is the sky. The clouds sweep by, full of light and colour, and their shadows and the sunlight spot the field with green and gold. As the stream ripples, it mirrors now the trees, now the sky. The trees are made up of many shades of green and patches of light reflect from their foliage. These white highlights were called «Constable's snow». The Hay Wain was triumphantly exhibited at the Salon of 1824, where Constable's broken colour and free brushwork set in motion a new current in French landscape art, which later culminated in the Impressionist movement.

In 1829 Constable became member of the Royal Academy.

In later life, after the death of his wife, Constable entered a period of depression in which his passionate communion with nature reached a pitch of semi-mystical intensity. One of his late pictures is Stroke- by-Nayland, of 1836-37, a large canvas in which the distant church tower, the wagon, the plough, the horses, and the boy looking over the gate are instruments on which light plays. The symphonic breadth, of the picture, and its crushing chords of colour painted in a rapid technique, bring to the finished painting the immediacy of the colour sketch. Such pictures are equalled in earlier art only by certain landscape backgrounds in Titian or by the mythical reveries of the late Rembrandt.

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