双语+MP3|美国学生艺术史31 真正的男子汉画家

 
萨金特在另外一面墙上画了许多圣徒和天使，画的中间是被钉十字架的基督。他用真金描绘这些人物的头部，基督的画像就像雕刻的塑像一样。看见这些画，人们一定会惊叹，一位肖像画家竟能画出如此富丽堂皇的大型壁画。如今，人们都慕名到波士顿公共图书馆欣赏这些壁画。如果去波士顿，我建议你也去看看这些画。 
31 REAL–MEN ARTISTS真正的男子汉画家
 
WHAT pictures do you like best? Do you like pictures of the Wild West? Pictures of the Indians with their horses and dogs and rolled–up tepees taking the trail to new hunting grounds? Pictures of cowboys with their six–shooters and lariats, riding the herd or roping broncos? Pictures of half–breed hunters with their fur caps and trusty rifles, making their way through a heavy snowstorm? Pictures of soldiers of the United States cavalry patrolling the Indian country to keep order and protect property? 
Are these the kinds of pictures you like? 
If they aren’t, I’ll be disappointed, for I like them very much. Even if they were painted by a poor painter, I’m afraid I’d like such pictures just because I can’t help liking Indians and cowboys and soldiers. 
Luckily, there was an American artist who painted such pictures very well. His name was Frederick Remington. Frederick Remington didn’t sit home in a studio and ask Indians to come and pose for him. He went out to the Wild West and painted them as he saw them living their daily lives. He wasn’t a “sissy” painter. Even if Frederick Remington had never written books about his life in the cowboy country, we should know by his paintings that he had lived there among real cowboys and Indians. 
At first Remington didn’t paint. He drew. For when he began to make pictures he was an illustrator. An illustrator’s job was to draw pictures in black and white for magazines anti books. He was something like a human camera, trained to put down on paper, with pen and ink, life in the West just as it was, so people in the East could know what it was like. 
Often illustrators do not become great painters, and at first Remington wasn’t a great painter. When he began to paint with colors instead of simply drawing with pen or pencil, he showed the cowboys and Indians all right, but the colors he used were too bright and glaring. Of course on the plains and bad lands of the West the colors that he saw were really bright and glaring in the brilliant sunlight and clear atmosphere. Gradually, however, his pictures became better paintings as he learned to use the bright colors better. His later pictures are really fine paintings, I think, and not just brightly colored illustrations. 
Frederick Remington didn’t paint the exciting happenings only, He liked to paint his Indians, for instance, as plain everyday Indian people and not to have them always dressed in feathers and warpaint. In other words, his pictures show us the real Indians, lazy or hard working, bad or good, dirty or clean, out hunting or at home on the reservation; and not just the picture book kind of Indians which you can see in a Wild West show or in the movies. His soldiers are not always dressed up for parade or marching forth to a stirring band, like picture book soldiers, but are real men, cooking their suppers over the camp–fire, guarding wagon trains, cleaning their horses. His cowboys are real cowboys working for their living, not just the sort of cowboys we see in the moving pictures. “Men with the bark on” is what Remington called these rough and ready men of the West. 
And as for horses! Frederick Remington, let me tell you, could paint horses that werereal horses. People aren’t all alike. Neither are horses. Frederick Remington’s horses aren’t just picture book horses any more than his Indians are picture book Indians. Each horse is a special horse, different from any other horse. They are stupid or bright, wicked or gentle, lazy or full of life, just as real horses are. 
Besides being a wonderful illustrator, a writer, and a good painter, Remington was a sculptor. He made statues of men on horseback that seem full of life and action. You can see one of these statues, a bronze cowboy on horseback, if you go to Philadelphia. It stands in Fairmount Park. 
 
No.31-1　THE PONY OF THE NORTHERN ROCKIES（《落基山北的小马》） 
REMINGTON（雷明顿　作） 
So, if you want to see what the real Wild West was like, not so many years ago, get hold of a book illustrated by Frederick Remington. You’ll really enjoy the pictures. 
Remington was an American painter who painted American people. So was a later painter named George Bellows. George Bellows also painted the kind of pictures I think you’ll like, only his pictures are of the eastern part of the country, especially in and about New York city. Bellows wasn’t a “sissy” any more than Remington. He was such a good baseball player on his college team that he almost became a professional ball player, but decided to be a painter instead. He always liked athletics. 
Some of his pictures show men and boys in swimming along the New York waterfront, some are of polo games and some very well–known ones are of boxing matches. George Bellows painted other pictures of quieter subjects. He painted some fine pictures of old ladies and little girls. 
He was an illustrator, too, as Remington was, but Bellows’s illustrations were made in a very different way. They were made first on smooth stone and then printed with ink on paper from the stone. This kind of picture is known as a lithograph. Bellows was an unusually fine lithographer. During the World War Bellows made a famous lithograph showing the English Red Cross nurse, Edith Cavell, who was shot by the enemy as a spy. 
One of Bellows’s well–known paintings is of the boxing match between Dempsey and Firpo for the heavy–weight championship of the world. Firpo was a South American boxer who was very strong. He was called the Wild Bull of the Pampas because of his tremendous strength. Once in the match the Wild Bull knocked Dempsey right through the ropes and down into the laps of the people looking on. But this didn’t seem to damage Dempsey much, for he finally won the match. Bellows’s picture shows Dempsey sailing out of the ring after Firpo’s powerful punch. The picture is very dark in some places and very bright in others, because all the light was turned on the ring like a big ceiling spotlight on the stage. The picture shows how well Bellows could paint furious action. 
Now you will also see that Bellows could paint a quiet picture. Look at the portrait of his mother, picture of his mother, is it? Yet the It isn’t very much like Whistler’s two mothers seem to be about the same age. Notice the dark and light in this picture. Bellows seemed to like to have some very dark parts and some very light parts in his paintings, and also in his lithographs. 
If you are a boy, probably you will like the boxing pictures best. If you are a girl, perhaps you’ll like the quieter pictures that Bellows painted. Whichever kind you prefer you can find among the works of George Bellows. 
George Bellows and Frederick Remington are just two of the many American artists that should be in a history book of art. I wish I could tell you about the other American painters, but to tell about them all would make this book very much too fat, and no one likes too fat a book. 
 
No.31-2　DEMPSEY AND FIRPO（《邓普西和菲尔波》）　BELLOWS（贝洛斯　作） 
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 
It would be fun to tell you of the artists who are still alive and painting pictures while you are growing up. I have hardly mentioned the wall paintings—mural paintings, we call them—that are being used more and more to decorate the rooms in new buildings of America. You remember those of Sargent in the Boston Public Library. 
 
No.31-3　BELLOWS MOTHER（《贝洛斯的母亲》）BELLOWS（贝洛斯　作） 
Courtesy of The University Prints 
Almost every large city in the United States now has good mural paintings in some of its buildings. If you live in a city, try to find out where these mural paintings are and then go to see them. They are very interesting. When you learn the name of the artist who painted them, see how much you can learn about his other paintings and about him. 
You can have fun on a rainy day making a scrap–book of American paintings and statues. Look for pictures of them in magazines and in advertisements. Often there are pictures of paintings there. American art isn’t mostly in the past. It’s being produced right now. along with new kinds of airplanes, automobiles, and sky–scrapers. Real artists are even painting pictures for magazine advertisements. Boys and girls like to collect things, and a collection you could be proud of would be a scrap–book of American Art. I know scrap–books are fun to make, because I’ve made them myself. I’m making one now. Try one, yourself, and get some fun out of all this art that is being produced in your country. 
And, if you like real–men artists, don’t forget Remington and Bellows.