Unit 7Task 1

【答案】 A.

1) In a mental asylum.

2) He was a member of a committee which went there to show concern for the pertinents there.

3) They were cants behaving like humans.

4) He was injured in a bus accident and became mentally ill. 5) He spent the rest of his life in comfort. B.

painter, birds, animals, cats, wide, published, encouragement, A year or two, The Illustrated London News, cats' Christmas party, a hundred and fifty, world famous 【原文】

Dan Rider, a bookseller who loved good causes, was a member of a committee that visited mental asylums. On one visit he noticed a patient, a quiet little man, drawing cats. Rider looked at the drawings and gasped.

\\

Most people today have never heard of Louis Wain. But, when Rider found him in 1925, he was a household name.

\made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world,\. Wells in a broadcast appeal a month or two later. \do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.\

Before Louis Wain began drawing them, cats were kept strictly in the kitchen if they were kept at all. They were useful for catching mice and perhaps for keeping the maidservant company. Anyone else who felt affection for cats usually kept quiet about it. If a man admitted that he liked cats, he would be laughed at. The dog was the only domestic animal that could be called a friend.

Louis Wain studied art as a youth and became quite a successful newspaper and magazine artist. He specialized in birds and animals, including dogs, but never drew a cat till his wife was dying. They had not been married long, and during her illness a black-and-white cat called Peter used to sit on her bed. To amuse his wife, Louis Wain used to sketch and caricature the cat while he sat by her bedside. She urged him to show these-drawings to editors, fie was unconvinced, but wanted to humour her.

The first editor he approached shared his lack of enthusiasm. \would want to see a picture of a cat?\year or two later he showed them to the editor of The Illustrated London News, who suggested a picture of a cats' Christmas party across two full pages. Using his old sketches of Peter, Louis Wain produced a picture containing about a hundred and fifty cats, each one different from the rest. It took him a few days to draw, and it made him world famous.

For the next twenty-eight years he drew nothing but cats. He filled his house with them, and sketched them in all their moods. There was nothing subtle about his work. Its humour simply lay in showing cats performing human activities; they followed every new fashion from sea bathing to motoring. He was recognized, somewhat flatteringly, as the leading authority on the feline species. He became President of the National Cat Club and was eagerly sought after as a judge at cat shows.

Louis Wain's career ended abruptly in 1914, when he was seriously injured in a bus accident and became mentally ill. Finally, he was certified insane and put in an asylum for paupers.

After Dan Rider found him, appeals were launched and exhibitions of his work arranged, and he spent the rest of his life in comfort. He continued to draw cats, but they became increasingly strange as his mental illness progressed. Psychiatrists found them more fascinating than anything he had done when he was sane.

Task 2

【答案】 A.

1) Because he was always trying new things and new ways of doing things just like a young painter.

2) It didn’t look like her.

3) It was the only picture she knew that showed her as she really was.

4) People from the poorer parts of Paris, who were thin, hungry, tired, and sick. B. 1) F 2) T 3) F 4) T

C. 1881, 1973, Malaga, Spain, ninety-one years

D. fifteen, nineteen, twenty-three, colors, darker, change, soft-colored, strange, shape, human face and figure, strange 【原文】

Pablo Picasso was born in 1881. So probably you are wondering why we call him \old. But even at that age, he was still painting like a young painter.

For that reason, we have called him the \painter. Young people are always trying new things and new ways of doing things. They welcome new ideas. They are restless and are never satisfied. They seek perfection. Older people often fear change. They know what they can do best, riley prefer to repeat their successes, rather than risk failure. They have found their own place in life and don't like to leave it. We know what to expect from them.

When he was over ninety, this great Spanish painter still lived his life like a young man. He was still looking for new ideas and for new ways to use his artistic materials.

Picasso's figures sometimes face two ways at once, with the eyes and nose in strange places. Sometimes they are out of shape or broken. Even the colors are not natural. The title of the picture tells us it is a person, but it may look more like a machine.

At such times Picasso was trying to paint what he saw with his mind as well as with his eyes. He put in the side of the face as well as the front. He painted the naked body and the clothes on it at the same time. He painted in his own way. He never thought about other people's opinions.

Most painters discover a style of painting that suits them and keep to it, especially if people like their pictures. As the artist grows older his pictures may change, but not very much. But Picasso was like a man who had not yet found his own style. He was still looking for a way to express his own restless spirit.

The first thing one noticed about him was the look in his large, wide-open eyes. Gertrude Stein, a famous American writer who knew him when he was young, mentioned this hungry look, and one can still see it in pictures of him today. Picasso painted a picture of her in 1906, and the story is an interesting one.

According to Gertrude Stein, she visited the painter's studio eighty or ninety times

while he painted her picture. While Picasso painted they talked about everything in the world that interested them. Then one day Picasso wiped out the painted head though he had worked on it for so long. \I look at you I can't see you any more!\

Picasso went away for the summer. When he returned, he went at once to the picture left in the comer of his studio. Quickly he finished the face from memory. He could see the woman's face more clearly in his mind than he could see it when she sat in the studio in front of him.

When people complained to him that the painting of Miss Stein didn't look like her, Picasso would reply, \bad. She'll have to look like the picture.\But thirty years later, Gertrude Stein said that Picasso's painting of her was the only picture she knew that showed her as she really was

Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, a pleasant, quiet town. His father was a painter and art teacher who gave his son his first lessons in drawing.

Young Pablo did badly at school. He was lazy and didn't listen to what the teachers were saying. He had confidence in himself from the beginning. But it was soon clear that the boy was an artist and deserved the best training he could get. Not even his earliest drawings look like the work of a child.

One can say that Picasso was born to be a painter. He won a prize for his painting when he was only fifteen. He studied art in several cities in Spain. But there was no one to teach him all he wanted to know. When he was nineteen he visited Paris.

Paris was then the center of the world for artists. Most painters went there sooner or later to study, to see pictures, and to make friends with other painters. Everything that was new and exciting in the world of painting happened there. When he was twenty-three, Picasso returned there to live, and lived in France for the rest of his life.

He was already a fine painter. He painted scenes of town life—people in the streets and in restaurants, at horse races and bull fights. They were painted in bright colors and were lovely to look at.

But life was not easy for him. For several years he painted people from the poorer parts of the city. He painted men and women who were thin, hungry, tired, and sick. His colors got darker. Most of these pictures were painted in blue, and showed very clearly what the artist saw and felt. The paintings of this \and despair.

Picasso did not have to wait long for success. As he began to sell his pictures and become recognized as a painter, his pictures took on a warmer look. At the same time he began to paint with more and more freedom. He began to see people and places as simple forms or shapes. He no longer tried to make his pictures true to life.

The results at first seemed strange and not real. The pictures were difficult to understand. His style of painting was known as Cubism, from the shape of the cube. Many people did not like this new and sometimes frightening style. But what great paintings give us is a view of life through one man's eyes, and every man's view is different.

Some of Picasso's paintings are rich, soft-colored, and beautiful. Others are strange with sharp, black outlines. But such paintings allow us to imagine things for ourselves. They can make our own view of the world sharper. For they force us to say to ourselves, \

Birds, places, and familiar objects play a part in Picasso's painting. But, when one thinks of him, one usually thinks of the way he painted the human face and figure. It is both beautiful and strange. Gertrude Stein wrote, \body--these are all that exist for Picasso. The souls of people do not interest him. The