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School of landscapes and genre scenes adopted a quasi-Impressionist technique while others used realist or more traditional levels of finish.

The late 19th century also saw the Decadent movement in France and the British Aesthetic movement. The British based American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, and the former Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Edward Burne-Jones are associated with those movements, with late Burne-Jones and Beardsley both being admired abroad and representing the nearest British approach to European Symbolism. In 1877 James McNeill Whistler, sued the art critic John Ruskin for libel after the critic condemned his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. Ruskin accused Whistler of "ask[ing] two hundred guineas for throwing a pot of paint in the public's face." The jury reached a verdict in favor of Whistler but awarded him only a single farthing in nominal damages, and the court costs were split. The cost of the case, together with huge debts from building his residence ("The White House" in Tite Street, Chelsea, designed with E. W. Godwin, 1877–8), bankrupted Whistler by May 1879, resulting in an auction of his work, collections, and house. Stansky notes the irony that the Fine Art Society of London, which had organized a collection to pay for Ruskin's legal costs, supported him in etching "the stones of Venice" (and in exhibiting the series in 1883) which helped recoup Whistler's costs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Sickert

Walter Sickert. The Acting Manager or Rehearsal: The End of the Act, (portrait of Helen Carte), c. 1885

Scottish art was now regaining an adequate home market, allowing it to develop a distinctive character, of which the "Glasgow Boys" were one expression, straddling Impressionism in painting, and Art Nouveau, Japonism and the Celtic Revival in design, with the architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh now their best-known member. Painters included Thomas Millie Dow, George Henry, Joseph Crawhall and James Guthrie.

New printing technology brought a great expansion in book illustration with illustrations for children's books providing much of the best remembered

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work of the period. Specialized artists included Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway and, from 1902, Beatrix Potter.

The experience of military, political and economic power from the rise of the British Empire, led to a very specific drive in artistic technique, taste and sensibility in the United Kingdom. British people used their art "to illustrate their knowledge and command of the natural world", whilst the permanent settlers in British North America, Australasia, and South Africa "embarked upon a search for distinctive artistic expression appropriate to their sense of national identity". The empire has been "at the centre, rather than in the margins, of the history of British art".

The enormous variety and massive production of the various forms of British decorative art during the period are too complex to be easily summarized. Victorian taste, until the various movements of the last decades, such as Arts and Crafts, is generally poorly regarded today, but much fine work was produced, and much money made. Both William Burges and Augustus Pugin were architects committed to the Gothic Revival, who expanded into designing furniture, metalwork, tiles and objects in other media. There was an enormous boom in re - Gothicising the fittings of medieval churches, and fitting out new ones in the style, especially with stained glass, an industry revived from effective extinction. The revival of furniture painted with images was a particular feature at the top end of the market.

From its opening in 1875 the London department store Liberty & Co. was especially associated with imported Far Eastern decorative items and British goods in the new styles of the end of the 19th century. Charles Voysey was an architect who also did much design work in textiles, wallpaper furniture and other media, bringing the Arts and Crafts movement into Art Nouveau and beyond; he continued to design into the 1920s. A. H. Mackmurdo was a similar figure.

(Abridged from: Art of the United Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_the_United_Kingdom)

2. Fill in the gaps with prepositions where necessary.

Executed … a colourful and minutely detailed style; to reject… the brushwork of the tradition; a return … hand-craftsmanship in the decorative arts; their adherence … the history painting; their subject matter was … tune with Victorian taste; to merge easily … the mainstream; to specialize … sentimental animal subjects; to feature the beauties … exotic or classical settings; being reviewed … huge length in the press; his blood splashed … his unfinished work; painters prided themselves… the increasing accuracy of their period settings; to scorn … the breezy approximations of artists; the scenes were lighter … mood; illustrations made … watercolour; the critic condemned … his painting; to throw a pot of paint … the public face; the misery of the human figures was offset … a landscape; hosted … many exhibitions of foreign art; resulted … an

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auction of his work; they embarked … a search for distinctive artistic expression; … the centre, rather than … the margins, of the history of British art; to fit out smth. … the style.

