Arts. Trends in Arts. Art Museums and Galleries. Great masters.

The arts are a vast subdivision of culture, composed of many endeavors (artforms) united by their employment of the human creative impulse. The term " art" usually refers only to the visual arts as an abbreviation of creative art or fine art.

The UK has a long history of excellence in the arts, patronizing them and setting the tone and style from early modern times to the Victorian era. The earliest visual arts in Britain were mostly Scandinavian wood carvings and ornamentations on ordinary objects. Dec­orative arts were particularly notable in early Christian Ireland through Celtic metal-working techniques, stone carvings and exquisitely decorated huge stone crosses. Painting was confined to illuminated manuscripts – bright and exactingly de­tailed miniature paintings in prayer books.

During the Middle Ages artists were mostly busy with decorating the massive cathedrals and local churches not experiencing the full flowering of the baroque era. In early modern times portrait painting became important with mostly for­eigners as noted artists, such as German artist Hans Holbein the Younger and Flemish painter Sir Anthony van Dyck. English artists came to excel at miniature painting in the 17th century, but by the 18th century a distinctive British style began to emerge tending to be brighter and livelier than the darker European canvases and more reminis­cent of the classical world of the Greeks and Romans. The etchings and paintings of W. Hogarth, the polished and elegant portraits of Sir J. Reynolds, T. Gainsborough and G. Romney, the artworks of G. Hamilton and J. Flaxman became enormously popular for they depicted satirical scenes from ordinary life, natural land- and seascapes and praised the values of order, logic, and propor­tion.

During the Victorian era scores of artists created specifically for mid­dle-class tastes depicting characters, situations, and scenes familiar or interesting to them, often being quite trite and ordinary. Such artists as Sir E. H. Landseer, F. Leighton, W. P. Frithand Sophie Anderson became noted for their scenes from everyday life featuring animals and wildlife, sweet children, mythological and historical subjects and large, busy canvases made in the popular style known as genre painting. In the 19th century in reaction to Victorian art styles and middle-class materialism with its concern for worldly objects the romanticism movement sought to make art more emo­tional. The hallmarks of romantic artists were exotic places, the beauties and forces of nature and fascination with the Middle Ages seen in the landscapes of J. Constable and J.M.W. Turner. Toward the end of the Victorian era, art nouveau developed as a decorative style with strong elements of fantasy borrowing motifs from sources as varied as Japanese prints, Gothic architecture, W. Blake’s symbolic imaginative illustrations influencing many art forms as well as architecture and interior design

The 20th century British art gave the world a war artist Paul Nash with his scenes of landscapes and war battles, Sir Stanley Spencer with biblical themes and the unique style of Graham Sutherland’s landscape painting. In all, contemporary art is marked by questioning the nature of art accompanied by experimentation and innovation withthe resulting work varying in content, form and production. The need to experiment is met by the new materials and tools made available by technological advance – plastics, lasers, new photographic techniques, computer technologies, and the communications media. Modern art trends, such as fusion, conceptual art, body art, environmental art, correspondence art, performance art and pop art suggest alternative contexts for art, promoting hybrid art forms and access to a wider audience. In their evocative and reflexive pieces, modern artist experiment with sensory awareness analyzing the meshing of the personal with the political, environmental and social experiences.

Among the constellation of outstanding British masters the following still come out as the most influential and world-renowned: Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723—1792)as one of the outstanding portraitists impressivein form design and pictorial rhythm. Many of his portraits are originally composed in decorative pattern and organised in light and space arrangements being honest and effective in their expression of the sitter, e. g. Dr Johnson and Admiral Keppel; the colourist Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), who has had few rivals among English painters, famous for the elegance, an extreme delicacy and refinement of his portraits and the particular discovery of an art form in which the sitters and the background merge into a single entity, the best works, painted in clear and transparent tone, in a colour scheme where blue and green predominate, being “ Road through Wood, with Boy Resting and Dog ”, “ The Wood Gatherers ”, “The Market Cart”, “The Blue Boy ” and “The Morning Walk”; and the foremost English landscapist, John Constable (1776-1837) with his “ The Haywain ”, “ Dedham Lock and Mill ” and “ The Cornfield ” renowned for the luxurious meadows, distant horizons, picturesque villages and above all the everchanging sky as the key notes, the standards of scale and potential vehicles for human emotions.

