Crimes punishments people legal processes

Sue libel suspended sentence jury the accused contempt of court judge counsel arson award damages community service manslaughter weigh up the evidence fraud speeding witness return a verdict cross examine solitary confinement

4.Use words and phrases from the table to complete these sentences.

a)What’s the difference between the two? Well, slander is when you say something about someone which isn’t true. _ is when you publish it, and that’s when people generally take action.

b)If a person is on trial for murder the press can’t refer to them as ‘the murderer.’ They have to say ‘_’.

c)You’re guilty of _ when you didn’t kill the victim deliberately.

d)You _ someone if you want to claim money from them because they have harmed you in some way.

e)The jury has to listen to the case, _ and then _.

f)A _ means that you don’t actually have to go to prison unless you commit another crime.

g)‘_’ is a more formal term for a legal adviser.

h)_ can be anything from teaching kids to play football to cutting grass. Obviously, it’s not paid.

5.Put the crimes below in the order of seriousness. Decide on the punishment you think a person guilty of each crime should get.

mugging swearing in public kidnapping drink driving graffiti creating and releasing computer viruses trespassing dropping litter

6.Look at the expressions in the box below. Which means…

a)suspected of having committed a crime?

b)she doesn’t follow rules?

c)we are all equal in the eyes of the law?

d)take revenge without using the legal system?

e)bossing people around?

f)What I say must be respected?

g)illegal?

h)obeying and respecting the law?

i)legally?

a law unto herself laying down the law against the law take the law into my own hands no-one is above the law by law in trouble with the law law-abiding my word is law

7.Complete the sentences with the expressions above.

a)After years as a _ citizen, John decided to rob a bank and flee the country.

b)Policeman: You were doing 160 kilometres per hour.

Prince: Yes, but do you know who I am?

Policeman: Yes, but _.

c)There was a constable here earlier. I think Mark’s _ again!

d)I was tempted to _ and wring his neck.

e)’Do this! Do that! Be back by 10!’ My father was always _.

f)You can never tell what Ruth’s going to do. She’s _.

g)I’m the boss and _.

h)Most Europeans are required _ to carry ID cards.

i)In some countries it’s _ to chew gum.

8.Study the words from the text.

induce - побуждать reveries - мечты adversary - соперник fiddling - пустой, ненужный wax - прийти в бешенство sneer - насмешка deplete - расслаблять rally - шутка floor - поставить в тупик cocky - нахальный

frantic – бешеный tractable - послушный fresh - дерзкий pat - “в точку” barrage - нагромождение pandemonium - ад кромешный quell - подавлять pop - неожиданно появиться adjourn - отсрочивать, объявлять перерыв wallop – удар

9.Match the words on the left with the words on the right to make up compounds.

cross come court cross day taxi

room ride dream examination questioning back

10.Fill in one of the following expressions in the sentences below.

fresh as a daisy to be after smb/smth to think smth up smart-Alecky a pretty kettle of fish to be immune from

to take one’s cue from smth baby talk a good crack to drag smth out to hit one’s stride to get smb on the run

1)_ is a clever quick joke or remark.

2)_ means to be specially protected from smth.

3)_ is to be in search of.

4)If you annoy others by trying to sound too clever, you are being _.

5)When you try to copy a certain standard, you _.

6)_ means to invent smth.

7)The way people sometimes talk to babies, often repeating words or sounds or using words with no meaning is called _.

8)_ means to confuse smth.

9)_ is to feel that you are fit for doing smth.

10)_ is to cause to last an unnecessary long time.

11)_ is young, not tired and active.

12)_ is a situation that is difficult and awkward.

II 1.Read the text.

Newspaper accounts of trial cross-examinations always bring out the cleverest in me. They induce day-dreams in which I am the witness on the stand, and if you don’t know some of my imaginary comebacks to an imaginary cross-examiner, you have missed some of the most stimulating reading in the history of American jurisprudence.

These little reveries usually take place shortly after I have read the transcript of a trial, while I am on a long taxi-ride or seated at a desk with plenty of other work to do. I like them best when I have work to do, as they deplete me mentally so that I am forced to go and lie down after a particularly sharp verbal rally. The knowledge that I have completely floored my adversary, and the imaginary congratulations of my friends (also imaginary), seem more worth while than any amount of fiddling work done.

During the cross-questioning I am always very calm. Calm is a nice way, that is – never cocky. However frantic my inquisitor may wax (and you should see his face at times – it’s purple!), I just sit there, burning him up with each answer, winning the admiration of the court-room, and, at times, even a smile from the judge himself. At the end of my examination the judge is crazy about me.

Just what the trial is about, I never get quite clear in my mind. Sometimes the subject changes in the middle of the questioning, to allow the insertion of an especially good crack on my part. I don’t think that I am ever actually the defendant, although I don’t know why I should feel that I am immune from trial by a jury of my peers – if such exists.

I am usually testifying on behalf of a friend, or perhaps as just an impersonal witness for someone whom I do not know, who, naturally, later becomes my friend for life. It is Justice that I am after – Justice and a few well-spotted laughs.

