II. Comprehension.

Exercise 1. Find in the text where it is said that

a). Gauguin went to Tahiti to find a new basis for art and his life;

b). he used a palette knife while painting his pictures;

c). he avoided sharp colour contrasts when he wanted to create a dreamlike atmosphere.

Exercise 2. Find in the text the answers to the following questions

a). What did he call his art style?

b). What cultures did he model his style on?

c). Whom did he work with in Aries?

d). Why did he go to Tahity?

e). What did the novelty of his style consist of?

f). What other titles does his painting “The woman with Mangoes” have?

Exercise 3. Say whether the following statements are false or true?

a). Gauguin broke away from Impressionism to adopt a bolder style.

b). Gauguin modelled his style on Western cultures.

c). Gauguin admired Japanese prints.

d). He tried to reconcile the Mauri idols with European art.

e). He painted his “The White Horse” on the island of Dominica.

f). “The Call” is an example of his imaginary works.

III. Speech practice.

Exercise 5. Describe Gauguin’s picture “The Queen of Beauty”.

Exercise 6. Prove that Gauguin’s approach to painting was a novelty.

Exercise 7. Make a plan of the text and retell it.

IV. Discussion points.

Exercise 8. Many people considered figures of men and women in Gauguin’s pictures of Tahiti period primitive and ugly. What do you think about it?

Active Vocabulary.

to adopt a style

Japanese prints

simplification

wilful flatness

to reduce

flat patterns

to arrange

to execute

telling works

to rejuvenate

“savage” sources

decorative stamp

to reconcile

asymmetrical composition

brush strokes

a palette knife

naked

Keys.

Ex.1. a - 3; b - 4; c - 10.

Ex.3. a - T; b - F; c - T; d - T; e - F; f - F.

Text 8

І. Reading.

Read the text « Goya » and do the exercises given after the text.

Goya (1746—1828)

Goya was born in a very poor village in Aragon, on 30 March 1746. Goya's father was a gilder in Saragossa, the capital of Aragon, and it was there that Goya spent his childhood and adolescence.

He found his style in portraiture. For Goya the portrait was, above all, a problem of the technique of painting and the passionate search for the mystery of the human individual. The most important thing for him was to go straight to the heart, to sum up quick­ly his model's character. His son wrote, many years after his death, that the portraits which had given the artist greatest satisfaction were those of his friends, for which he needed not more than one sitting. Spontaneity, rapidity, frank and gay execution were Goya's ideals in portrait painting. He was always affected by his models and so his portraits could be very unequal. His liking or revulsion for the person before him were unmis­takably reflected in his painting. Beauty, goodness, intelli­gence, gentility, timidity, vanity, pride, stupidity, can all be seen in Goya's work, portrayed with surprising sincerity. No­where can we find a more pitiless exposure of serene stupidity than in his "Charles IV on Horse-back".

The magic technique that has given us so many masterpieces is very much his own. In the portrait of "The Condesa del Car-pio", as well as in his many other paintings, we see Goya's supreme artistry. The Condesa is silhouetted against a background of a single wash of paint, as Goya liked to place his models. No concession has been made in the treatment of the face; it is mod­elled with magic skill as are the two gloved hands, the fan and the dancing shoes elegantly supporting the sitter's light and ex­pressively feminine weight. And the background sings in exact­ly the right note, as in the work of all great masters. All Goya's art, his marvellously simplified complexity, his rare gifts as a "pure" painter, his desire to tell the truth have been poured out together here in masterly fashion. We recognise the work of a great artist, for art's highest achievement is to overcome every danger: Goya has not sacrificed character to grace, he remains ro­bust when he is seductive, he avoids over-sweetness by his re­straint, he treats a dangerously pleasing subject without letting the danger be apparent, and finally he has achieved style, with­out exaggerating form. Here, in fact, we see that supreme qual­ity — all the more remarkable in the case of so tormented a genius — a sense of proportion.

Like so many Spaniards of his time, in those years when Europe was bubbling over with ideas of revolution, Goya sympa­thised with liberty and condemned the abuses of an archaic social structure.

At the very height of his success Goya was struck down by a violent illness in Seville.

This frank jovial man, who loved society, conversation, the­atres, bullfights and his friends, was now cut off from it all by deafness.

It is not only in his engravings that we see the impact of the crisis but also in a new type of painting; imaginative pictures in which he gives full expression to his interior world. His ideas are given forms. His technique becomes more free and daring, and his palette more violent and personal.

About 1789 the deaf painter began work on the preliminary sketches which were to become his series of etchings, "The Cap-richos". Gradually Goya's original idea developed into a condem­nation of sinful humanity, dragged along by its vices and pas­sions. In these etchings no state, profession or social class was free from his stinging sarcasm: nobles, legal practitioners, doctors, prostitutes, monks, witches appear as a cross-section of incor­rigible and degraded humanity. Together with his social crit­icism there appears in his art the world of the subconscious: "The dream of reason produces monsters", he declared at the foot of one of his etchings, and in seeking a graphic language to express this abysmal world, Goya, a true precursor of modern art, freely distorted his figures. The whole venture was daring. When he published "The Caprichos" in 1799 he had to withdraw them from sale for fear of being indicted by the Inquisition.

His pessimism became deeper. His passionate condemnation of man in his brilliant series "The Disasters of War", a collec­tion of eighty-two etchings gives us his personal view of the war. War is not exalted here; in these etchings he depicts hunger and suffering, devastation, horror and barbaric cruelty. There is no document in the history of art more terrifying and more accu­satory than Goya's "Disasters of War".

An even more pessimistic Goya appeared after his recovery in 1820, in the so-called black paintings and the etchings of "The Incongruities" or "Proverbs". A new crisis and a new style, an extension of what he had begun in "The Caprichos".

An expressionist art, violent, painted in greyish ochre and black, also covered the walls of his country house. Twisted im­agination, hallucinations, supernatural visions were painted with great spontaneity and sincerity.