X. Read the article by John Berger on what distinguishes oil painting from any other form of painting and say to what extent you can sympathise with his argument. Answer the questions after it.

WAYS OF SEEING

What distinguishes oil painting from any other form of painting is its special ability to render the tangibility, the texture, the luster? The solidity of what it depicts. It defines the real as that which you can put your hands on.

Although its painted images are two-dimensional, its potential of illusionism is far greater than that of sculpture, for it can suggest objects possessing colour, texture and temperature, filling a space and, by implication, filling the entire world.

Holbein’s painting of “The Ambassadors” (1533) stands at the beginning of the tradition and, as often happens with a work at the opening of a new period, its character is undisguised. The way it is painted shows what it is about. How is it painted?

It is painted with great skill to create the illusion in the spectator that he is looking at real objects and materials. We pointed out in the first essay that the sense of touch was like a restricted, static sense of sight. Every square inch of the surface of this painting, whilst remaining purely visual, appeals to, importunes, the sense of touch. The eye moves from fur to silk to metal to wood to velvet to marble to paper to felt, and each time what the eye perceives is already translated, within the painting itself, into the language of tactile sensation. The two men have a certain presence and there are many objects which symbolize ideas, but it is the materials, the stuff, by which the men are surrounded and clothed which dominate the painting.

Except for the faces and hands, there is not a surface in this picture which does not make one aware of how it has been elaborately worked over - by weavers, embroiderers, carpet-makers, goldsmiths, leather workers, mosaic-makers, furriers, tailors, jewelers – and of how this working-over and the resulting richness of each surface has been finally worked-over and reproduced by Holbein the painter.

This emphasis and the skill that lay behind it was to remain a constant of the tradition of oil painting.

Works of art in earlier traditions celebrated wealth. But wealth was then a symbol of a fixed social or divine order. Oil painting celebrated a new kind of wealth – which was dynamic and which found its only sanction in the supreme buying power of money. Thus painting itself had to be able to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy. And the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will reward the touch, the hand, of the owner.

Until very recently – and in certain milieux even today – a certain moral value was ascribed to the study of the classic. This was because the classic texts, whatever their intrinsic worth, supplied the higher strata of the ruling class with a system of references for the forms of their own idealized behaviour. As well as poetry, logic and philosophy, the classics offered a system of etiquette. They offered examples of how the heightened moments of life – to be found in heroic action, the dignified exercise of power, passion, courageous death, the noble pursuit of pleasure p-should be lived, or, at least, should be seen to be lived.

Yet why are these pictures so vacuous and so perfunctory in their evocation of the scenes they are meant to recreate? They did not need to stimulate the imagination. If they had, they would have served their purpose less well. Their purpose was not to transport their spectator-owners into new experience, but to embellish such experience as they already possessed. Before these canvases the spectator-owner hoped to see the classic face of his own passion or grief or generosity. The idealized appearances he found in the painting were an aid, a support to his own view of himself. In those appearances he found the guise of his own (or his wife’s or his daughters’) nobility.

(Ways of Seeing, BBC and Penguin, 1972
by John Berger)

Questions:

1. Why does the author choose to write about the painting “The Ambassadors” (1533) by Holbein.?

2. What did works of art in earlier traditions celebrate?

3. What did the classics as well as poetry, logic and philosophy offer?

4. Yet why are these pictures so vacuous and so perfunctory in their evocation of the scenes they are meant to recreate?

5. What did the spectator-owner hope to see before these canvases?

XI. In the novel by O.Wilde “The Picture of Dorian Gray” the author presents his view point on art and his personal understanding of the role of an artist in it. Read the extracts from the novel and say if there are any invisible links between an artist and a sitter. Can a sitter have any influence upon an artist?

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs…

In the center of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself. Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement, and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skillfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and, closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

“It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done,” said Lord Henry, languidly. “You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Crosvenor is really the only place.

“I don’t think I shall send it anywhere,” he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford. “No: I won’t send it anywhere.”

“I know you will laugh at me,” he replied, but I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.”

“Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn’t know you were so vain; and I really can’t see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you – well, pf course you have an intellectual expression, and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.

“He is all my art to me now,” said the painter, gravely. “I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the world’s history. The first is the appearance of a new personality for art also. What the invention of oil painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinous was to late Greek scupture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me. It is not merely that I paint from him, sketch from him. Of course I have done all that. But he is much more to me than a model or a sitter. I won’t tell you that I am dissatisfied with what I have done of him, or that his beauty is such that Art cannot express it. There is nothing that Art cannot express, and I know that the work I have done, since I met Dorian Gray, is good work, is the best work of my life. But in some curious way – I wonder will you understand me? – his personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I see things differently, I think of them differently. I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me before.

(From “The Picture of Dorian Gray”
by Oscar Wilde)

XII. How do the picture by Breasley the description of which is given below and the portraiture of the painter charaterise him? What personality is the painter? Translate the extracts from English into Russian.

Breasley had granted himself pride of place – and space – over the old stone fireplace in the center of the room. There hung the huge Moon-hunt, perhaps the best-known of the Coetminais oeuvre, a painting David was going to discuss at some length and that he badly wanted to study at leisure again … perhaps not least to confirm to himself that he wasn’t overrating his subject. He felt faintly relieved that the picture stood up well to renewed acquaintance – he hadn’t seen it in the flesh since the Tate exhibition of four years previously – and even announced itself as better than memory and reproductions had rated it. It gave an essential tension, in fact: behind the mysteriousness and the ambiguity (no hounds, no horses, no prey … nocturnal figures among trees, but the title was needed), behind the modernity of so many of the surface elements there stood both a homage and a kind of thumbed nose to a very tradition. One couldn’t be quite sure it was a masterpiece, there was a clotted quality in some passages, a distinctly brusque use of impasto on closer examination; something faintly too static in the whole, a lack of tonal relief. Yet it remained safely considerable, had presence – could stand very nicely, thank you, up against anything else in British painting since the war. Perhaps its most real mystery, as with the whole series, was that it could have been done at all by a man of Breasley’s age. The Moon-hunt had been painted in 1965, in his sixty-ninth year. Then suddenly, as if to solve the enigma, the living painter himself appeared from the garden door and came down toward David.

“ Williams, my dear fellow.”

He advanced, hand outstretched, in pale blue trousers and a dark blue shirt, an unexpected flash of Oxford and Cambridge, a red silk square. He was white-haired. Though the eyebrows were still faintly grey; the bulbous nose, the misleadingly fastidious mouth, the pouched grey-blue eyes in a hale face. He moved almost briskly, as if aware that he had been remiss in some way; smaller and trimmer than David had visualized from the photographs.

(From “The Ebony Tower” by John Fowles)

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