Let us whip right unto the middle of my cross-examination, as I naturally wouldn’t want to pull my stuff until I had been insulted by the lawyer, and you can’t get insulted simply by having your name and address asked. I am absolutely fair about these things. If the lawyer will treat me right, I’ll treat him right. He has got to start it. For a decent cross-examiner there is no more tractable witness in the world than I am.

Advancing towards me, with a sneer on his face, he points a finger at me. (I have sometimes thought of pointing my finger back at him, but have discarded that as being too fresh. I didn’t resort to clowning.)

Q. You think you are pretty funny, don’t you? (I have evidently just made some mildly humorous comeback, nothing smart-Alecky, but good enough to make him look silly.)

A. I have never given the matter much thought.

Q. Oh, you haven’t given the matter much thought, eh? Well; you seem to be treating this examination as if it were a minstrel show.

A. (very quietly and nicely) – I have merely been taking my cue from your questions. (You will notice that all this pre-supposes quite a barrage of silly questions on his part, and pat answers on mine, omitted here because I haven’t thought them up. At any rate, it is evident that I have already got him on the run before reverie begins.)

Q. Perhaps you would rather I concluded this inquiry in baby talk?

A. If it will make it easier for you. (Pandemonium, which the Court feels that it has to quell, although enjoying it obviously as much as the spectators.)

Q. (furious) I see. Well, here is a question that I think will be simple enough to elicit an honest answer: Just how did you happen to know that it was eleven-fifteen when you saw the defendant?

A. Because I looked at my watch.

Q. And just why did you look at your watch at this particular time?

A. To see what time it was.

Q. Are you accustomed to looking at your watch often?

A. That is one of the uses to which I often put my watch.

Q. I see. Now, it couldn’t, by any chance, have been ten-fifteen instead of eleven-fifteen when you looked at your watch this time, could it?

A. Yes, sir. It could.

Q. Oh, it could have been ten-fifteen?

A. Yes, sir – if I had been in Chicago. (Not very good, really. I’ll work up something better. I move to have that answer struck from the record.)

When I feel myself lowering my standards by answering like that, I usually give myself a rest and, unless something else awfully good pops into my head, I adjourn the court until next day. I can always convene it again when I hit my stride.

If possible, however, I like to drag it out until I have really given my antagonist a final wallop which practically curls him up on the floor (I may think of one before this goes to press) and, wiping his forehead, he mutters, “Take the witness!”

As I step down from the stand (fresh as a daisy), there is a round of applause which the Court makes no attempt to silence. In fact, I have known certain judges to wink pleasantly at me as I take my seat. Judges are only human, after all.

My only fear is that, if ever I really am called upon to testify in court, I won’t be asked the right questions. That would be a pretty kettle of fish!

2.What can you say about the personality of the story-teller? What kind of person is he?

3.Comment on the author’s words “Judges are only human, after all.” Does this phrase seem funny? Why?

4.In the last paragraph the author says that he is afraid he won’t be asked “the right questions” if called upon to testify in court. What does he mean?

5.What do you think, why is “would” in the last sentence italicized?

6.Comment on the following grammatical phenomena:

1)Just what the trial is about, I never get quite clear in my mind.

2)If it will make it easier for you.

3)If the lawyer will treat me right, I’ll treat him right.

4)My only fear is that, if ever I really am called upon to testify in court, I won’t be asked the right questions.

7.In what meaning is the word “fresh” used in the text? Read the following joke based on the play with two different meanings of the same word. Do you happen to know other examples of the kind?

Lady: “Are you sure these crabs are fresh?”

Fishmonger: “Madam, they are positively insulting”.

8.Write out informal words and phrases from the text.

III1.Think in what way the following poem is connected with the story you’ve read.

The Case for Obscurity

(On thoughts and words)

If no thought

your mind does visit,

make your speech

not too explicit.

2.Roleplay an imaginary court trial. Let there be a cross-examiner and a witness. The witness has been insulted by the lawyer and tries to make the lawyer look silly.

3.Describe a court case you have read or heard about.

4. Additional tasks.

a)Read the joke and say how the humorous effect is achieved.

Prisoner: The judge sent me here for the rest of my life.

Prison guard: Have you got any complaints?

Prisoner: Do you call breaking rock with a hammer a rest?

b)Read the following joke out loud. Choose appropriate intonation and comment on your choice.

“You want to go in and say: ‘Good morning, Judge. How do you feel?’ ”

“Not me. I did that once and the judge said: ‘Fine - $10’ ”.

c)Read the puzzle and answer the questions to find the solution.

There were two lawyers, Alfred and Bertram. Alfred once borrowed a great deal of money from Bertram. He promised to pay him back on the day he won his first case in court. But Alfred was lazy and never took on a case.

At first Bertram didn’t mind, but after five years he got tired of waiting for his money. He decided to take Alfred to court to get the money back.

On the day of the trial they both came to the court feeling happy and confident. They shook each other’s hand as if nothing was wrong. Alfred was sure that whether he won or lost in court he wouldn’t need to pay Bertram the money back. Bertram, on the other hand, was sure he’d get his money back. Can both of them have been right?

A.Look at it from Alfred’s point of view:

1)If the judge says he must pay, then he has

a)won the case

b)lost the case.

2)If so, then according to his promise to Bertram,

a)he has to pay Bertram

b)he needn’t pay him.

