Text for question.

He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of an enemy which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a coconut. Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.

Orlando’s fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields, and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed. But since he was sixteen only, and too young to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal away from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with his blade. (…) His fathers had been noble since they had been at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing coronets on their heads. Were not the bars of darkness in the room, and the yellow pools which chequered the floor, made by the sun falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the window? Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body of a heraldic leopard. When he put his hand on the window-sill to push the window open, it was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly’s wing. Thus, those who like symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them, might observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body, and the well-set shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints of heraldic light, Orlando’s face, as he threw the window open, was lit solely by the sun itself. A more candid, sullen face it would be impossible to find. Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invokes the help of novelist or poet. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to office he must go, his scribe following after, till they reach whatever seat it may be that is the height of their desire. Orlando, to look at, was cut out precisely for some such career. The red of the cheeks was covered with peach down; the down on the lips was only a little thicker than the down on the cheeks. The lips themselves were short and slightly drawn back over teeth of an exquisite and almond whiteness. Nothing disturbed the arrowy nose in its short, tense flight; the hair was dark, the ears small, and fitted closely to the head. But, alas, that these catalogues of youthful beauty cannot end without mentioning forehead and eyes. Alas, that people are seldom born devoid of all three; for directly we glance at Orlando standing by the window, we must admit that he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his temples. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we rhapsodize. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore.

Virginia Woolf. Orlando – A biography, 1928 (adapted).

According to the text, decide whether the following statement are right (C) or wrong (E).

Text for question.

“took delivery” means received something that has already been paid for.

Barbara Dawson, director of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, remembers very clearly the day in 1997 when she climbed the steep stairs and entered Francis Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington. It had been left the way it was when he passed away, on April 28 1992, and it was a chaos of slashed canvases, paint-splashed walls, cloths, brushes, champagne boxes, and a large mirror. She stood and stared for a long time, in a kind of incredulity, “and actually it became quite beautiful.” She began to see “paths cut through it,” and details. “The last unfinished painting was on the easel when I went in there, and on the floor underneath the easel was a short article on George Michael, the singer, about how he liked to be photographed from one side. It was like looking into somebody’s mind”.

7 Reece Mews was tiny, and apart from the studio consisted of two rooms — a kitchen that contained a bath, and a living room that doubled as a bedroom. The studio had one skylight, and Bacon usually worked there in the mornings. He tried to paint elsewhere — in South Africa, for example, when he was visiting family, but couldn’t. (Too much light, was the rather surprising objection.) He liked the size and general frugality, too.

Dawson recognised that the studio was the making of Bacon’s art in a more profound sense than just being a comfortable space to paint in, and determined that it should not be dismantled. John Edwards, to whom Bacon had bequeathed Reece Mews, felt similarly, and after months of painstaking cataloguing by archaeologists, conservators and photographers, the Hugh Lane Gallery took delivery of the studio, in 1998. It was opened to the public in 2001.

What is visible now, in a climate-controlled corner of the gallery, a gracious neo-classical building on Parnell Square in Dublin, is in fact a kind of faithful “skin” of objects; the tables and chairs have all been returned to their original places, the work surfaces seem as cluttered as they were — but the deep stuff, the bedrock, has been removed and is kept in climate-controlled archival areas. In the end, there were 7,500 items — samples of painting materials, photographs, slashed canvasses, umpteen handwritten notes, drawings, books, champagne boxes.

Bacon was homosexual at a time when it was still illegal, and while he was open about his sexuality, his notes for prospective paintings refer to “bed[s] of crime]”, and his homosexuality was felt as an affliction, says Dawson. It wasn’t easy. The sense of guilt is apparent in his work, as well as his fascination with violence. “His collections of pictures, dead bodies, or depictions of violence — he’s not looking at violence from the classic liberal position”. It was all, concedes Dawson, accompanied by intellectual rigour, and an insistent attempt at objectivity — “he’s trying to detach from himself as well.”

Everything was grist, and in his studio even his own art fed other art. He returned to his own work obsessively, repeating and augmenting. And of course, he responded negatively — and violently — as well as positively; a hundred is a lot of slashed canvasses to keep around you when you’re working, especially when they are so deliberately slashed. In a way, all this might serve as a metaphor for the importance of our understanding of his studio as a whole.

Aida Edemarian. Francis Bacon: box of tricks. Internet: <www.theguardian.com> (adapted).

About the vocabulary the author uses in his text, decide whether the statement below are right (C) or wrong (E).

Text for question.

Barbara Dawson, director of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, remembers very clearly the day in 1997 when she climbed the steep stairs and entered Francis Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington. It had been left the way it was when he passed away, on April 28 1992, and it was a chaos of slashed canvases, paint-splashed walls, cloths, brushes, champagne boxes, and a large mirror. She stood and stared for a long time, in a kind of incredulity, “and actually it became quite beautiful.” She began to see “paths cut through it,” and details. “The last unfinished painting was on the easel when I went in there, and on the floor underneath the easel was a short article on George Michael, the singer, about how he liked to be photographed from one side. It was like looking into somebody’s mind”.