3.Explain what is meant by the phrases in bold in the text.

4.Formulate the basic features of the development of art and painting over the Victorian Period. What differs paintings of this period from the Golden period?

IV. On Your Own.

Make up 5 TRUE or FALSE statements about the development of art and painting over the Victorian Period. Work in small groups, read your statements to each other and let your partners say if the statements are true or false. If the statements are FALSE, let your partners explain why.

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UNIT 2.

BRITISH PAINTING IN THE 20TH CENTURY

1. Lead-in.

1.What do you know about the development of world art and painting, in particular, in the 20th century? What names of outstanding artists of the 20th century come to your mind? Share your background knowledge with your group mates.

2.What do you know about the following phenomena in art:

Vorticism;

Art Deco;

Pop Art;

Avant-garde;

Conceptual art?

2. Language Focus.

Check in the dictionaries the pronunciation, meaning and translation of the underlined words and phrases in the sentences below (they come from the text you are going to read in this Unit), then translate the sentences into Russian.

1)The Royal Academy became increasingly ossified.

2)The reaction to the horrors of the First World War prompted a return to pastoral subjects.

3)Jimmy Porter, the anti-hero of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger (1957), observes ruefully that he lives in 'the American age'.

4)Their works are assertions of the energy of creativity, of the spiritual heights and depths to be plumbed in the contemplation of a coloured void.

5)The joie de vivre that characterizes much of their work testifies to a mood of contentment, if not optimism, that pervades much St Ives School art.

6)St Ives, with its white, slate-roofed cottages and narrow streets, and wide bays, seems to have possessed an extraordinary capacity to lead artists forward in the search for a language to express their strong sense of these eloquent surroundings.

7)His own method of dealing with the problem was to subject reality to a careful scrutiny, a measuring by eye, which was transferred to the canvas by means of a half-notional, half-real grid.

8)There is no room for chance; the results are breathlessly balanced, ordained by an inexorable intellectual process.

9)The master who bestrode the modernist and traditional worlds was Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), and it isn't surprising that some artists found his example valuable in the struggle to forge a workable personal style.

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10)Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, in the latter part of their careers no longer avant-garde, made large-scale murals for Berwick church.

11)Smeared surfaces like old urban walls, covered with random graffiti, become the back-drops to louche encounters, or sometimes constitute the entire picture.

12)He quickly succumbed to the attractions of American life and moved to California, where he made pictures that evoke with an entirely appropriate obviousness the sun-drenched, leisurely lifestyle of pool side and palm-lined boulevard.

13)It is worth remembering that the British painter and etcher Walter Sickert (1860-1942) had pioneered the use of newspaper photographs as the basis for pictures back in the 1930s.

14)Riley began painting in black and white alone, titillating the eye with finely modulated stripes or dots that seem to flicker, fade or fold out of view as one looks.

15)At the opposite end of the artistic spectrum from Riley and the Martins is the lushly sensuous painting of Howard Hodgkin (b.1932), who has sustained the native tradition of abstraction.

16)He has painted portraits, interiors, landscapes, all transformed into glowing cauldrons of colour, variegated with polka dots and molten rainbows, in which the very glossiness of the paint contributes to the luxuriant effect.

17)A younger exponent of the values of lusciously applied colour pigment is Therese Oulton (b.1953), whose often large canvases are inundated by tides of rippling paint, floods of rich, sombre colour illuminated by intermittent flashes of fitful light.

18)Christopher Le Brun (b.1951), reflected some of the preoccupations of the New York school in his large, brooding, loosely painted canvases; though his shadowy spaces usually evoke the transcendental in more concrete ways.

19)The fantasies of Ken Kiff (1935-2001) are told in simple, childlike forms and vibrant, unmixed hues, often using a dense yet luminous watercolour.

20)Gary Hume (b.1962) revives some of the brasher aspects of the Pop movement in images that draw much of their effect from a boldly simplified abstraction, projected in the attention-grabbing colours and shapes of advertising.

III. Reading and Speaking.

1. Read the text below and complete the tasks that follow.

A brief review of the British painting in the 20th century.