3)If the judge says he needn’t pay Bertram, then he has

a)won the case

b)lost the case.

4)If so, then according to the law,

a)he must pay Bertram

b)he needn’t pay him.

B.Look at it from Bertram’s point of view:

1)If the judge says Alfred must pay then he, Bertram, has

a)won the case

b)lost the case.

2)The judge’s ruling is law, so

a)Alfred has to pay up

b)he doesn’t have to pay up.

3)If the judge says Alfred needn’t pay then he, Bertram,

a)has won the case

b)has lost the case.

4)Therefore, according to Alfred’s promise,

a)Alfred must pay him

b)Alfred needn’t pay him.

C.Does this sound quite right to you? Is either of them right? Where is the contradiction?

d)Read the cases below and discuss the questions that follow each one.

Case one

A driver swerves to avoid a little girl crossing the road. The driver goes off the road and injures a pedestrian.

a)What is the driver guilty of, if anything?

b)Who should pay for the pedestrian’s medical expenses?

c)Who should pay for the damage done to the car?

Case two

A footballer trips up an opponent deliberately. The opponent breaks a leg and is unable to play football again. He sues the other footballer for a lifetime of lost earnings.

Should the footballer pay? Why/Why not?

Case three

Bob adds a double vodka rather than a single to Joe’s drink. Joe gets into his car and is stopped by the police on the way home. He’s breathalysed, found to be over the legal alcohol limit and banned from driving for six months. Joe sues Bob for the money he has to spend on taxis over the next six months.

Should Bob pay for Joe’s taxi expenses? Why/Why not?

Section 4. The Arts

Unit 14. William Hogarth

Part 1

I1.Study the words.

felicity – дар, способность, счастье

jaded – измученный, заезженный

verve – живость, яркость, талант

clandestine – тайный, скрытый

congenial – подходящий, благоприятный

sharp-wittedness – остроумие, проницательность

insular – островной, относящийся к Британским островам

veneration – почитание, преклонение

varnish – лак, олифа

curvature – изгиб

II 1.Read the text. Some of the sentences have been removed from it. Fill in the blank spaces with the sentences below.

a)Yet he was not content with one line of development only and the work of his mature years takes a varied course.

b)With many felicities of detail and arrangement they show Hogarth still in a restrained and decorous mood.

c)There is no reason to suppose he had anything but respect for the great Italian masters, though he deliberately took a provocative attitude.

d)His first success as a painter was in the "conversation pieces" in which his bent as an artist found a logical beginning.

e)It was his achievement to give a comprehensive view of social life within the framework of moralistic and dramatic narrative.

f)The fact that he was apprenticed as a boy to a silver-plate engraver has a considerable bearing on Hogarth’s development.

g)In portraiture he displays a great variety.

William Hogarth (1697–1764)

William Hogarth was unquestionably one of the greatest of English artists and a man of remarkably individual character and thought. (1) He produced portraits which brought a fresh vitality and truth into the jaded profession of what he called “phizmongering”. He observed both high life and low with a keen and critical eye and his range of observation was accompanied by an exceptional capacity for dramatic composition, and in painting by a technical quality which adds beauty to pictures containing an element of satire or caricature.

A small stocky man with blunt pugnacious features and alert blue eyes, he had all the sharp-wittedness of the born Cockney and an insular pride which led to his vigorous attacks on the exaggerated respect for foreign artists and the taste of would-be connoisseurs who brought over (as he said) “shiploads of dead Christs, Madonnas and Holy Families” by inferior hands. (2) What he objected to as much as anything was the absurd veneration of the darkness produced by time and varnish as well as the assumption that English painters were necessarily inferior to others. A forthrightness of statement may perhaps be related to his North-country inheritance, for his father came to London from Westmorland, but was in any case the expression of a democratic outlook and unswervingly honest intelligence.

(3) It instilled a decorative sense which is never absent from his most realistic productions. It introduced him to the world of prints, after famous masters or by the satirical commentators of an earlier day. It is the engraver’s sense of line coupled with a regard for the value of Rococo curvature which governs his essay on aesthetics, The Analysis of Beauty.

As a painter Hogarth may be assumed to have learned the craft in Thornhill’s “academy”, though his freshness of colour and feeling for the creamy substance of oil paint suggest more acquaintance than he admitted to with the technique of his French contemporaries. (4) These informal groups of family and friends surrounded by the customary necessaries of their day-to-day life were congenial in permitting him to treat a picture as a stage. He was not the inventor of the genre, which can be traced back to Dutch and Flemish art of the seventeenth century and in which he had contemporary rivals. Many were produced when he was about thirty and soon after he made his clandestine match with Thornhill’s daughter in 1729, when extra efforts to gain a livelihood became necessary. (5) A step nearer to the comprehensive view of life was the picture of an actual stage, the scene from The Beggar’s Opera with which he scored a great success about 1730, making several versions of the painting. Two prospects must have been revealed to him as a result, the idea of constructing his own pictorial drama comprising various scenes of social life, and that of reaching a wider public through the means of engraving. The first successful series The Harlot’s Progress, of which only the engraving now exist, was immediately followed by the tremendous verve and riot of The Rake’s Progress, c. 1732; the masterpiece of the story series the Marriage a la Mode followed after an interval of twelve years.