Britain is world famous for its outstanding art galleries and spectacular museums, most of which are located in London: the National Gallery renowned for its extensive and diverse collections of British and European paintings dating from the 13th century to modern times; the National Portrait Gallery with its fascinat­ing display of about 10, 000 portraits of famous British historic figures dating from the 14th century; the Tate Gallery housing a vast collection of both British and European artworks from the past two centuries; the Victoria and Albert Museum featuring one of the world's largest collections of fine and applied arts, from jewelry, clocks and pottery to fabrics, furniture and musical instruments; Madame Tussaud's unique collection of life-size wax figures of fa­mous people. Several museums and galleries of note located outside London are: the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at Oxford University and the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University containing diverse collections of rare art and relics; the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery containing one of the world's finest collections of Pre-Raphaelite art; the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh concentrating on fine Euro­pean paintings dating from the Renaissance, including many Scottish paint­ings; the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum with an excellent collection ranging from ancient weapons and objects to 17th-century Dutch paintings and works by French masters. The National Museum of Wales in Cardiff and the Ulster Museum in Belfast focus on Welsh and Irish life, history, and culture with their diverse collection that mix the arts, history, and sciences.

I. Match the English word-combinations with their Ukrainian equivalents:

II. Find in the text the English equivalents for the following phrases and collocations:

- види зображувального мистецтва

- різьба по дереву та камінню

- бути неперевершеним у малюванні мініатюр

- вишукано декорований

- змішані види мистецтва

- воскові фігури у натуральну величину

- надзвичайна вишуканість і

витонченість

- декоративний візерунок

- чарівна виставка портретів

- злиття натурщика із художнім тлом

- види прикладного мистецтва

- сузір’я видатних майстрів

III. Translate the sentences into English:

1. У ранішньо-християнський період малювання обмежувалося орнаментованими манускриптами – яскравими та надзвичайно деталізованими мініатюрами у молитвениках. 2. Сучасні мистецькі галереї та музеї Британії містять величезні та унікальні колекції, що варіюються від старовинних полотен Європейський майстрів до рідкісних зібрань кераміки, тканин, зброї та інших реліквій. 3. Течія романтизму, намагаючись зробити мистецтво емоційнішим, зробило своїми символами красоту та силу природи та захоплення епохою середньовіччя, запозичуючи елементи та мотиви з різноманітних джерел, здійснивши величезний вплив на численні мистецькі форми. 4. Відмінний британський стиль почав виникати у 18-му столітті, відрізняючись від європейських суворих полотен своєю яскравість та життєвістю, більше нагадуючи класичну творчість греко-римського світу.

IV. Answer the questions with reference to the text:

1. What art forms are demonstrative of the earliest period of art development in Great Britain?

2. When did the distinctive English art style begin to develop, what were its main features and who were its outstanding representatives?

3. What were the reasons for the 19-th century romanticism movement development? What were its hallmarks?

4. What is typical of the 20^th and 21^st centuries’ trends in art? What are their key-notes and what are they provoked by?

5. What is your favourite art trend? Which of the British museums and art galleries would you personally like to visit? Substantiate your answer.

V. Work with an explanatory monolingual dictionary of English and find as many synonyms and antonyms (if possible) for the following words:

creative, adj.

- pattern, n.

- excellence, n

- relic, n

- display (vt., n.)

- renowned, adj.

- contemporary, adj.

- sensory, adj.

- hallmark, n.

- trite, adj.

- excel, vt.

- fascination, n.