Art History and Movements

‘Influential artist’ means

Directions: The passage is followed by five questions. Read the passage carefully and answer the question that follows. For the question four probable answers bearing options (1), (2), (3) and (4) are given. Only one out of those is correct. You have to choose the correct answer.

Pablo Picasso once boasted, “Give me a museum and I'll fill it.” And the artist's words have proved true, as a museum filled with his work re-opened in Paris. But the renovation of this exhibition has certainly not been a painter's dream with repeated delays leaving fans waiting five years to see one of the world's largest collections of this influential artist's work.

What has not been a painter’s dream?

Directions: The passage is followed by five questions. Read the passage carefully and answer the question that follows. For the question four probable answers bearing options (1), (2), (3) and (4) are given. Only one out of those is correct. You have to choose the correct answer.

Pablo Picasso once boasted, “Give me a museum and I'll fill it.” And the artist's words have proved true, as a museum filled with his work re-opened in Paris. But the renovation of this exhibition has certainly not been a painter's dream with repeated delays leaving fans waiting five years to see one of the world's largest collections of this influential artist's work.

What do you infer from the passage?

Directions: Answer the question based on the following passage.

Matisse is the best painter ever at putting the viewer at the scene. He's the most realistic of all modern artists, if you admit the feel of the breeze as necessary to a landscape and the smell of oranges as essential to a still life. "The Casbah Gate" depicts the well-known gateway Bab el Aassa, which pierces the southern wall of the city near the sultan's palace. With scrubby coats of ivory, aqua, blue, and rose delicately fenced by the liveliest gray outline in art history, Matisse gets the essence of a Tangier afternoon, including the subtle presence of the bowaab, the sentry who sits and surveys those who pass through the gate.

All of the following can be true of Claude', except

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
Naturally thus, when the Italian influence wore itself out, and the Fontainebleau school gave way to a more purely national art; when France had definitely entered into her Italian heritage and had learned the lessons that Holland and Flanders had to teach her as well; when, in fine, the art of the modern world began, it was an art of grammar, of rhetoric. Certainly up to the time of Géricault painting in general held itself rather pedantically aloof from poetry. Claude, Chardin, what may be called the illustrated vers de société of the Louis Quinze painters — of Watteau and Fragonard — even Prudhon, did little to change the prevailing color and tone. Claude's art is, in manner, thoroughly classic. His personal influence was perhaps first felt by Corot. He stands by himself, at any rate, quite apart. He was the first thoroughly original French painter, if indeed one may not say he was the first thoroughly original modern painter. He has been assigned to both the French and Italian schools — to the latter by Gallophobist critics, however, through a partisanship which in aesthetic matters is ridiculous; there was in his day no Italian school for him to belong to. The truth is that he passed a large part of his life in Italy and that his landscape is Italianate. The great English painter, Mr. Ruskin says that Claude could paint a small wave very well, and acknowledges that he affected a revolution in art, which revolution “consisted mainly in setting the sun in heavens.” Mr. George Moore observes of Mr. Ruskin that his unusual attrition of Mr. Whistler — “the lot of critics” being “to be remembered by what they have failed to understand” — “will survive his finest prose passage.” I am not sure about Mr. Whistler. Contemporaries are too near for a perfect critical perspective. But assuredly Mr. Ruskin's failure to perceive Claude's point of view — to perceive that Claude's aim and Stanfield's, say, were quite different; that Claude, in fact, was at the opposite pole from the botanist and the geologist whom Mr. Ruskin’s “reverence for nature” would make of every landscape painter — is a failure in appreciation than to have shown which it would be better for him as a critic never to have been born. It seems hardly fanciful to say that the depreciation of Claude by Mr. Ruskin, who is a landscape painter himself, using the medium of words instead of pigments, is, so to speak, professionally unjust.

With respect to which of the following painters does the passage provide the least support for the assertion that the painter was influenced by the contemporary art of France?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question.

In the past century Irish painting has changed from a British - influenced lyrical tradition to an art that evokes the ruggedness and roots of an Irish Celtic past. At the turn of the twentieth century Irish painters, including notables Walter Frederick Osborne and Sir - William Orpen, looked elsewhere for influence.
Osborne’s exposure to “Plein Air” painting deeply impacted his stylistic development; and Orpen allied himself with a group of English artists, while at the same time participating in the French avant - garde experiment, both as painter and teacher.
However nationalist energies were beginning to coalesce, reviving interest in Irish culture and Irish visual arts. Beatrice Elvery’s Aire (1907), a landmark achievement, merged the devotional simplicity of fifteenth - century Italian painting with the iconography of Ireland’s Celtic past, linking the history of Irish Catholicism with the still - nascent Irish republic. And, although also captivated by the French Plein Air school, Sir John Lavery invoked the mythology of his native land for a 1928 commission to paint the central figure for the bank note of the new Irish Free State. Lavery chose as this figure Aire, with her arm on a Celtic harp, the national symbol of independent Ireland. In Irish painting from about 1910, memories of Edwardian romanticism coexisted with a new sense of realism, exemplified by the paintings of Paul Henry and Sean Keating, a student of Orpen’s realism also crept in to the work of Edwardian’s Lavery and Orpen, both of whom made paintings depicting World War I, Lavery with a distanced Victorian nobility, Orpen closer to the front, revealing a more sinister and realistic vision. Meanwhile, counterpoint to the Edwardians and realists came Jack B. Yeats, whose travels throughout the rugged and more authentically Irish west led him to depict subjects ranging from street scenes in Dublin to boxing matches and funerals. Fusing close observations of Irish life and icons with an Irish identity in a new way, Yeats changed the face of Irish painting and became the most important Irish artist of his century.