As a painter of social life, Hogarth shows the benefit of the system of memory training which he made a self-discipline. London was his universe and he displayed his mastery in painting every aspect of its people and architecture, from the mansion in Arlington Street, the interior of which provided the setting for the disillusioned couple in the second scene of the Marriage a la Mode, to the dreadful aspect of Bedlam. (6) He could not resist the temptation to attempt a rivalry with the history painters, though with little success. The Biblical compositions for St. Bartholomew’s Hospital on which he embarked after The Rake’s Progress were not of a kind to convey his real genius. He is sometimes satirical as in The March of the Guards towards Scotland, and the Oh the Roast Beef of Old England! (Calais Gate), which was a product of his single expedition abroad with its John Bull comment on the condition of France, and also the Election series of 1755 with its richness of comedy. (7) The charm of childhood, the ability to compose a vivid group, a delightful delicacy of colour appear in the Graham Children of 1742. The portrait heads of his servants are penetrating studies of character. The painting of Captain Coram, the philanthropic sea captain who took a leading part in the foundation of the Foundling Hospital, adapts the formality of the ceremonial portrait to a democratic level with a singularly engaging effects. The quality of Hogarth as an artist is seen to advantage in his sketches and one sketch in particular, the famous Shrimp Girl quickly executed with a limited range of colour, stands alone in his work, taking its place among the masterpieces of the world in its harmony of form and content, its freshness and vitality.

The genius of Hogarth is such that he is often regarded as a solitary rebel against a decaying artificiality, and yet though he had no pupils, he had contemporaries who,

while of lesser stature in one way and another, tended in the same direction.

(William Gaunt. A Concise History of English Painting)

2.Answer the questions.

1)What is peculiar of Hogart’s manner of painting?

2)What was his attitude to foreign artists?

3)What pictures and series of pictures are mentioned in the text? Give their brief description.

3.Explain what the word "phizmongering" means.

4.Which of these words go together? Recall the situations from the text in which these phrases were used.

technical pugnacious insular provocative decorative pictorial ceremonial solitary

sense portrait features quality rebel attitude drama pride

5.Match the adjectives and their translation. What nouns can be used with them?

content mature restrained considerable decorous comprehensive varied dramatic fresh keen exceptional vigorous would-be inferior absurd customary contemporary vivid engaging decaying

всесторонний приходящий в упадок мнимый, “с претензиями” обычный довольный зрелый современный яркий, живой проницательный разнообразный низшего качества сдержанный пристойный значительный драматичный, театральный свежий, новый, чистый исключительный нелепый сильный, энергичный, бодрый привлекательный

mood years course view narrative vitality eye composition capacity attack connoisseurs hands veneration necessaries rivals group effect artificiality

6.Match the words to make up phrases as they were used in the text. Think of your own examples.

to take a felicity to find within the framework to give to have to bring keen and critical a forthrightness to instill freshness a feeling to treat a picture to be the inventor to gain to tend to be to score to reach to display to attempt to embark to convey to compose a delightful delicacy a penetrating study to be seen harmony

a livelihood eye as a stage of statement a logical beginning one’s mastery a varied course for the creamy substance of oil paint of colour a considerable bearing on smth of lesser stature in the same direction of moralistic and dramatic narrative of colour on smth one’s real genius a comprehensive view of smth a rivalry with smb/smth a vivid group a wider public a decorative sense a great success to advantage of character of the genre of detail and arrangement of form and colour a fresh vitality and truth

Part 2

I 1.Match the words and their synonyms. Which of these words are formal?

wrought dexterous pending dissipated twiddle rueful pervade confidant apprehend ensue

friend not yet settled regretful spread all over smth arrest skilful happen afterwards done play immoral

2.Have you ever heard the following names - Andromeda, Judith and Holofernes? Who do they refer to?

II1.Read the text.

