2019-2020年高中英语必修8Unit3Theworldofcoloursandlight--Section2Backgroundination.doc

2019-2020年高中英语必修8Unit3Theworldofcoloursandlight-Section2BackgroundinformationI. A vocabulary about different coloursbeige 米色 black 黑色 blue 蓝色 brown 褐色，棕色bright 鲜 bronze古銅色 dark 深 flesh肉色fluorescent 荧光 gold金色 green 绿色 green-yellow青色grey 灰色 light 浅 maroon紫褐色；褐红色 orange 橙色pink 粉红 purple紫色 red 红色 silver 银色transparent 透明 white 白色 yellow 黄色II. An introduction to Picasso and the periods which his paintings went through1. Introduction Picasso, Pablo Ruizy (1881-1973), Spanish painter, who is widely acknowledged to be the most important artist of the 20th century. A long-lived and highly prolific (producing a great number or amount of something) artist, he experimented with a wide range of styles and themes throughout his career. Among Picassos many contributions to the history of art, his most important include pioneering the modern art movement called cubism, inventing collage as an artistic technique, and developing assemblage (constructions of various materials) in sculpture. Picasso was born Pablo Ruiz in Mlaga, Spain. He later adopted his mothers more distinguished maiden namePicassoas his own. Though Spanish by birth, Picasso lived most of his life in France.2. Formative Work (1893-1900) Picassos father, who was an art teacher, quickly recognized that his child Pablo was a prodigy. Picasso studied art first privately with his father and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in La Corua, Spain, where his father taught. Picassos early drawings, such as Study of a Torso, After a Plaster Cast (1894-1895, Muse Picasso, Paris, France), demonstrate the high level of technical proficiency he had achieved by 14 years of age. In 1895 his family moved to Barcelona, Spain, after his father obtained a teaching post at that citys Academy of Fine Arts. Picasso was admitted to advanced classes at the academy after he pleted in a single day the entrance examination that applicants traditionally were given a month to finish. In 1897 Picasso left Barcelona to study at the Madrid Academy in the Spanish capital. Dissatisfied with the training, he quit and returned to Barcelona.After Picasso visited Paris in October 1900, he moved back and forth between France and Spain until 1904, when he settled in the French capital. In Paris he encountered, and experimented with, a number of modern artistic styles. Picassos painting Le Moulin de la Galette (1900, Guggenheim Museum, New York City) revealed his interest in the subject matter of Parisian nightlife and in the style of French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a style that verged on caricature (讽刺画，漫画). In addition to caf scenes, Picasso painted landscapes, still lifes, and portraits of friends and performers.3. Blue Period (1901-1903) From 1901 to 1903 Picasso initiated his first truly original style, which is known as the blue period. Restricting his color scheme to blue, Picasso depicted emaciated (very thin and weak, usually because of illness or extreme hunger) and forlorn figures whose body language and clothing bespeak (to suggest or show) the lowliness of their social status. In The Old Guitarist (1903, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois), Picasso emphasized the guitarists poverty and position as a social outcast, which he reinforced by surrounding the figure with a black outline, as if to cut him off from his environment. The guitarist is pressed within the canvas (no room is left in the painting for the guitarist to raise his lowered head), suggesting his helplessness: The guitarist is trapped within the frame just as he is trapped by his poverty. Although Picasso underscored (to emphasize) the squalor of his figures during this period, neither their clothing nor their environment conveys a specific time or place. This lack of specificity suggests that Picasso intended to make a general statement about human alienation rather than a particular statement about the lower class in Paris.4. Rose Period (1904-1905) In 1904 Picassos style shifted, inaugurating the rose period, sometimes referred to as the circus period. Although Picasso still focused on social outcastsespecially circus performershis color scheme lightened, featuring warmer, reddish hues, and the thick outlines of the blue period disappeared. Picasso maintained his interest in the theme of alienation, however. In Two Acrobats and a Dog (1905, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), he represented two young acrobats before an undefined, barren landscape. Although the acrobats are physically close, they gaze in different directions and do not interact, and the reason for their presence is not made clear. Differences in the acrobats height also exaggerate their disconnection from each other and from the empty landscape. The dog was a frequent presence in Picassos work and may have been a reference to death as dogs appear at the feet of figures in many Spanish funerary monuments.During this period Picasso met Fernande Olivier, the first of several women who shared his life and provided inspiration for his art. Oliviers features appear in many of the female figures in his paintings over the next several years. 