Answer the questions alongside the text. 1 What does the word

Answer the questions alongside the text. 1 What does the word profound here mean: a) strong? b) weak? 2 Think of a Russian word that sounds similar to banal. 3 What does the word elusive mean here: a) необъяснимая? b) ускользающая? 4 Label the pictures: a) in dots. b) in strokes. 5 What do you normally see in a landscape? 6 Does shapes here mean: a) forms of something that you see? b) a combination of qualities and features that something has? 7 Think of the Russian word that sounds similar to elegance. Seurats Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte is one of those rare works of art that stands alone; its transcendence is instinctively recognised by everyone. What makes this transcendence so mysterious is that the theme of the work is not some profound emotion or momentous event, but the most banal of workaday scenes: Parisians enjoying an afternoon in a local park. Yet we never seem to fathom its elusive power. Stranger still, when he painted it, Seurat was a mere 25 (with only seven more years to live), a young man with a scientific theory to prove; this is hardly the recipe for success. His theory was optical: the conviction that painting in dots, known as pointillism or divisionism, would produce a brighter colour than painting in strokes. Seurat spent two years painting this picture, concentrating painstakingly on the landscape of the park before focusing on the people; always their shapes, never their personalities. Individuals did not interest him, only their formal elegance. There is no untidiness in Seurat; all is beautifully balanced. The park was quite a noisy place: a man blows his bugle, children run around, there are dogs. Yet the impression we receive is of silence, of control, of nothing disordered. I think it is this that makes La Grande Jatte so moving to us who live in such a disordered world: Seurat39;s control. There is an intellectual clarity here that sets him free to paint this small park with an astonishing poetry. Even if the people in the park are pairs or groups, they still seem alone in their concision of form alone but not lonely. No figure encroaches on anothers space: all coexist in peace. This is a world both real and unreal a sacred world. We are often harried by lifes pressures and its speed, and many of us think at times: Stop the world, I want to get off! In this painting, Seurat has stopped the world,quot; and it reveals itself as beautiful, sunlit, and silent it is Seurat39;s world, from which we would never want to get off.