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  3. Self-Portrait with Straw Hat(1887), a Van Gogh self-portrait done in Paris, is one of his most intriguing yet most neglected wor

Self-Portrait with Straw Hat(1887), a Van Gogh self-portrait done in Paris, is one of his most intriguing yet most neglected wor

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问题     Self-Portrait with Straw Hat(1887), a Van Gogh self-portrait done in Paris, is one of his most intriguing yet most neglected works. The artist’s gloomy eyes stare out from his face in half-profile, facing to the left, and the world-weary expression initially appears to support the view of critics such as James Risser, who explains Van Gogh’s self-portraits as a sustained search for identity.
    Self-Portrait with Straw Hat(1887)initially appears to comply with Risser’s evaluation. In this work, the painter depicted himself wearing a jumper of intense blue before a background done almost entirely in gray but with noticeable blurs of blue—most notably in the top right corner. Overall the painting appears to be unfinished, a hastily done portrait that the painter abandoned to create more lasting works.
    In its incomplete state we can precisely read "an unfinished life," and in the wild strokes of casual blue in the background and splashed across the artist’s garments we are instantly confronted with the sense of growing "more and more out of control."
    But is this an accurate evaluation? On the one hand, Risser seems to have legitimate cause for envisioning Van Gogh’s self-portrait as psychological self-analysis, a painting that "reveals an emotional intensity hiding beneath the surface". But is the chaotic surface effect of the blue in this painting actually a form of self-criticism, the artist’s own intense and emotional despair over his loss of control—or is it representative of an underlying aesthetic whose focus is not the painter himself? An intriguing alternative exists: Van Gogh may not have painted the self-portraits as psychoanalytical evaluations of himself, but instead merely as experiments in technique. The artist often stated that he painted himself only because he lacked other models, a view found in the critical work of both Richard Kendall and T.J. Shackelford. Perhaps, then, Van Gogh was not trying to learn about himself but about art as a whole while painting these portraits and hence we ought to read the self-portraits as a series of statements about art itself. The key to this analysis may be a careful exploration of the special color symbolism Van Gogh attached to the color blue. Unlike our everyday association of blue with melancholy or boredom, the artist imagined blue as a symbol for the infinite or the limitless. Such a view calls into question the idea that self-portraits such as Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Straw Hat(1887)were a psychological profile of the artist’s melancholy or despair. Instead, when we consider blue’s special symbolic role as the infinite in Van Gogh’s Paris self-portraits, we discover a new narrative describing the painter’s own aesthetic: his insistence that the future of art lay in expressive rather than realistic methods.
Who felt that the self-portrait showed "an unfinished life"?
选项 A、Van Gogh himself.
B、Risser’s opponents.
C、The author.
D、James Risser.
答案D
解析 第3段虽然没有明确写到这一段是谁的观点，但是，我们要知道本文前三段和第4段第2句都是Risser的观点，由此可知，本题应选D。本题虽然看起来只关于一个细节，但要正确解答本题，必须理清全文结构才行。另外，不要因为第4段第2句开头的On the other hand而误以为前一段的观点是与Risser观点相反的人提出的。
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