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.
According to Richard Kendall and T.J. Shackelford, the Self-portrait with a Straw Hat may not have anything to do with

选项 A、Van Gogh’s painting technique.
B、the symbolism of color.
C、the psychological analysis of the painter.
D、the painter’s aesthetic.

答案C

解析 根据题干中的人名Richard Kendall and T.J.Shackelford定位到第4段第5句。根据对段落结构的分析,可以发现,Richard Kendall和T.J.Shackelford的观点是与Risser不同的,而Richard Kendall和T.J.Shackelford的观点分散在第4段第4句到最后一句当中。仔细阅读这些句子,可以发现倒数第2句提到他们这一派不赞同梵高自画像与梵高的心理分析有关,由此可见,他们最不认同的应该是D的内容。
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