PASSAGE 3 – Questions 21-30

In April 1870, an art exhibit opened in Paris featuring famous and priceless works of art. However, at the time, no one knew that these paintings would one day be considered masterpieces. The paintings and the painters were virtually unknown at the time and would remain that way for several years.

In the nineteenth century, French art was dominated by the Academy of Fine Arts. Every year the academy held an art show called Le Salon. In 1863, the Academy rejected one of the paintings of Edouard Manet and a group of other independent artists organized their own show, which they called Salon des Refuses (Salon of the Rejected) opened on April 15,1874. A newspaper critic named louis Leroy visited the gallery and was not pleased with what he saw. Impression: Sunset – a painting of boats in a harbor at dawn by Claude Monet particularly enraged him. Leroy wrote that this piece, and in fact most of the pieces in the show, looked like “impressions” – a term for a preliminary, unfinished sketch made before a painting is done. Leroy’s newspaper review was jokingly called “The Exhibition of the Impressionists.” Within a few years of Leroy’s review, the term Impressionists had clearly stuck, not as a term of derision but as a badge of honor, and a new movement was born.

The Impressionist movement included the French painters Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, and the American painter Mary Cassatt. The techniques and standards employed within the Impressionist movement varied widely, and though the artists shared a core of values, the real glue which bound the movement together was its spirit of rebellion and independence. This spirit is clear when you compare Impressionist paintings with traditional French paintings of the time. Traditional painters tended to paint rather serious scenes from history and mythology. Many Impressionist paintings feature pleasant scenes of urban life, as shown in Renoir’s luminous painting Luncheon of the Boating Party. Renoir once said that paintings should be “... likable, joyous, and pretty.” He said, “There are enough unpleasant things in this world. We don’t have to paint them as well.”

The Impressionists delighted in painting landscapes (except for Edgar Degas, who preferred painting indoor scenes, and Mary Cassatt, who mainly painted portraits of mothers and children). [A] Traditional painters, too, painted landscapes, but their landscapes tended to be somber and dark. [B] The Impressionists’ landscapes sparkle with light. [C] Impressionists insisted that their works be “true to nature.” [D] When they painted landscapes, they carried their paints and canvases outdoors in order to capture the ever-changing light. Traditional painters generally made preliminary sketches outside but worked on the paintings themselves in their studios.

“Classic” Impressionist paintings are often easy to spot because of the techniques used by the painters. For example, colors should be dropped pure on the canvas instead of getting mixed on the palette. Most Impressionists mixed their paints as little as possible. The traditional technique at the time was to make or outlines of the subject before painting them. Unlike traditional painters, Impressionists applied one layer of paint on top of the last one without waiting for the paint to dry. These techniques created paintings that seemed strange and unfinished to the general public when they were first painted, but are much loved in our time.

Câu 1: The word ‘virtually’ in the passage is closest in meaning to the word