5. Classical Period (1905) and Iberian Period (1906) Experimentation and rapid style changes mark the years from late 1905 on. Picassos paintings from late 1905 are more emotionally detached than those of the blue or rose periods. The color scheme lightensbeiges and light browns predominateand melancholy and alienation give way to a more reasoned approach. Picassos increasing interest in form is apparent in his references to classical sculpture. The figure of a seated boy in Two Youths (1905, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), for example, recalls an ancient Greek sculpture of a boy removing a thorn from his foot.By 1906 Picasso had bee interested in sculptures from the Iberian peninsula dating from about the 6th to the 3rd century BC. Picasso must have found them of particular interest both because they are native to Spain and because they display remarkable simplification of form. The Iberian influence is immediately visible in Self-Portrait (1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania), in which Picasso reduced the Picture of his head to an oval and his eyes to almond shapes, thus revealing his increasing fascination with geometric simplification of form.6. African Period (1907) Picassos predilection for experimentation and for drawing inspiration from outside the accepted artistic sources led to his most radical and revolutionary painting yet in 1907: Les Demoiselles dAvignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art). The paintings themethe female nudecould not be more traditional, but Picassos treatment of it is revolutionary. Picasso took even greater liberties here with human anatomy than in his 1906 Self-Portrait. The figures on the left in the painting look flat, as if they have no skeletal or muscular structure. Faces seen from the front have noses in profile. The eyes are asymmetrical and radically simplified. Contour lines are inplete. Color juxtapositionsbetween blue and orange, for instanceare intentionally strident and unharmonious. The representation of space is fragmented and discontinuous.7. Cubism (1908-1917) For many scholars, Les Demoiselles dAvignonwith its fragmented planes, flattened figures, and borrowings from African masksmarks the beginning of the new visual language, known as cubism. Other scholars believe that French painter Paul Czanne provided the primary catalyst for this change in style. Czannes work of the 1890s and early 1900s was noted both for its simplification and flattening of form and for the introduction of what art historians call passage, the interpenetration of one physical object by another. For example, in Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), Czanne left the outer edge of the mountain open, allowing the blue area of the sky and the gray area of the mountain to merge. This innovationair and rock interpenetratingwas a crucial precedent for Picassos invention of cubism. First, it defied the laws of our physical experience, and second, it indicated that artists were viewing paintings as having a logic of their own that functioned independently of, or even contrary to, the logic of everyday experience.Scholars generally divide the cubist innovations of Picasso and French painter Georges Braque into two stages. In the first stage, analytical cubism, the artists fragmented three-dimensional shapes into multiple geometric planes. In the second stage, synthetic cubism, they reversed the process, putting abstract planes together to represent human figures, still lifes, and other recognizable shapes.8. Construction and After (1912-1920) In 1912 Picasso instigated another important innovation: construction, or assemblage, in sculpture. Before this innovation, sculpture, at least in the West, was primarily created in one of two ways: by carving a block of stone or wood or by modelingshaping a form in clay and casting that form in a more durable material, such as bronze. In Guitar (1912, Museum of Modern Art), Picasso used a new additive process. He cut various shapes out of sheet metal and wire, and then reassembled those materials into a cubist construction. In other constructions, Picasso used wood, cardboard, string, and other everyday objects, not only inventing a new technique for sculpture but also expanding the definition of art by blurring the distinction between artistic and nonartistic materials.From World War I (1914-1918) onward, Picasso moved from style to style. In 1915, for instance, Picasso painted the highly abstract Harlequin (Museum of Modern Art) and drew the highly realistic portrait of Ambroise Vollard (Metropolitan Museum of Art). During and after the war he also worked on stage design and costume design for the