Artists
материал по английскому языку (10 класс) на тему

Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh was born in Holland in 1853.

Before becoming a painter he was a teacher.

He started painting when he was twenty-seven. In 1886 he left Holland and joined his young brother Theo, who lived in Paris.

Here he painted some of his most famous pictures.

After living there for two years he moved to the South of France, because the climate was warmer there.

But Van Gogh was mentally ill. During one of his fits of madness he attacked his friend, the artist Paul Gaugin.

In another fit of madness, he cut off part of his own ear. Eventually he went into a mental hospital but he didn't get any better.

Finally, on Sunday 27th July 1890, in the small village Vincent Van Gogh took a gun. He went into a cornfield and shot himself. Thirty-six hours later Van Gogh died in his brother's arms.

His last words were: «I hope I did it properly». Nobody has ever painted cornfields or sunflowers like Van Gogh. His paintings are full of colour and sunlight.

Today his paintings are worth millions of pounds but in his lifetime he only sold one.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol, 1928-1987, an American artist and filmmaker is regarded as the founder of pop culture. Pop art first appeared in Great Britain at the end of the 1950s as a reaction against the seriousness of abstract expressionism. British and American pop artists used images found in comic strips, soup cans, and Coke bottles to express abstract relationships. Pop artists attempted to combine elements of popular and high culture to destroy the boundaries between the two.

The leader of the pop art movement and one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century, Warhol concentrated on the surface of things. He choose his images from the world of commonplace objects such as dollar bills, soup cans, soft-drink bottles, and soap-pad boxes. He both ridiculed and celebrated American middle-class values by destroying the distinction between popular and high culture. Monotony and repetition became — typical of his multi-image, mass-produced paintings. For many of these, such as the portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy, he employed newspaper photographs. He and his assistants worked in a large New York studio called the 'Factory.'

In the mid-1960s Warhol began making films, suppressing the personal element in marathon essays on boredom. In The Chelsea Girls (1966) he used techniques that differed from established methods. With Paul Morrissey, Warhol also made the films Frankenstein and Dracula. In 1973, Warhol first published the magazine Interview focusing on lives of celebrities.

He died from complications following surgery. The Andy Warhol Museum, which exhibits many of his works, opened in Pittsburgh in 1994.

Isaac Ilyich Levitan

Isaac Ilyich Levitan, the great Russian artist, became the first painter of the Russian scenery, who revealed all its beauty. He is a real poet of the Russian countryside. He continued and developed the traditions of painters of the Russian realistic school — Savrasov, Polenov, Serov. Levitan found significant meaning and poetry in what would seem the most everyday subjects.
He is a very individual sort of painter. You can't but appreciate his paintings, because there is something in his landscapes that reflects our own moods.

He deeply felt what he wished to express and his brush transferred these feelings to the canvas. It is interesting to note that a master of landscape, he never introduced figures into it. Though if you look at the Autumn Day in Sokolniki — everything seems to bring out the loneliness of the figure in the centre: the trees losing their leaves, the remote, indifferent sky, the path going off into the distance. But the fact is that it was not Levitan who painted the figure. It was Checkov's brother Nicolai who did it.
His travels over the Volga region influenced Levitan's art, the impression made on him by the great Russian river was unforgettable. For his life and painting he chose Plyoss — a small beautiful town on the Volga. His paintings Evening, Golden Plyoss, After Rain reflect his love for nature.

Last summer I visited Plyoss and saw the places where the great pictures were painted. Many people admire his pictures Deep Waters, Evening Bells, Springtime, The Last Snow and, of course, his famous Golden Autumn. All his paintings are very emotional, lyrical and realistic.
In the closing years of his life Levitan made several journeys abroad to France, Italy and Germany where he painted a number of landscapes, although his best works of the period were devoted to Russia. He was only 40 when he died in 1900.

Levitan's influence on the painters of lyrical landscapes was great. Levitan's feeling for nature, his great love for his native land, his ability to reveal and depict the poetry of the Russian land have won his paintings the love and gratitude of people.