The official LSAT Prep Test 140

Section 4

African American painter Sam Gilliam (b.1933) is internationally recognized as one of the foremost painter assoiciated with the Washington Color School, a group of Color Field style painters practicing in Washington, D.C, during the 1950s and 1960s. The Color Field style was an important development in abstract art that emerged after the rise of abstrant expressionism. It evolved from complex and minimally representional abstractions in the 1950s to totally nonrepresentational, simplified works of bright colors in the 1960s.

Grilliam’s participation in the Color Field movement was motivated in part by his reaction to the art of his African American contemporaires, much of which was strictly representational and was intended to convey expolicit political statements. Gilliam found their approch to be aesthetically conservative: the message was unmistakable, he felt, and there was little room for the expression of subtlety or anbiguity or more importanyly, the exploration of new artistic territory through experimentation and innovation. For example, one of his contemporaries worked with collage assembling disparate bits of images from popular magazines into loosely structured compositions that depicted the period’s political issues-themes such as urban life, the rural South, and African American music. Though such art was quite popular with the general public, Gilluam was impatient with its stratightforward, literal approach to representation. In its place he sought an artistic form that was more expressive than a painted figure or a political slogan, more evocative of the complexity of human experience in general, and of the African American experience in particular. In this he represented a view that was then rare among African American artists.

Gilliam’s highly experimental paintings epitomized his refusal to conform to the public’sc expectation that African American artists produce explicitly politcal art. His early experiments included paint onto stained canvases and folding canvases over onto themselves. Then around 1965 Gilliam became the first painter to introduce the idea if the unsupported canvas. Partially inspired by the sight of neighbors hanging laudrry on clotheslines, Gilliam began to drape huge pieces of loose canvas along floorsC and fold them up and down walls, even suspending them from ceilings, giving them a third dimension and therefore a sculptureal quality. These efforts demonstrate a sensitivity to the texture of daily experience, as well as the ability to generate thesion by juxtaposing conceptual opposites-such as surface and depth or chaos and control-to form a cohesive whole. In this way, Gilliam helped advance the notion that the deepest, hardest-to-capture emotion and tensions of being African American could not be represented directly, but were expressed more effectively through the creation of moods that would allow these emotions and tensions to be felt by all audiences.

1. In the oassage, the author is primarily concerned with
A) describing the motivation behind and nature of an artist’s work
B) describing the political themes that permeate an artist’s work
C) describing the evolutiob of an artistms style over a period of time
D) demonstration that a certain artist’s views were rate among African American artists
E) demonstrating that a certaiob artist was able to transecend his technical limitations

2. Which one of the following would come closest to exemplifying the characteristics of Gilliam’s work as described in the pasage?
A) a brightly colored painting carefully portraying a man dressed in work clothes and holding a shoveel in his hands
B) a large, wrinkled canvas painted with soft, blended colors and overlaid with glued-on newspaper photographs depicting was scenes
C) a painted abstract caricature of a group of jazz musician waiting to perform
D) a long unframed canvas painted with images of the sea and clouds and hung from a balcony to simulate the unfurling of sails
E) a folded and crumbled canvas with many layerw of colorful drippled and splashed painted interwoven with one another

3. The author mentions a collage artist in the second paragraph primarily to
A) exemplify the style of art of the Washington Color School
B) point out the cause of the animosity between representational artists and abstact artists
C) establish that representational art was more popular with the general public than abstract art was
D) illustrate the kind of art that Gilliam was reacting against
E) show why Gilliam’s art was primarily concerned with political issues

4. The passage most strongly suggests that Gilliam’s attitude toward the strictly representational art of his contemporaries is which one of the following?
A) derisive condescension
B) open dissatisfaction
C) whimsical dismissal
D) careful neutrality
E) mild approval

5. The passage says all of the following except:
A) Draping and folding canvases gives them a sculptural quality.
B) Gilliam refused to satisfy the public’s expectations concerning what African American art ought to address.
C) Gilliam’s view on explicitly political art were rare among African American artists.
D) The color Field style involoved experimentation more than Gilliam believed the art of his African American contemporaries did.
E) Everyday images such as laundry hanging out are most likely to give artists great inspiration.

6. The passage suggests that Gilliam would be likely to agree with which one of the following statements?
A) Artists need not be concerned with aesthetic restrictions of any sort.
B) The images portrayed in paintings, whether representational or not, should be inspired by real-life images.
C) Artists ought to produce art that addresses the political issues of the period.
D) The Color Field style offers artists effective ways to express the complexity of human experience.
E) The public’s expectations concerning what kind of art a certain group of artists produces should be a factor in that artist’s work

 

 

 

 

 

 다음은 위 지문을 Chatgpt에게 정리해달라고 했어요.

Gilliam의 주요 특징:

• Color Field movement의 일원으로, 선명한 색상과 단순화된 형태 활용
• 초기엔 캔버스를 얼룩지게 칠하거나 접는 방식 실험
• 1965년경, Unsupported canvas라는 개념 도입
  → 캔버스를 천처럼 벽과 천장에 늘어뜨려 회화에 3차원 조각적 요소 추가

Gilliam의 미술관:

• 정치적 표어 대신, 모호함과 감정의 복합성을 통해 아프리칸 아메리칸 경험 표현
• 표면 vs 깊이, 혼돈 vs 통제 같은 개념적 대조를 통해 긴장감과 새로운 감각 창출

Expression: 

• Color Field style : 색면 추상 스타일
• nonrepresentational : 비구상적인
• explicit political statements : 명확한 정치적 메시지
• evocative of : ~을 떠올리게 하는, 불러일으키는
• unsupported canvas : 지지대 없이 천처럼 드리운 캔버스
• juxtaposing conceptual opposites : 개념적 반대 개념의 병치
• epitomize : 전형적으로 보여주다
• subtlety or ambiguity : 미묘함 혹은 모호함
• aesthetic conservatism : 미적 보수성