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CONTENTS
2 Russian
3 English
4 Vocabulary
5 Sample Sentences
6 Cultural Insight
# 25
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RUSSIAN
CONT'D OVER
ENGLISH
2. Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky is the brightest, most unique, and extremely interesting
phenomenon in the history of Russian, Germany, and the whole world's fine art; he was
an expressionist who put the beginning to abstract art.
3. The future artist was born to a wealthy family, since childhood he studied music, art, and
received an excellent education in law. But in 1896, instead of the offered position of a
law professor, he decided to give up a promising career and dedicate himself entirely to
art. He went on to study in Germany, which at the time was famous for its art schools. He
studied special features of painting, drawing, graphics, and composition, but having a
very extraordinary way of thinking, he often confronted the teachers that didn't
understand his style, finding the compositions in his paintings to be too arbitrary and the
colors too bright.
4. In the early 1900s Kandinsky traveled around Europe (Italy, France, Switzerland, and
others). At that time he was mostly painting landscapes, using color dissonances,
gradually replacing the images of reality with the play of color spots and streaks. He
addressed his interest to the Russian fairy tales and epic stories ("Russian Beauty in the
Landscape," "Russian Village on the River with the Rooks," and "The City").
CONT'D OVER
6. Beginning in 1915 he lived in Moscow. After the October events he got involved in
teaching, became one of the organizers of the Museum of Art in Petrograd, and became
head of the All-Russian Procurement Commission at the museum office. But the
ideological pressure that led to the creation of social realism forced him to leave for
Germany. He never returned to Russia afterwards.
7. In the 20's 30's the name Kandinsky became famous around the world and his
theoretical work, "A Point and a Line on the Plane," was published in many languages.
When fascism came to power and called abstract art "degenerated," Kandinsky moved to
France. In 1936, he participated in the "Abstract and Concrete" exhibitions (London) and
"Cubism and Abstract Art" (New York). Over the years of his life in France he had created
144 paintings, 250 water colors, and gouaches characterized by strict forms and more
mechanistic compositions. Works of the abstract art founder are the pride of the best
museums in the world.
VOCABULARY
изобразительн izobrazitel'noye
ое искусство iskusstvo fine art phrase
многообещающ monogoobesch
ий ayuschiy promising participle masculine
SAMPLE SENTENCES
CULTURAL INSIGHT
Recently, law enforcement authorities in Germany and Italy solved a carefully planned case
of fraudulent sales of paintings. In one of Moscow's museums appeared a previously
unknown painting by Kandinsky. Then it was exhibited at the gallery in Germany where it was
"bought out" by the scams and offered to a wealthy admirer of Italian art for three million
dollars. At the last moment the buyer decided to give the picture to an expertise. It took the
French experts a whole three months to check the "unknown Kandinsky" to understand that it