Hogarth’s Marriage a la Mode

The famous set of pictures called “Marriage a la Mode” contains the most important and highly wrought of the Hogarth comedies. The care and method with which the moral grounds of these pictures are laid is as remarkable as the wit and skill of the observing and dexterous artist. He has to describe the negotiations for a marriage pending between the daughter of a rich citizen Alderman and young Lord Viscount Squanderfield, the dissipated son of a gouty old Earl. Pride and pomposity appear in every accessory surrounding the Earl. He sits in gold lace and velvet – as how should such an Earl wear anything but velvet and gold lace? His coronet is everywhere: on his footstool on which reposes one gouty toe turned out; on the sconces and looking-glasses; on the dogs, on his lordship’s very crutches; on his great chair of state and the great baldaquin behind him; under which he sits pointing majestically to his pedigree, which shows that his race is sprung from the loins of William the Conqueror, and confronting the old Alderman from the City, who has mounted his sword for the occasion, and wears his Alderman’s chain, and has brought a bag full of money, mortgage-deeds, and thousand pound notes, for the arrangement of the transaction pending between them. Whilst the steward is negotiating between the old couple, their children are together, united but apart. My lord is admiring his countenance in the glass, while the bride is twiddling her marriage ring on her pocket handkerchief and listening with rueful countenance to Counsellor Silvertongue. The girl is pretty, but the painter with a curious watchfulness, has taken care to give her a likeness to her father, as in the young Viscount’s face you see a resemblance to the Earl, his noble sire. The sense of the coronet pervades the picture, as it is supposed to do the mind of its wearer. The pictures round the room are sly hints indicating the situation of the parties about to marry. A martyr is led to the fire; Andromeda is offered to sacrifice; Judith is going to slay Holofernes. There is the ancestor of the house (in the picture it is the Earl himself as a young man), with a comet over his head, indicating that the career of the family is to be brilliant and brief. In the second picture, Madam has now the Countess’s coronet over her bed and toilet-glass, and sits listening to that dangerous Counsellor Silvertongue, whose portrait now actually hangs up in her room, while the counsellor takes his ease on the sofa by her side, evidently the familiar of the house, and the confidant of the mistress. My lord takes his pleasure elsewhere than at home, whither he returns jaded and tipsy to find his wife yawning in her drawing-room, her whist-party over, and the daylight streaming in; or he amuses himself with the very worst company abroad, whilst his wife sits at home listening to foreign singers, or wastes her money at auctions, or, worse still, seeks amusement at masquerades. The dismal end is known. My lord draws upon the counsellor, who kills him, and is apprehended whilst endeavouring to escape. My lady goes back perforce to the Alderman of the City, and faints upon reading Counsellor Silvertongue’s dying speech at Tyburn, where the counsellor has been executed for sending his lordship out of the world. Moral: don’t listen to evil silver-tongued counsellors: don’t marry a man for his rank, or a woman for her money: don’t frequent foolish auctions and masquerade balls unknown to your husband: don’t have wicked companions abroad and neglect your wife, otherwise you will be run through the body, and ruin will ensue, and disgrace, and Tyburn.

William Makepeace Thackeray

The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century

2.Answer the questions:

1)What does Marriage a la Mode describe?

2)What do you think about the names of Hogarth’s characters? What qualities of their owners do they suggest?

3)The author says that the pictures around the room are sly hints indicating the situation. Explain why.

3.What do the following quotations from the text mean?

1)Whilst the steward is negotiating between the old couple, their children are together, united but apart.

2)The sense of the coronet pervades the picture, as it is supposed to do the mind of its wearer.

3)Madam has now the Countess’s coronet over her bed and toilet-glass...

III1.Use additional sources of information to find a biography of a painter. Make a short presentation.

2.Choose a painting and try to analyze the means which the artist applied to make the message of the picture clear.

3.Additional tasks.

a)Read the following joke about an artist and explain why the old man was hesitating.

One day a painter, looking out of the window, saw an old countryman going by and thought the man would make a good subject for a picture. So he sent out his servant to tell the old man that his master would like to paint him. The old man hesitated and asked what the painter would pay him.

The painter said he would give him a pound. The man still hesitated.

“Come on”, said the painter, “it’s an easy way to earn a pound”.

“Oh, I know that”, he answered. “I was only wondering how I should get the paint off afterwards.”

b)Read the joke and say if the men were really eager to do what the sergeant asked them to.

Sergeant: Who likes moving pictures? (Most of men eagerly step forward.) All right, you fellows carry the pictures from the basement to the attic.

Unit 15. Modernism

I1.Write three things you know and three things you want to know about modern art.

2.Study the words.

aegis – эгида, защита primacy – первенство evince – показывать, проявлять shattering – разрушительный, оглушительный lure – привлекать dabble – барахтаться voraciously – жадно, ненасытно contrive – придумывать feeble – слабый squander – тратить suggestiveness – многозначительность buoyant – веселый, жизнерадостный blunt – тупой sagging – обвисающий

kapok – вата из семян капка scrap – обрывок helterskelter – неразбериха crouching – припадающий к земле sage-brush – полынь morbid – нездоровый, отвратительный gestural – жестикуляционный insoluble – нерастворимый, неразрешимый ideational – воображаемый discard – отвергать canker – разъедать dribble – выпускать по капле fling – бросать, метать vortex – вихрь

3.Match the names of various trends of modernism and their definitions.

-Futurism -Cubism -Surrealism -Performance Art -Minimal Art -Impressionism -Post-Impressionism -Op Art -Fauvism -Conceptual Art -Expressionism -Pop Art -Dada

-a style of painting (used esp. in France between 1870 and 1900 by painters such as Monet, Cezanne and Pissarro) which produces effects (esp. of light) by use of colour rather than by details of form. -a late 19th-century style of painting in which paintings have a strong colour and a strong plan. -a movement in painting 1905-08 using pure, bright colours and including the work of the painters Matisse and Braque. -a 20th century art style in which the subject matter is represented by geometric shapes. Picasso and Braque are the most famous artists connected with this style. -an early 20th-century movement in art and literature which was a violent reaction against previous ideas about art and writing, and was particularly concerned with producing unexpected strange images which have a feeling of unreality. Was one of the main influences upon surrealism. -a style of painting which expresses feelings rather than describing objects and experiences. -a new style of painting, music and literature in the early 20th century which claimed to express the violent active quality of life in the modern age of machines. -a modern type of art and literature in which the painter, writer etc. connects unrelated images and objects in a strange dreamlike way; famous painters include Marc Chagall and Salvador Dali. -a form of modern art which shows common objects from everyday life, such as advertisements, articles found around the house rather than the usual subjects of art. -a form of modern art using patterns that play tricks on your eyes. -an art movement started in New York in the 1960s, involving esp. sculptures, consisting of simple forms in an impersonal style. -art having some theatre and something to see and/or hear e.g. a sculpture of which the artist forms a part. -art in which the artist intends to describe an idea rather than make an art object.

