【分析解答题】

Questions 40-50In the years leading up to the First World War, the realist tradition in the United Stateswas given new life within the ranks of the so-calledAshcan School, a term that looselydescribes a group of artists in New York who favored, as the name implies, commonplace subjects, even ones that emphasized the seedy aspects of daily life. In an era when the5 United States was shifting from an agricultural to an industrially based economy, artiststurned to the vitality of the city for their themes, sometimes documenting the lives of thenation’s urban inhabitants with a literalness that shocked viewers accustomed to the blandgeneralizations of academic art. Thus, the first modernAmerican revolution in painting inthe early twentieth century was not away from, but toward, realism.The developments toward realism and new pictorial subject matter introduced by this revolution are explained in part by the fact that the academic spirit had become anathemato many young painters by the beginning of the twentieth century, when the professionalsurvival of an artist was largely contingent on membership in the NationalAcademy ofDesign, theAmerican equivalent of the FrenchAcademy ofAits. The NationalAcademyofDesign perpetuated the Traditions of ftp FrenchAcademy, such as annual juried exhibitions.Although it merged with the more tolerant Society ofAmericanArtists in1907, it remained steadfastly intolerant of new developments.At the same time, important venues in New York, particularlyAlfred Stteglitz’s galleryknown as 291 and* in 1913, the gigantic exhibition of modern art known as theArmory20 Show, introducedEuropean modernists toAmerican audiences and nurtured a numberofAmerican artists committed not to realism but to experimental artDuring the 1930’s,the country’s focus turned inward, giving rise to new varieties of realist art based onintrinsicallyAmerican themes. These were practiced by the so-called Regionalists, whorecorded the rural lire of the Midwest, and the more politically engaged Social Realists,who documented the social consequences of extreme economic change.Also a fertileperiod forAmerican photography, the era before the Second World War witnessed the development of photojournalism, as well as social documentary and advertising photography. What aspect of twentieth-century art in the United States does the passage mainly discuss

A、The realistic representation of urban life in the years before the First World War
B．he limitations of early twentieth-century academic art
C．The development of realism from the early twentieth century to the Second World War
D．The influence ofEuropean art onAmerican an between the First and the Second World Wars