In many respects, the Victorian era continued until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and the Royal Academy became increasingly ossified. The American John Singer Sargent was the most successful London portraitist at the start of the 20th century, with John Lavery, Augustus John and William

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Orpen rising figures. British attitudes to modern art were "polarized" at the end of the 19th century. Modernist movements were both cherished and vilified by artists and critics; Impressionism was initially regarded by "many conservative critics" as a "subversive foreign influence", but became "fully assimilated" into British art during the early-20th century.

William Orpen. Self-Portrait, 1910 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/14.59

Vorticism was a brief coming together of a number of Modernist artists in the years immediately before 1914; members included Wyndham Lewis, the sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, David Bomberg, Malcolm Arbuthnot, Lawrence

Atkinson, Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton, Christopher Nevinson, William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth, Jessica Dismorr, Helen Saunders, and Dorothy Shakespear.

The early 20th century also includes The Sitwells artistic circle and more notably the Bloomsbury Group a group of mostly English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, including painter Dora Carrington, painter and art critic Roger Fry, art critic Clive Bell, painter Vanessa Bell, painter Duncan Grant among others; very fashionable at the time, their work in the visual arts looks less impressive today. British modernism was to remain somewhat tentative until after World War II, though figures such as Ben Nicholson kept in touch with European developments.

Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group developed an English style of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism with a strong strand of social documentary, including Harold Gilman, Spencer Frederick Gore, Charles Ginner, Robert Bevan, Malcolm Drummond and Lucien Pissarro (the son of French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro). Where their colouring is often notoriously drab, the Scottish Colourists (like Samuel Peploe and John Duncan Fergusson) indeed mostly used bright light and colour. They were initially inspired by Sir William McTaggart (1835–1910), a Scottish landscape painter associated with Impressionism.

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The reaction to the horrors of the First World War prompted a return to pastoral subjects as represented by Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious, mainly a printmaker. Stanley Spencer painted mystical works, as well as landscapes, and the sculptor, printmaker and typographer Eric Gill produced elegant simple forms in a style related to Art Deco.

The Euston Road School was a group of "progressive" realists of the late 1930s, including the influential teacher William Coldstream. Surrealism, with artists including John Tunnard and the Birmingham Surrealists, was briefly popular in the 1930s, influencing Roland Penrose and Henry Moore. Stanley William Hayter was a British painterand printmaker associated in the 1930s with Surrealism and from 1940 onward with Abstract Expressionism.

Francis Bacon. Painting (1946), 1946

http://www.moma.org/collection/works/79204?locale=en

The "London School" of figurative painters including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, and Michael Andrews have received widespread international recognition, while other painters such as John Minton and John Craxton are characterized as Neo-Romantics. According to William Grimes of the New York Times "Lucien Freud and his contemporaries transformed figure painting in the 20th century. In paintings like Girl With a White Dog (1951-52), Freud put the pictorial language of traditional European painting in the service of an anti-romantic, confrontational style of portraiture that stripped bare the sitter‟s social facade. Ordinary people many of them his friends stared wide-eyed from the canvas, vulnerable to the artist‟s ruthless inspection."

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1.Augustus John. W.B. Yeats, 1907 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/john-wb-yeats-n05218

2.John Duncan Fergusson. People and Sails at Royan, 1910 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Duncan_Fergusson

3.Sir Jacob Epstein. The Tomb of Oscar Wilde 1911, in Père Lachaise Cemetery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Epstein

1.Roger Fry. River with Poplars, c. 1912 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/fry-river-with-poplars-t01779

2.Spencer Gore of the Camden Town Group. Gauguins and Connoisseurs at the Stafford Gallery, 1911 https://www.pinterest.com/pin/478577897874870993/

3.James Bolivar Manson. Lucien Pissarro Reading, c. 1913 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bolivar_Manson

1.David Bomberg. The Mud Bath, 1914 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bomberg-the-mud-bath-t00656

2.Samuel Peploe. Still Life: Apples and Jar, c. 1912–1916 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Peploe

3.Paul Nash. The Ypres Salient at Night, 1917–18, he painted some of the most powerful images of World War I by an English artist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Nash_(artist)

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1.Dora Carrington. Portrait of E. M. Forster, 1924–1925 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_Carrington

2.Henry Moore. Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 5, Bronze, 1963–1964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore

3.Sir Anthony Caro. Black Cover Flat, 1974 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Caro

The 1960s decade the decade that gave birth to contemporary art - saw a great increase in national wealth. War receded into the past, but its technological spin-offs were everywhere. The material world of the commercial artifact came to dominate everyone's perception of reality. Drug-taking, which had been common in bohemia for a century or more, became fashionable.