II 1.Read the text. After reading it, write a detailed plan of the text. Follow the instructions:

1)How many parts can the text be divided into? Think of a suitable heading for each part.

2)Within each part think of smaller parts with their own sub-headings.

The twentieth century is marked by a violent enhancement of the struggle between the two opposing tendencies in art – the realist tradition and the academic and modernistic trends. Modernism is represented by a multitude of trends but with all their apparent differences all modernistic trends have one common decisive feature: al of them are aggressively opposed to realism in art and materialism in aesthetics; they advocate extreme subjectivism (“self expression”) in creative work.

While Henri, Luks, Sloan and Bellows were successfully struggling against conservative academism and exalting the primacy of life over art, a new vanguard was emerging and gathering force in America under the aegis of art for art’s sake. A decisive role in fostering modernism in America was played by the famous Armoury Show of 1913, which was the first vast exhibition of modern European art. It included Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, the Fauves, Cubists, and “Dada” (Derain, Dufy, Manguin, Villon, Friesz, Picasso, Braque, Leger, Picabia, Duchamp, Gleizes, de la Fresnaye) The Armoury Show speeded up the decay of art evinced already by some artists such as Morris Prendergast and Arthur Davis, who paved the way for the frank departure from realism to purely formal and subjective experiments.

This vast demonstration of new and bold experiments of the most avant-garde artists of many countries shocked and bewildered the American public. It had a shattering effect on some young artists, who, lured by the tempting paths of “free” art – free from any obligation to life – abandoned realism to experiment with avant-garde styles, imitating now one now another European painter, dabbling voraciously in Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism and Fauvism. They contrived to combine in their largely eclectic and derivative work the imitation of the most contradictory of European avant-garde trends. American modernism was a feeble and hasty imitation of European formalistic experiments.

The first wave of modernism in America was represented by Cubism (L.Feininger, Ch.Demuth, Ch.Sheeler), Futurism (J.Stella), abstractionism (M.Russell and S.Macdonald-Wright) and Expressionism (M.Weber, A.Maurer, M.Hartley, J.Marin). Expressionism was by far the most widespread form of modernism in America in the period between the Armoury Show and World War II. After a few years of experimentation many artists returned to more representational styles, and about 1925 this first wave of modernism had passed.

There were some serious and undoubtedly very gifted artists who gave up

realism in search of new forms of expression and squandered their talent in fruitless experimentation. Among purely formalistic works they would sometimes produce a work revealing a keen awareness of the beauty of American nature.

One of the most sensitive among the artists converted to modernism, was John Marin (1870–1953). He was an expressionist and like all other expressionists, he concentrated on his own emotions, the intensity of which far surpassed his range of vision. Drawing on the Fauves and late Cezanne for his stylistic devices, he developed his own spontaneous and generalized style of painting, a colouristic shorthand, with a number of abbreviated personal symbols of colour and line – a green triangle for a pine, a zigzagfor a wave. His favourite medium was water-colour which he used with great richness and suggestiveness. He found his subject matter in New York or in the state of Maine. In Maine he did his most memorable work – his breezy and buoyant water-colour landscapes of the coast of Maine. His best landscapes are a lyrical expression of the expansive, joyful poetry of earth and sea. He transmuted the rugged coast of Maine into a remarkable and lyrical harmony of form and radiant colour.

Marsden Hartley (1887–1943) as a painter is characterized by frequent changes of style. His early landscapes of the Maine mountain countryside reveal his profound admiration for Ryder. In France he was influenced by Cezanne and Picasso and experimented with a cubistderived style. In Berlin, under the influence of Kandinsky, he began experimentation in abstraction. But it was German Expressionism that had the strongest impact on his style.

After years of experimentation, he returned to his native Maine, where he found his subject matter and his ultimate expressionistic manner. He painted the fishermen, pinewoods and rockbound coast of Maine with an elemental simplicity and with great power. His best Maine landscapes, rough, blunt, with their simple colour areas and heavy-handed execution have the direct and uncomplicated impact of a primitive.

Charles Demuth (1883–1935), more known for his “architectural” and industrial scenes, which are rendered in the geometric mode of precisionism, is best in his more realistic water-colours of flowers, fruits and also in his night-club and vaudeville subjects. Even more expressive are the water-colour illustrations for Poe, Zola, Balzac and Henry James, which he made for his own pleasure. In these highly original and elegant water-colours he “taps a vein of psychological power practically unique in American art”, as D.C. Rich put it.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887) began with abstractions, giantsized flower forms - irises, sunflowers, petunias, Jacks-in-the-pulpit enlarged until they had lost their identity as flowers. In the late twenties she moved to New Mexico and desert landscape provided her with new subject matter; she painted its sands and skies, its crouching, hump-backed hills and bleached bones and skulls lying in the sage-brush. Her pictures of dried cow skulls placed against an abstract red, white and blue suggest a parallel with surrealist paintings.

