GRE 2017

Think & Learn GRE

READING PRINCIPLES
CONCEPT PASSAGE

PASSAGE 1
Art historians’ approach to French Impressionism
has changed significantly in recent years. While a
decade ago Rewald’s History of Impressionism,
which emphasizes Impressionist painters’ stylistic
innovations, was unchallenged, the literature on
impressionism has now become a kind of
ideological battlefield, in which more attention is
paid to the subject matter of the paintings, and to
the social and moral issues raised by it, than to
their style. Recently, politically charged
discussions that address the impressionists’
unequal treatment of men and women and the
exclusion of modern industry and labor from their
pictures have tended to crowd out the stylistic
analysis favored by Rewald and his followers. In a
new work illustrating this trend, Robert L. Herbert
dissociates himself from formalists whose
preoccupation with the stylistic features of
impressionist painting has, in Herbert’s view, left
the history out of art history; his aim is to restore
impressionist paintings “to their socio-cultural
context.” However, his arguments are not finally
persuasive.
In attempting to place impressionist painting in its
proper historical context, Herbert has redrawn the
traditional boundaries of impressionism. Limiting
himself to the two decades between 1860 and
1880, he assembles under the impressionist
banner what can only be described as a somewhat
eccentric grouping of painters. Cezanne, Pisarro,
and Sisley are almost entirely ignored, largely
because their paintings do not suit Herbert’s
emphasis on themes of urban life and suburban
leisure, while Manet, Degas, and Caillebotte—who
paint scenes of urban life but whom many would
hardly characterize as impressionists dominate
the first half of the book. Although this new
description of Impressionist painting provides a
more unified conception of nineteenth-century
French painting by grouping quite disparate
modernist painters together and emphasizing
their common concerns rather than their stylistic
difference, it also forces Herbert to overlook some
of the most important genres of impressionist
painting—portraiture, pure landscape, and still-life
painting.
Moreover, the rationale for Herbert’s emphasis on
the social and political realities that Impressionist
paintings can be said to communicate rather than
on their style is finally undermined by what even
Herbert concedes was the failure of Impressionist
painters to serve as particularly conscientious
illustrators of their social milieu. They left much
ordinary experience—work and poverty, for
example—out of their paintings and what they did
put in was transformed by a style that had only an
indirect relationship to the social realities of the
world they depicted. Not only were their pictures
inventions rather than photographs, they were
inventions in which style to some degree
disrupted description. Their paintings in effect
have two levels of subject: what is represented
and how it is represented, and no art historian can
afford to emphasize one at the expense of the
other.

2. According to the passage, Rewald’s book on impressionism was characterized by which one of the
following?
A. Even handed objectivity about the achievements of impressionism

B. bias in favor of certain impressionist painters

C. an emphasis on the stylistic features of impressionist painting

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D. an idiosyncratic view of which painters were to be classified as impressionists

E. a refusal to enter into the ideological debates that had characterized earlier discussions of
impressionism

PRACTICE PASSAGES

PASSAGE 1
1That Louise Nevelson is believed by many
critics to be the greatest twentieth-century
sculptor is all the more remarkable because the
greatest resistance to women artists has been,
5 until recently, in the field of sculpture. Since
Neolithic times, sculpture has been considered
the prerogative of men, partly, perhaps, for
purely physical reasons: it was erroneously
assumed that women were not suited for the
10 hard manual labor required in sculpting
stone, carving wood, or working in metal. It has
been only during the twentieth century that
women sculptors have been recognized as
major artists, and it has been in the United
15 States, especially since the decades of the
fifties and sixties, that women sculptors have
shown the greatest originality and creative
power. Their rise to prominence parallels the
development of sculpture itself in the United 20
States: while there had been a few talented
sculptors in the United States before the
1940’s, it was only after 1945—when New York
was rapidly becoming the art capital of the
world—that major sculpture was produced in
25 the United States. Some of the best was the
work of women.
By far the most outstanding of these women is
Louise Nevelson, who in the eyes many critics is
the most original female artist alive today. One
famous and influential critic, Hilton Kramer, 30
said of her work, “For myself, I think Ms.
Nevelson succeeds where the painters often
fail.”
Her works have been compared to the Cubist
constructions of Picasso, the Surrealistic objects
35 of Miro, and the Merzbau of Schwitters.
Nevelson would be the first to admit that she
has been influenced by all of these, as well as
by African sculpture, and by Native American
and pre-Columbian art, but she has absorbed all
40 these influences and still created a
distinctive art that expresses the urban
landscape and the aesthetic sensibility of the
twentieth century. Nevelson says, “I have
always wanted to show the world that art is
45 everywhere, except that it has to pass
through a creative mind.”
Using mostly discarded wooden objects like
packing crates, broken pieces of furniture, and
abandoned architectural ornaments, all of
50 which she has hoarded for years, she
assembles architectural constructions of great
beauty and power. Creating very freely with no
sketches, she glues and nails objects together,
paints them black, or more rarely white or gold,
55 and places them in boxes. These
assemblages, walls, even entire environments
create a mysterious, almost awe-inspiring
atmosphere. Although she has denied any
symbolic or religious intent in her works, their
60 three-dimensional grandeur and even their
titles, such as Sky Cathedral and Night
Cathedral, suggest such connotations. In some
ways, her most ambitious works are closer to
architecture than to traditional sculpture, but
65 then neither Louise Nevelson nor her art fits
into any neat category.

