2014年12月英语四级听力备考练习4
听力音频点击下载
听力材料：
American Masters at the Phillips Collection
More than 200 art works by some of America's bestartists have returned home to a museum inWashington, D.C. The paintings had been travelingto shows around the world for the last four years.Now they are on exhibit at the Phillips Collectionagain. Mario Ritter reports.
The exhibit is called "Made in the USA: American Masters from The Phillips Collection." Itincludes the work of more than 100 American artists. All the paintings were created between1850 and about 1970.
Museum founder Duncan Phillips collected the artwork from the end of World War l until hisdeath in 1966.
"This show is really an opportunity to bring out artists who are under-recognized."
"Egg Beater No. 4, 1928" by Stuart DavisThat is exhibit organizer Susan Frank. She saysDuncan Philips bought the works at a time when European artists were more in demand.
"He was determined that he would dedicate this museum to living American artists and lift upAmerican art out of obscurity and give it the same presence that European works were givenby his contemporary collectors and other museums."
She says 80 percent of the art in the Philips Collection is American.
The earliest works date from the beginning of the late 19th century and include paintings bysuch famous artists as Winslow Homer and Arthur B. Davies. The exhibit ends withextraordinary examples of Post-War Abstract Expressionism. The art of this final period usescolor and forms not to represent objects but to show emotion and creativity.
Susan Frank says Duncan Phillips often developed a personal relationship with the artists whoseworks he collected. Sometimes that relationship included financial support.
"Most well-known of course is his engagement with the abstract American artist Arthur Dovewhose work he discovered in the mid-1920s."
Duncan Phillips lent his support to many immigrant artists as well. Susan Frank says heconsidered their cultural differences as something that expanded the American experience.
"Phillips always believed and championed American art as including all of the world because somany artists were immigrants who came here from being foreign-born, who brought theircultural aesthetics with them and synthesized them with their American experience. Hecelebrated their approach to their American experience as being something that enriched us."
The museum is hoping that the exhibit will excite people about the wide mix of American art inthe first half of the 20th century. It also seeks to educate people about how Duncan Phillipshelped lift American modern art to the level of European masterworks of the same time.
页:
[1]