7 Reece Mews was tiny, and apart from the studio consisted of two rooms — a kitchen that contained a bath, and a living room that doubled as a bedroom. The studio had one skylight, and Bacon usually worked there in the mornings. He tried to paint elsewhere — in South Africa, for example, when he was visiting family, but couldn’t. (Too much light, was the rather surprising objection.) He liked the size and general frugality, too.

Dawson recognised that the studio was the making of Bacon’s art in a more profound sense than just being a comfortable space to paint in, and determined that it should not be dismantled. John Edwards, to whom Bacon had bequeathed Reece Mews, felt similarly, and after months of painstaking cataloguing by archaeologists, conservators and photographers, the Hugh Lane Gallery took delivery of the studio, in 1998. It was opened to the public in 2001.

What is visible now, in a climate-controlled corner of the gallery, a gracious neo-classical building on Parnell Square in Dublin, is in fact a kind of faithful “skin” of objects; the tables and chairs have all been returned to their original places, the work surfaces seem as cluttered as they were — but the deep stuff, the bedrock, has been removed and is kept in climate-controlled archival areas. In the end, there were 7,500 items — samples of painting materials, photographs, slashed canvasses, umpteen handwritten notes, drawings, books, champagne boxes.

Bacon was homosexual at a time when it was still illegal, and while he was open about his sexuality, his notes for prospective paintings refer to “bed[s] of crime]”, and his homosexuality was felt as an affliction, says Dawson. It wasn’t easy. The sense of guilt is apparent in his work, as well as his fascination with violence. “His collections of pictures, dead bodies, or depictions of violence — he’s not looking at violence from the classic liberal position”. It was all, concedes Dawson, accompanied by intellectual rigour, and an insistent attempt at objectivity — “he’s trying to detach from himself as well.”

Everything was grist, and in his studio even his own art fed other art. He returned to his own work obsessively, repeating and augmenting. And of course, he responded negatively — and violently — as well as positively; a hundred is a lot of slashed canvasses to keep around you when you’re working, especially when they are so deliberately slashed. In a way, all this might serve as a metaphor for the importance of our understanding of his studio as a whole.

Aida Edemarian. Francis Bacon: box of tricks. Internet: <www.theguardian.com> (adapted).

According to the information given in the text about Bacon’s personal life, his relationship with art, and his work, decide whether the statement below are right (C) or wrong (E).

Text for question.

Barbara Dawson, director of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, remembers very clearly the day in 1997 when she climbed the steep stairs and entered Francis Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington. It had been left the way it was when he passed away, on April 28 1992, and it was a chaos of slashed canvases, paint-splashed walls, cloths, brushes, champagne boxes, and a large mirror. She stood and stared for a long time, in a kind of incredulity, “and actually it became quite beautiful.” She began to see “paths cut through it,” and details. “The last unfinished painting was on the easel when I went in there, and on the floor underneath the easel was a short article on George Michael, the singer, about how he liked to be photographed from one side. It was like looking into somebody’s mind”.

7 Reece Mews was tiny, and apart from the studio consisted of two rooms — a kitchen that contained a bath, and a living room that doubled as a bedroom. The studio had one skylight, and Bacon usually worked there in the mornings. He tried to paint elsewhere — in South Africa, for example, when he was visiting family, but couldn’t. (Too much light, was the rather surprising objection.) He liked the size and general frugality, too.

Dawson recognised that the studio was the making of Bacon’s art in a more profound sense than just being a comfortable space to paint in, and determined that it should not be dismantled. John Edwards, to whom Bacon had bequeathed Reece Mews, felt similarly, and after months of painstaking cataloguing by archaeologists, conservators and photographers, the Hugh Lane Gallery took delivery of the studio, in 1998. It was opened to the public in 2001.

What is visible now, in a climate-controlled corner of the gallery, a gracious neo-classical building on Parnell Square in Dublin, is in fact a kind of faithful “skin” of objects; the tables and chairs have all been returned to their original places, the work surfaces seem as cluttered as they were — but the deep stuff, the bedrock, has been removed and is kept in climate-controlled archival areas. In the end, there were 7,500 items — samples of painting materials, photographs, slashed canvasses, umpteen handwritten notes, drawings, books, champagne boxes.

Bacon was homosexual at a time when it was still illegal, and while he was open about his sexuality, his notes for prospective paintings refer to “bed[s] of crime]”, and his homosexuality was felt as an affliction, says Dawson. It wasn’t easy. The sense of guilt is apparent in his work, as well as his fascination with violence. “His collections of pictures, dead bodies, or depictions of violence — he’s not looking at violence from the classic liberal position”. It was all, concedes Dawson, accompanied by intellectual rigour, and an insistent attempt at objectivity — “he’s trying to detach from himself as well.”

Everything was grist, and in his studio even his own art fed other art. He returned to his own work obsessively, repeating and augmenting. And of course, he responded negatively — and violently — as well as positively; a hundred is a lot of slashed canvasses to keep around you when you’re working, especially when they are so deliberately slashed. In a way, all this might serve as a metaphor for the importance of our understanding of his studio as a whole.

Aida Edemarian. Francis Bacon: box of tricks. Internet: <www.theguardian.com> (adapted).

According to the information given in the text about Bacon’s personal life, his relationship with art, and his work, decide whether the statement below are right (C) or wrong (E).