1. The author quotes Hilton Kramer in lines 29-31 most probably in order to illustrate which of the
following?

F. The realism of Nevelson’s work

G. The unique qualities of Nevelson’s style

H. The extent of critical approval of Nevelson’s work

I. A distinction between sculpture and painting

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J. A reason for the prominence of women sculptors since the 1950’s

PASSAGE 2
1 Computer programmers often remark that
computing machines, with a perfect lack of
discrimination, will do any foolish thing they
are told to do. The reason for this lies, of
5 course, in the narrow fixation of the
computing machine’s “intelligence “on the
details of its own perceptions-its inability to be
guided by any large context. In a psychological
description of the computer intelligence, three
10 related adjectives come to mind: single-
minded, literal-minded, and simpleminded.
Recognizing this, we should at the same time
recognize that this single-mindedness, literal-
mindedness, and simple-mindedness also
15 characterizes theoretical mathematics,
though to a lesser extent.
Since science tries to deal with reality, even the
most precise sciences normally work with more
or less imperfectly understood approximations
20 toward which scientists must maintain an
appropriate scepticism. Thus, for instance, it
may come as a shock to mathematicians to
learn that the Schrodinger equation for the
hydrogen atom is not a literally correct
25 description of this atom, but only an
approximation to a somewhat more correct
equation taking account of spin, magnetic
dipole and relativistic effects; and that this
corrected equation is itself only an imperfect
30 approximation to an infinite set of quantum
field-theoretical equations. Physicists, looking
at the original Schrodinger equation, learn to
sense in it the presence of many invisible terms
in addition to the differential terms visible, and
35 this sense inspires an entirely appropriate
disregard for the purely technical features of
the equation. This very healthy scepticism is
foreign to the mathematical approach.
Mathematics must deal with well-defined
40 situations. Thus, mathematicians depend on
an intellectual effort outside of mathematics
for the crucial specification of the
approximation that mathematics is to take
literally. Give mathematicians a situation that is
45 the least bit ill-defined, and they will make it
well-defined, perhaps appropriately, but
perhaps inappropriately. In some cases, the
mathematician’s literal-mindedness may have
unfortunate consequences. The
50 mathematicians turn the scientist’s
theoretical assumptions, that is, their
convenient points of analytical emphasis, into
axioms, and then take these axioms literally.
This brings the danger that they may also
55 persuade the scientists to take these axioms
literally. The question, central to the scientific
investigation but intensely disturbing in the
mathematical context “what happens if the
axioms are relaxed” is thereby ignored.
60 The physicist rightly dreads precise
argument, since an argument that is convincing
only if it is precise loses all its force if the
assumptions on which it is based are slightly
changed, whereas an argument that is
65 convincing though imprecise may well be
stable under small perturbations of its
underlying assumptions.

1. The author discusses computing machines in the first paragraph primarily in order to do which of
the following?
A. Indicate the dangers inherent in relying to a great extent on machines

B. Illustrate his views about the approach of mathematicians to problem solving

C. Compare the work of mathematicians with that of computer programmers

D. Provide one definition of intelligence

E. Emphasize the importance of computers in modern technological society

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