Ballets Russes, a modern Russian ballet pany launched by the impresario Sergey Diaghilev. Inspired by his direct experience of the theater, Picasso also produced representations of performers, such as French clowns called Pierrot and Harlequin, and scenes of ballerinas.Picasso separated from Olivier in 1912, after meeting Eva Gouel. Gouel died in 1915, and in 1918 Picasso married Olga Koklova, one of the dancers in Diaghilevs pany. Picasso created a number of portraits of her, and their son, Paulo, appears in works such as Paulo as Harlequin (1924, Muse Picasso).9. Classical Period (1920-1925) After World War I, a strain of conservatism spread through a number of art forms. A motto popular among traditionalists was “the return to order.” For Picasso the years 1920 to 1925 were marked by close attention to three-dimensional form and to classical themes: bathers, centaurs (mythical creatures half-man and half horse), and women in classical drapery. He depicted many of these figures as massive, dense, and weighty, an effect intensified by strong contrasts of light and dark. But even as he moved toward greater realism, Picasso continued to play games with the viewer. In the classical and carefully posed The Pipes of Pan (1923, Muse Picasso), for example, he painted an area of the architectural framework in the foreground (which should be grayish) with the same color as the sea in the background, revealing again his pleasure in ambiguity.10. Cubism and Surrealism (1925-1936) From 1925 to 1936 Picasso again worked in a number of styles. He posed some paintings of tightly structured geometric shapes, limiting his color scheme to primary colors (red, blue, yellow), as in The Studio (1928, Museum of Modern Art). In other paintings, such as Nude in an Armchair (1929, Muse Picasso), he depicted contorted female figures whose open mouths and menacing teeth reveal a more emotional, less reasoned attitude. Picassos marriage broke up during this time, and some of the menacing female figures in his art of this period may represent Koklova. The same diversity is visible in Picassos sculpture during this period. Bather (Metamorphosis II) (1928, Muse Picasso) represents the human body as a massive spherical shape with protruding limbs, whereas Wire Construction (1928, Muse Picasso) depicts it as a rigid, geometric configuration of thin wires. Picasso also experimented with welding in sculpture of this period and explored a variety of themes, including the female head, the sleeping woman, and the Crucifixion. The model for many of his sleeping women was Marie Thrse Walter, a new love who had entered his life. Their daughter, Maia, was born in 1935.11. Guernica (1937) In 1937 the Spanish government missioned Picasso to create a mural for Spains pavilion at an international exposition in Paris. Unsure about the subject, Picasso procrastinated. But he set to work almost immediately after hearing that the Spanish town of Guernica had been bombed by Nazi warplanes in support of Spanish general Francisco Francos plot to overthrow the Spanish republic. Guernica (1937, Prado, Madrid) was Picassos response to, and condemnation of, that event. He executed the painting in black and white.At the extreme left is a bull, which symbolizes brutality and darkness, according to Picasso. At the center, a horse wounded by a spear most likely represents the Spanish people. At the center on top, an exploding light bulb possibly refers to air warfare or to evil ing from above (and putting out the light of reason). Corpses and dying figures fill the foreground: a woman with a dead child at the left, a dead warrior with a broken sword (from which a flower sprouts) at the center, a weeping woman and a figure falling through a burning building at the right. The distortion of these figures expresses the inhumanity of the event. To suggest the screaming of the horse and of the mother with the dead child, Picasso transformed their tongues into daggers. In the upper center, a tormented female figure holds an oil lamp that sheds light upon the scene, possibly symbolizing the light of truth revealing the brutality of the event to the outside world. 12. World War II (1939-1945) Picasso, unlike many artists, stayed in Paris during the German occupation of World War II. Some of his paintings from this time reveal the anxiety of the war years, as does the menacing Still Life with Steers Skull (1942, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dsseldorf, Germany). Other works, such as his sculpture Head of a Bull (1943, Muse Picasso), are more playful and whimsical. In this sculpture Picasso bined a bicycle seat and handlebars to represent the bulls head. Upon receiving news of the Nazi death camps, Picasso also painted, although he did not finish, an homage to the victims of the Holocaust (mass murder of European Jews during the war). In this painting, called The Charnel House (1945, Museum of Modern Art), he restricted the color scheme to