The second wave of modernism began in the thirties. The positions of modernism were largely strengthened by the arrival in America of many representatives of the European avant-garde at the beginning of World War II. In the early forties New York became the centre of cosmopolitan surrealism. Surrealists used traditional painting techniques, but objects of the real world were torn from their accustomed environment and recombined illogically and arbitrarily. Surrealists drew for their expression on the subconscious, on dreams, fears and morbid fancies. They rendered their fearful, enigmatic and hallucinatory visions, their obsessions and complexes, in terms of realistic images. Their works are filled with the arbitrary and the monstrous, with a morbid eroticism and horror of death.

The European fugitives Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Andre Masson, Matta, and Andre Breton spent some years in New York, while Yves Tanguy and Pavel Tchelitchev settled in America for good. They went on with their exploration of the subconscious and the irrational and translated their dreams and obsessions. The American variant of surrealism was represented by P. Blume’s and E. Berman’s hallucinatory visions and I. Albright’s pathologic scrutiny of the wrinkles of old age, and his obsessions with sensation of disintegration. This surrealistic unsubstantial intensity of mood continued in the work of the so-called “magic realists” like Henry Koerner and Bernard Perlin.

Another group of surrealists was influenced by the “psychic automatism” of Andre Breton. They employed symbolic, semi-abstract forms, a direct outpouring of subconscious impulses, sometimes in symbolic form, often of sexual derivation or of a purely gestural nature. This variety of surrealism led to the subsequent gestural Abstract Expressionism or “action painting” exemplified by Bradley Walker Tomlin, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and others.

A second abstract movement, which began in the mid-thirties, had become by the forties the dominant trend in American art overshadowing a vigorous school of realist painting which had continued to flourish. Like surrealism, abstractionism was nurtured by disillusion, fear and the awareness of helplessness in the face of the insoluble contradictions of contemporary reality. For many artists it became a refuge from reality, a withdrawal into an egoistic “self-expression”. Abstractionism is an extreme form of modernism, and evidence of the deep crisis of modern culture. It deforms the outside world to the point of making it unrecognizable and resulted in the complete disintegration of form. The abstractionists severed the last ties which connected their art with visible reality. They maintain that art does not reflect, does not cognize reality, but is a means of expressing the personal, instinctive, subconscious emotional experience of the artist. Their works are practically devoid of any image-bearing, intellectual, emotional or ideational content and sense. Their paintings are a confusion of patches and lines, their sculptures - a conglomeration of absurd forms of metal, wood or stone. Preaching unlimited arbitrariness and subjectivism in artistic creation they violate the fundamental principles of art: they discard drawing and composition in painting and the reproduction of actual forms of the material world in sculpture. By denying the criteria of artistic values in art, and by discarding national forms and traditions, abstractionism corrupts people’s aesthetic taste, diverts them from the cognition of human life and human struggle and cankers their love for their national culture.

Abstractionism has a number of varieties. Joseph Albers, Bradley Walker Tomlin and Irene Rice Pereira represented the geometric or precise mode of abstraction which prevailed in the mid-thirties. Free-form abstraction was dominant in the forties and fifties. This mode of abstraction goes by the name of “Abstract Expressionism” and is represented by American art critics as being “the most significant movement”, “the triumph of American painting”. Abstract Expressionism developed by the fusion of expressionism – with its emphasis on emotional intensification, abstraction - with its rejection of representation of reality, and surrealism – with its reliance upon automatism. The way for Abstract Expressionism was paved by Arshile Gorky and Adolph Gottlieb, who were deeply involved in surrealist argument. About 1950 Abstract Expressionism broke into gestural abstraction or “action painting” (Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning), symbolic Abstract Expressionism (Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Theodores Stamos) and chromatic or colour-field abstraction (Mark Rothko, Barnett Newmann, Clyfford Still, Mark Tobey). They have different styles and techniques, but all of them have one common feature – they have nothing to do with real life and very little - with art.

The “action painting” arising out of the "psychic automatism" of surrealism, came closest to pure automatism. With “action painters” planned designing was replaced by purely instinctive methods, in which the physical action of painting determined the final forms. Traditional brushwork gave way to dribbling, flinging or pouring the pigment on to the canvas. The most celebrated “virtuoso” of “action painting”, Jackson Pollock, placed his enormous canvases on the floor and moved around them, spotting, puddling and splashing paint from buckets, producing a vortex of swirling lines, spatters, and drips.

Some of Pollock’s paintings (and a few of Mark Tobey’s, James Brooks’, Fritz Glarner’s) possess at least a certain decorative quality which is lacking in the works of A. Gorky, R. Motherwell, M. Rothko, A. Gottlieb and others, whose harsh and muddy colours and slovenly helterskelter combinations of smears produce a cheerless impression. But nothing can surpass in ugliness and sickening repulsiveness Willem de Kooning’s woman series in which monstrous fullbodied, wide-eyed, toothy female figures materialize from a chaos of slashing brushstrokes and anatomical fragments spread across the canvas.

