- What English painters can you name?
- William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, John Constable are outstanding English painters. One of the greatest painters of Britain is Joseph Mallord William Turner. He often painted historical subjects, involving violence as well as shipwrecks and conflagrations, in which the individual figures appear as scarcely more than spots in a seething tide of humanity. He liked to accompany his works with the labels with quotations from poetry, often his own. Turner was fond of painting the pure movement of masses of colour - a kind of colour music, strikingly relevant to Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s. Turner's masterpieces are "The Slave Ship" and the "Rain, Steam and Speed". In the former the painter represented an incident common in the days of slavery, when entire human cargoes were thrown into the sea, either because of epidemics or to avoid arrest. The latter is one of the first paintings of a railway train, and its Romantic idealization of "progress" - man conquering nature by utilizing its force. It should be said that Turner's colour sense provided a revelation to the French Impressionists.
- Is the English school of painting proud of its portraitists?
- Yes, certainly. The greatest of them are Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. They created the portraits of celebrated lords and ladies. Their works are full of charm and elegance. Throughout the 18th century, portraiture was the most important genre of British painting. In portraiture an interest in extremes of mood found most eloquent expression in the work of Sir Thomas Lawrence. In the portraits "Richard Payne Knight" and "Pope Pius VII" the artist combined brilliant freedom of handling with dramatic expression and setting.
- Do you like American art?
- Yes, I do.
- How did it develop in the 20th century?
- At the beginning of the twentieth century American Art was still traditional. But artistic currents from Europe continued to flow. They resulted in the neorealist "Ash Gan" group, and in the modernist group of "291". An absolutely original American painter was Georgia O'Keffe. Throughout her long creative life, O'Keffe's imagery was derived from the great variety of objects surrounding her. In her "Blue and Green Music" the brushwork moved like visual music. After World War I some American artists turned to new forms of realism, focusing on the banality of American urban and rural life. One of the best of these American scene painters was Edward Hopper, He presents us with a bleak world made up of dirty streets, gloomy houses, comfortless rooms such as in the "Automate".
- What can you tell us about American cultural life?
- American culture has produced many outstanding writers, filmmakers, and musicians. The country's 19th-century literature was dominated by such names as Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Рое, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Henry James. Among the great American writers of the 20th century were Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The dramatists Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams. The poets Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Robert Frost were popular too.
- What is one of the USA most popular and internationally influential art forms?
- One of the country's most popular and internationally influential art forms has been the motion picture. American filmmakers such as Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg gained world fame for cinematic artistry.
- What music types have been developed in the USA?
- The country has developed several distinctive and highly influential types of popular music: jazz, the blues, country and western, and rock and roll. The most important performers have included Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane in jazz; Muddy Waters in the blues, Hank Williams in country and western, and Elvis Presley in rock and roll.