Mary Cassatt (1844 - 1926)
A tall, taut Philadelphia society girl, Mary Cassatt insisted on going to Europe to study art. Her banker father declared he would almost rather see her dead. Nevertheless, in 1866, Cassatt went. She was then only twenty-two. After travelling' extensively throughout Europe, studying and copying the old masters in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain, she finally settled down in Paris and gave herself over to the influence of Edgar Degas. Degas transmitted much of his precise craftsmanship to Cassatt. The impressionists — Manet, Monet and others — followed his lead in charming the prim, determined creature into their sunlit circle. From them she learned to subordinate form, space, and texture to the pure play of light, and to give her pictures their characteristic air of calm and gracious ease. She made a habit of painting plain people in unconsciously beautiful poses, and with the same care that earlier artists lavished on saints and goddesses. From the start, French critics noted her rather puritanical simplicity. “She remains exclusively of her people”, said one. But America failed to realize the fact; she had no native fame until after her death. Mary Cassatt felt more at home in Paris. For decades she rarely left her studio, painting from eight in the morning until the light failed, and then turning to her drawings and etchings. During World War I the light failed in her eyes. Blind, she lived on for another decade, feeling her way about with an umbrella, and snapping her large and bony fingers as she recalled the great days of impressionism.
Woman at her Toilette, 1909 Tea, 1880
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) Sargent’s output was more than 800 portraits and innumerable sketches of people and places. Sargent’s “manner” was not that of a neo-expressionist but of a virtuoso: his drawing lacks the tenacity of an Eakins, let alone a Cezanne, yet it was drawing of a high order, heartless sometimes, but rarely less than dazzling in its fluency; and there is nothing like it in American art today. He was a stylist without a natural subject, unlike such Americans as Winslow Homer or Thomas Eakins whose work was rooted in unmistakably American values and experiences. He spent most of his adult life in England. If Sargent was the painter of his age, it was also because his talent suited a changes climate in England in the late 19th century — one in which John Ruskin's passionate social moralizing had dropped out of fashion, to be replaced by Matthew Arnold's exhortations to detach art from politics, the seed of “art for art’s sake”. His fame as a social portraitist and his passage from France into the English upper crust <...> began at the Paris Salon of 1884 with the scandalous Madame X. This portrait caused a sensation. Over the years to come Sargent’s social and celebrity portraits became an indispensable record of their time and. class. Sargent was the last of what had passed, not the first of what was to come; but he still looks impressive, and one realizes that his sense of decorum went deeper than the mere desire to cure the vanity of the rich.
George Bellows (1882-1925) “The Eight” were by no means an isolate phenomenon. Their social realism was maintained and developed further by the younger generation of artists who were Henri’s pupils. The most remarkable of them were Bellows, Hopper and Kent. George Bellows was closely associated with the Ash-Can School. He was one of the most powerful exponents of realistic tradition which through his sizable contribution became firmly established in America. He continued the exploration of the city life, begun by Eakins in the seventies of the nineteenth century. George Wesley Bellows was a stronger painter than Henri and his followers, and he went further than they. His range of subjects is more diverse and deeper in social content. He found his subject matter at sports clubs, at construction sites, in tenement areas, on the teeming river fronts. He painted scenes of prize boxing and circus performances, city streets and parks flooded with crowds, dockers and builders, hospitals and prisons, slums and Negro lynching scenes — the whole multiform and dramatic world of everyday life. The artist’s relentless critical realism is expressed with tremendous power in such lithographs as Blessing in Georgia (1916), where a prison priest is preaching at the imprisoned Negroes in irons, or The Law Is Too Slow — a wrathful indictment of the appalling crimes of the bourgeois reaction To the First World War he responded with two highly tragic anti-war compositions — The Return of the Useless showing the crippled and disabled French prisoners of war returning from the German captivity, and the Murder of Edith Caveli — a pathetic scene just before the shooting of the British nurse who had helped wounded prisoners to escape from Belgium when it was occupied by the Germans.
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) Edward Hopper was born on July 22, 1882, at Nyack, New York. He was educated at a local private school, then in Nyack High School. In the winter of 1899-1900 he studied illustration at a commercial art school in New York; then during six years he studied at the New York School of Art, at first illustration, then painting. In the fall of 1906 he went abroad for about nine months, visiting England, Holland, Germany, and Belgium, but spending most of his time in Paris, where he painted and drew city scenes.
Second Story Sunlight, 1960 From 1908 Hopper lived in New York. After leaving art school he made his living by commercial art and some illustration, painting in his free time and in summers. Because of lack of opportunities to exhibit he was less active as a painter from 1915 to 1920. In 1915 he took up etching, producing about fifty plates in the next eight years. From about 1920 he worked more in oil and in 1923 began to paint water-colors. From the late 1920s he was represented regularly in the chief national exhibitions. Hopper was painting an honest portrait of an American town, with all its native character, its familiar ugliness and beauties. Since his boyhood in Nyack, Hopper had been attracted to everything connected with boats and salt water. The noble forms of the white lighthouse towers and the white building groups around them inspired some of his best water-colors; and also three oils, Captain Upton's House, Lighthouse Hill, and Lighthouse at Two Lights — the last is a particular one of his strongest paintings. Hopper's art from the first had been opposite to the general trends of modernism: instead of subjectivity, a new kind of objectivity; instead of abstraction, a purely representational art; instead of international influences, an art based on American life. The contemporary American city was the center of much of Hopper's work. There are never any crowds in his pictures. Early Sunday morning in an empty street before anyone is up, with a row of identical houses. The monotony and loneliness of the city have seldom been so intensely conveyed. He received numerous prizes, several honorary degrees. He died on May 15, 1967, in his eighty-fifth year. Edward Hopper belongs to the American creative realists.
Girl in a Hammock, 1873 by W. Homer E. Find English equivalents in the texts to the following expressions: віддалений об’єкт, удосконалювати, асоціюватися з, найвпливовіший представник, знайти свою тему у мистецтві, малювати аквареллю, викликати сенсацію, шанувальник мистецтва, зображати, мистецтво, що базується на, малювати з великою увагою до деталей, точний майстер, зображати простих людей, передати відчуття чистого реалізму, бути поневоленим, бути літописцем, дослідження життя міста, F. Answer the following questions: 1) What is characteristic of Thomas C. Eakins’ works? What are his two most famous scenes of clinics? Was Eakins recognized in his lifetime? 2) What family did Cassatt come from? Where did she study and copy the old masters? Who influenced her art greatly? What did Cassatt learn from the impressionists? 3) How many portraits and sketches did Sargent paint? What was his “manner”? Why was Sargent considered to be the painter of his age? 6) What does his drawing lack? 8) What portrait caused a sensation at the Paris Salon of 1884? 4) What tradition in American art did George Bellows represent? In which of his lithographs is his relentless critical realism expressed with tremendous power? What painters maintained and developed the social realism of "The Eight" in American art? What American painter began the exploration of the city life continued by George Bellows? 5) What had Hopper been attracted to since his boyhood? What inspired some of his best water-colors? What had Hopper's art been opposite to from the first? How can we characterize Hopper’s art? G. Fill out the following table:
|