Around 1960 abstractionism appeared to have run its course. The decade of the sixties saw new trends, some as outgrowths of abstraction, some as reactions against it. The most notorious and influential "movement" of the sixties was pop art, which opposed to abstractionism the rude world of actual objects that are passed as “works of art”. Pop art utilizes the most common banal features of American daily life – comic strips, billboards, and all sort of rubbish from a dump. In spite of its name, pop art has nothing to do with popular or folk art. The return to real objects is based upon concepts borrowed from the earlier “schools” of modernism: complexes of “stream of consciousness”, refusal to express a concrete idea. These concepts are expressed by the alogism of scraps of visual information and commodities wrenched from their habitual context, by fetishization of actual objects as such. Pop art works offer to the viewer an unlimited set of disconnected associations, political, commercial, sexual, which break in upon one another. No evaluation, interpretation or commentary is possible, they merely express a frigid attitude of noninvolvement. “The implication is,” an American art critic remarks, "that nothing can be done about a materialistic, worldly society plunged into situations, so that the only sensible attitude is one of the unemotionalized acceptance of the realities." Though pop art was a reaction against abstraction there is much in common between them. They both display a dispassionate concern with visual experience unrelated to any social ideals.

The leading exponents of pop art in America were Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

R. Rauschenberg combines abstraction with pop art devices, incorporating commonplace mass-produced items into his canvases, The result is a conglomeration of cloth, bits of newspaper, strips of canvas, splashes, blobs or drips of paint with furniture, kitchen utensils, bottles, road signs, stuffed animals, photos and the like protruding from the canvas or merging into it. His notorious “masterpiece” “The Bed” represents an actual pillow and a patchwork quilt splashed liberally with paint.

Andy Warhol, perhaps the most publicized of the pop artists, takes his inspiration from such images of mass culture of a depersonalized and standardized consumer society as labels of manufactured products, newspaper headlines, magazine photographs, currency and stamps. He makes pictures of soup-cans, tomato ketchup, Coca-Cola bottles; of famous personalities (Jacqueline Kennedy – Jackie), film stars (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Tylor); of works of art (Mona Liza, Thirty Are Better Than One). Warhol has created several Disaster series depicting car crashes, suicides, the electric chair, etc. Each image is mechanically repeated a great number of times by means of mass-reproduction devices (photomechanical silk screening), e.g. One Hundred Campbell’s Soup Cans, Green Coca-Cola Bottles or 5 Deaths 11 Times in Orange.

Roy Lichtenstein draws upon comic strips for his inspiration. His pictures are like comic book illustrations painted in bright colours and enlarged to a gigantic scale (over 13 feet in length).

James Rosenquist is inspired by advertizing, especially the huge omnipresent billboard. He is known to have produced the largest pop painting, entitled F-lll. The canvas is larger than the fighterbomber it represents and is 86 feet long. It consists of 51 interlocking panels.

Tom Wesselmann found his inspiration in the bathroom. He is best known for his Great American Nudes and bathroom collages in which real objects (toilet paper, toilet seat, towels, etc.) are incorporated with airy female figures painted flat.

Claes Oldenburg is famous for his sagging soft sculptures of food items and household utensils made of vinyl stuffed with kapok and enlarged to an absurdly gigantic size (Giant Hamburger).

By the late 1960s pop art became outmoded. “The rapidity of artistic change in the 1960s was unusual even in a period accustomed to the swift dispersal of outmoded styles into inglorious obsolescence,” remarks Milton Brown. It is impossible to classify the bewildering number of modern “movements” that rocked the American art world in the sixties and seventies. Pop art, junk, assemblage, hard edge that flourished in the sixties, were superseded by Op, Minimal, Land, Systemic, Primary, Performance, Body, Process, Conceptual, Post-Studio, Story and Light and Movement Art, that dominated the scene in the seventies. These trends carried still further the drastic switch from tradition, and a nihilistic attitude to the culture of the past and to humanitarian ideals. The boundaries of American art became so flexible that anything might be included from earthworks and videotape events to cornflakes scattered in an open area, grease, dirt, leaves, ice blocks melting on a gallery floor or merely verbal statements and print. The search for novelty is very characteristic of the present day art world and very often this is the primary concern of the artist. Speaking about the accelerated pace innovation, Jack Levine very aptly compared it with the rat race: “I think that the abstract, the non-objective, the modernistic artists have lost themselves in the wilderness. I think they have been motivated by a continuous sequence of rebellions, one against the other, so nobody remembers which came first, the why and wherefore of what they are doing... I think that simple cognition, simple reason has been dispelled by the ceaselessness of the rat race.”

2.Answer the questions.

1)What is modernism opposed to in art and aesthetics?

2)What played a decisive role in speeding up modernism in America?

3)What was the reaction of the public to the avant-garde exhibitions?

4)What made many new artists abandon realism?

5)What and who was the 1^st wave of modernism represented by?

6)Why was John Marin considered to be one of the most sensitive among modernists?

7)What is the main feature of M. Hartleys’s works?

8)Ch. Demuth can be called unique in American art. Explain why.

9)What are the two major themes of G. O’Keeffe’s works?

10)What is peculiar of the 2^nd wave of modernism?

11)Can you recall different trends of surrealism and their representatives?