American Influence

In all these matters, American life and culture came to represent a standard to be imitated. American films were seen on television, American slang heard in the streets. Jimmy Porter, the anti-hero of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger (1957), observes ruefully that he lives in 'the American age'. In the arts, that age was announced in the work of the 'Beat' poets and novelists round Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, and the New York School of Abstract Expressionist painters, led by Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Pollock's grand canvases, articulated with all-embracing gestures of the painting arm, often using bucketfuls of paint splashed and dripped in swirls and spirals, are perhaps Existentialist exercises like the less titanic work of his contemporaries in Europe. But they are also positive, assertions of the energy of creativity, or, in Rothko's case, of the spiritual heights and depths to be plumbed in the contemplation of a coloured void.

Patrick Heron

This sort of positive energy was something that appealed to Patrick Heron (1920-99), who is one of the few British painters to have been associated directly with the New York group. In the later 1950s he abandoned the figure subjects and still-lifes inspired by Braque and Matisse that he had been painting and started to make large abstracts, often at first 'stripe paintings', tall piles of many-coloured brushstrokes, which were early reflections of the developments

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in New York; Heron himself claimed to have arrived at this point independently, and to have led the way for some of the Americans. Heron's abstractions became very large indeed in the 1970s and 1980s. They consist of cheerfully coloured pink, blue or yellow patches floating in and out of each other, managing to graft their Americanness onto an unforced freshness and sense of natural beauty that is entirely English.

Heron lived for much of his life in or near St Ives, which had been home to many of the most perceptive landscape painters of the pre-war years, notably Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) and William Scott (1913-89).

St Ives School

Following the earlier example of Graham Sutherland, many English painters continued to find inspiration at St Ives, and developed a tradition of abstraction (see also Vorticism) that deserves more recognition.

Roger Hilton (1911-75) and Terry Frost (b.1915) are among the distinguished artists to have worked there since the war. The joie de vivre that characterizes much of their work testifies to a mood of contentment, if not optimism, that pervades much St Ives School art. Peter Lanyon (1918-64), like Nicholson was happy to blend fine art painting and 3-D sculpture in a free, expressive way. It led him naturally to large abstract works, drawing on the characteristics of the local landscape. In scale and breadth his work has links with the New York artists. But his paintings typically have the colours of the English country and seaside swirling greens and browns shot through with blue and white, the paint thick and energetically applied in big, open-air strokes.

St Ives, with its white, slate-roofed cottages and narrow streets, intricately winding harbour front and wide bays, seems to have possessed an extraordinary capacity to lead artists forward in the search for a language to express their strong sense of these eloquent surroundings. The inspiration was crucial, since the question of abstraction had not been resolved. Was it an inevitable development, the goal to which every serious painter and sculptor must tend? Or was there always to be an underlying reference to that demanding reality outside? In St Ives it was possible to have it both ways.

The English painter Victor Pasmore (1908-98) visited the town in 1950, and about that time broke decisively with representational art, abandoning his delicately coloured, poetic Thames scenes and solidly modelled figure-studies for pure abstraction. He adopted the new international language of nonrepresentational art, in which he was at once word perfect. But he deliberately allowed his pieces, whether paintings, collages or relief sculptures, to bear the marks of 'do-it-yourself' construction splintered edges, visible glueing.

Euston Road School

Before all this, back in 1937, Pasmore had been a founder of the Euston Road School with William Coldstream (1908-87) and Claude Rogers(190779) in an attempt to get away from the uncertainty about abstraction and representation. Although they admired much of what had been achieved

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