现代大学英语听力原文及答案unit

completely convincing composition. Bertie's portrait, with its plump backside and bow legs, is more like Bertie than

reflection in a mirror—it catches the absolute essentials of his physique and personality.

But these gifts are just the foundation of what Beryl Cook does. She has a very keen feeling for pictorial rhythm. The picture of Dustmen, for instance, has a whirling rhythm which is emphasized by the movement of their large hands in red

rubber gloves—these big hands are often a special feature of Beryl's pictures. The English artist she most closely resembles in this respect is Stanley Spencer.

Details such as those I have described are, of course, just the kind of thing to appeal to a professional art critic.

Important as they are, they would not in themselves account for the impact she has had on the public.

Basically, I think this impact is due to two things. When Beryl paints an actual, everyday scene—and I confess these are the pictures I prefer—the smallest detail is immediately

recognizable. Her people, for example, seem to fit into a kind of Beryl Cook stereotype, with their big heads and fat and round bodies. Yet they are in fact brilliantly accurate portraits. Walking round Plymouth with her, I am always

recognizing people who have made an appearance in her work. Indeed, her vision is so powerful that one tends ever after to see the individual in the terms Beryl has chosen for him/her.

The other reason for her success is almost too obvious to be worth mentioning—it is her marvelous sense of humour. My Fur Coat is a picture of a bowler-hatted gentleman who is being offered an unexpected treat. What makes the picture really memorable is the expression on the face of the man. The humour operates even in pictures which aren't obviously \is something very endearing, for instance, in the two road sweepers with Plymouth lighthouse looming behind them.

A sense of humour may be a good reason for success with the public. It is also one which tends to devalue Beryl's work with professional art buffs. Her work contains too much life to be real art as they understand it.

This seems to me nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. Beryl does what artists have traditionally done—she comments on the world as she perceives it. And the same time she rearranges what she sees to make a pattern of shapes and

colours on a flat surface—a pattern which is more than the sum of its individual parts because it has the mysterious power to enhance and excite our own responses to the visible. I suspect Beryl's paintings will be remembered and

cherished long after most late 20th-century art is forgotten. What they bring us is a real sense of how ordinary life is lived in our own time, a judgment which is the more authoritative for the humour and lightness of touch.

Task 6

【答案】

A. objects, action or story, painted and composed, interesting B.

Plate 1: symmetrical, more interesting design Plate 2: asymmetrical, shapes, colors Plate 3: extends, the left side, point C.

Plate 4: c) d)

Plate 5: a) b) d) Plate 6: a) b) d) 【原文】

The six pictures in your book are all what we call still life paintings—that is to say, they pictures of ordinary

objects such as baskets of fruit, flowers, and old books. There is no “action”, there is no \these paintings. Yet we find these paintings interesting because of the way they have been painted, and especially because of the way they have been composed.

The picture in PLATE 1 was painted by the seventeenth-century Spanish master Zurbaran. How simply Zurbaran has

arranged his objects, merely lining them up in a row across the table! By separating them into three groups, with the largest item in the center, he has made what we call a symmetrical

arrangement. But it is a rather free kind of symmetry, for the objects on the left side are different in shape from those on the right. Furthermore, the pile of lemons looks heavier than the cup and saucer. Yet Zurbaran has balanced these two

different groups in a very subtle way. For one thing, he has made one of the leaves point downward toward the rose on the saucer, and he has made, the oranges appear to tip slightly toward the right. But even by themselves, the cup and saucer, combined with the rose, are more varied in shape than the pile

of lemons on the left. All in all, what Zurbarran has done is to balance the heavier mass of lemons with a more interesting design on the right.

We find a completely different sort of balance in a still life by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Pieter Claesz (see PLATE 2). Objects of several different sizes are

apparently scattered at random on a table. Claesz has arranged them asymmetrically, that is, without attempting to make the two halves of the picture look alike. The tall glass tumbler, for instance, has been placed considerably off-center, weighing down the composition at the left. Yet Claesz has restored the balance of the picture by massing his most interesting shapes and liveliest colors well over to the right.

PLATE 3, a still life by the American painter William M. Harnett, seems even more heavily weighted to one side, for here two thick books and an inkwell are counterbalanced merely by a few pieces of paper. But notice the angle at which Harnett has placed the yellow envelope: How it extends one side of the pyramid formed by the books and inkwell way over to the left edge of the picture, like a long cable tying down a ship to its pier. Both the newspaper and the quill pen also point to this side of the painting, away from the heavy mass at the right, thus helping to balance the whole composition.

Now turn to a still life by one of Harnett's contemporaries, the great French painter Paul Cezanne (see PLATE 4). Here the composition is even more daringly asymmetrical, for the climax of the entire picture is the heavy gray jug in the upper fight comer. Notice that Cezanne has arranged most of the fruit on the table, as well as a fold in the background drapery, so that they appear to move upward toward this jug. Yet he has balanced the composition by placing a bright yellow lemon at the left and by tipping the table down toward the lower left corner. Our next still life (see PLATE 5), by the famous Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, seems hardly \view this scene from almost directly above, the composition seems to radiate in all directions, almost like an explosion. Notice that Van Gogh has painted the tablecloth with short, thick strokes which seem to shoot out from the very center of the picture.

Finally, let us look at a painting by Henri Matisse (see PLATE 6). Here we see a number of still life objects, but no

table to support them. Matisse presents each form by itself, in a world of its own, rather than as part of a group of objects in a realistic situation. But he makes us feel that all these forms belong together in his picture simply by the way he has related them to one another in their shapes and colors.

Task 7

【原文】

Frank Lloyd Wright did not call himself an artist. He

called himself an architect. But the buildings he designed were works of art. He looked at the ugly square buildings around him, and he did not like what he saw. He wondered why people built ugly homes, when they could have beautiful ones.

Frank Lloyd Wright lived from 1869 to 1959. When he was young, there were no courses in architecture, so he went to work in an architect's office in order to learn how to design buildings. Soon he was designing buildings that were beautiful. He also wanted to make his buildings fit into the land

around them. One of the houses he designed is on top of a high hill. Other people built tall, square houses on hills, but Wright did not want to lose the beauty of the hill. He built the house low and wide.

Now other architects know how to design buildings to fit

into the landscape. Frank Lloyd Wright showed them how to do it.