black and white (as in Guernica) and depicted an accumulation of distorted, mangled bodies. During the war Picasso joined the munist Party, and after the war he attended several peace conferences.13. Late Work (1945-1973) Picasso remained a prolific artist until late in his life, although this later period has not received universal acclaim from historians or critics. Another new direction in Picassos work came from variations on well-known works by older artists that he recast in his own style. Among these works are Women on the Banks of the Seine, after Courbet (1950, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland) and Le Djeuner sur lHerbe after Manet (1960, Muse Picasso).One of Picassos late works, Head of a Woman (1967), was a gift to the city of Chicago. This sculpture of welded steel, 15 m (50 ft) tall, stands in front of Chicagos Civic Center. Although its semiabstract form proved controversial at first, the sculpture soon became a city landmark. Because of his many innovations, Picasso is widely considered to be the most influential artist of the 20th century. The cubist movement, which he and Braque inspired, had a number of followers. Its innovations gave rise to a host of other 20th-century art movements, including futurism in Italy, suprematism and constructivism in Russia, de Stijl in the Netherlands, and vorticism in England. Cubism also influenced German expressionism, dada, and other movements as well as early work of the surrealists and abstract expressionists. In addition, collage and construction became key aspects of 20th-century art.III. Something about LouvreLouvrea French palace and the national art museum of France. Located in Paris, the Louvre is one of the largest palaces in the world and, as a former residence of the kings of France, one of the most illustrious. It exemplifies traditional French architecture since the Renaissance, and it houses a magnificent collection of ancient and Western art.The MuseumIn 1793, during the Revolution, the first state museum was opened in the Louvre, consisting of the former royal collections of painting and sculpture. It was enriched temporarily by loot from the Napoleonic wars and then permanently by purchases and gifts, including archaeological finds. More and more specialized divisions were created.The present Louvre departments include Oriental (ancient Mesopotamian) antiquities; Egyptian antiquities; Greek and Roman antiquities; sculpture from the Middle Ages to modern times; furniture and objets dart; and paintings representing all the European schools. A section of the museum is devoted to Islamic art.Universally famous ancient works of art in the Louvre include a statuette of the Sumerian ruler Gudea, a stele bearing Hammurabis code, an Egyptian painted stone statue of a scribe sitting cross-legged, the Venus de Milo, and the Victory of Samothrace. Among outstanding later works are two marble Slaves by Michelangelo, the treasure of the abbey of St. Denis, and the French crown diamonds. Important paintings include the Piet of Avignon, Leonardo da Vincis Mona Lisa, Veroneses immense Wedding at Cana (which was badly damaged in 1992 while being installed in the newly renovated galleries), and Watteaus Embarkation for Cythera.The school of the Louvre trains curators in history of art and archaeology. Special exhibits are indicated in the Revue du Louvre.IVAn introduction to Leonardo Da VinciLeonardo Da Vinci was born in a small village called Vinci in the country of Italy. He was raised by his grandparents and even as a boy showed signs of genius. He could work hard mathematics problems and was a very good artist. His father Piero recognized that he had artistic talent and sent him to Florence to study with the artist Verrocchio. In addition to art he also learned sculpture and engineering. Soon he was a better artist than his teacher. At age 20 he was accepted into the painters guild in Florence. About ten years later he was hired by Sforza, who later became Duke of Milan. It was during this time he painted The Last Supper. Artists through the centuries had used egg tempera as the base for their paint, but Leonardo wanted to try something new, so he applied plaster to the wall and painted on the dried plaster. Unfortunately the plaster began to flake off after just a short time and the painting has required a lot of repair through the years. When the French army captured Milan, the duke had to flee, and Leonardo went back to Florence. It was here he painted the portrait of the wife of a merchant named Giocondo. It is called La Giocando, or Mona Lisa. Legend has it he hired musicians to play while he painted the portrait so his subject would stay in a good mood. Numerous words have been written about the painting and it remains one of the most recognizable paintings in the world. He was a musician who invented musical instruments. He would pose, then play and sing his own songs. Probably of greater importance than h