The Impressionist Revolution:The Impressionist Revolution:
Monet-Verlaine-Debussy provides a great way to explore the French Impressionist movement. It includes 120 of Claude Monet's paintings, 60 Paul Verlaine poems, and 74 minutes of music in several genres by Claude Debussy. This CD-ROM is bilingual in English and French, a feature that will make it very attractive for students and lovers of French.
Claude Monet is well represented here. Many of the 120 paintings there are full-screen details as well as images of the entire painting. Some of the work is resplendent on the glowing computer screen, better than any book. But frequently the computer's limited color palette adds its own layer of pointillism, causing gradual shadings to become speckled.
The material relating Monet's artistic vision, style, and technique is excellent. There are good explanations and examples of the way he and other Impressionists saw and painted colors and shapes rather than objects, and of their new brush techniques.
The best way to use the music of Debussy that's included on this title is to let it play in the background as you explore. The music adds a lot to the experience of the painting or the poetry. There is so much to explore here that you'll hear all the music several times by the time you finish.
You might wonder how 74 minutes of music can fit on this CD-ROM, in addition to all the paintings and text, in both languages. The answer is that the fidelity of the audio is reduced, to reduce storage space, and the resulting noise and distortion is quite noticeable, especially in quiet passages. But the music is still glorious underneath the noise.
The third artist represented on this title is the poet Paul Verlaine, a Romantic-Impressionist-Symbolist poet who lived at roughly the same time as Monet and Debussy. He is of lesser stature than those masters, and less clearly an Impressionist.
Poetry is notoriously difficult to translate. Verlaine's work is about as untranslatable as it gets, being heavily dependent on effects of sound and subtleties of language. Fortunately, this title is bilingual. The original French text is just a mouse click away, making it useful for francophones at all levels.
Clicking on an icon when a poem is displayed plays a reading of the poem in English. Too bad there's no way to play the French reading if you chose English as your language when you started up the program. Even readers with no French would gain in appreciation by hearing the musicality of the original words.
Besides the works themselves there is a selection of "Themes," linear slide shows on subjects such as snow, cathedrals, the sea. These show mostly paintings with short text descriptions, an occasional poem read aloud, and music playing in the background. There are also chronologies, bibliographies, and an index of Monet's works. All this is organized in a way that is easy and fun to explore. It makes a great introduction to Impressionism.
Matisse-Aragon-Prokofiev uses the same formula and has most of same strengths. It contains 150 of Henri Matisse's paintings, drawings and sculptures, 60 of Louis Aragon's poems, and 60 minutes of Sergei Prokofiev's music.
It's less clear what these three artists are doing on the same CD-ROM. They're all, in some sense, Modernists, were rough contemporaries, and worked, for part of their career at least, in Paris, but their work is much more distantly related than that of the three Impressionists.
The introduction to Matisse-Aragon-Prokofiev states that "The first half of our century will undoubtedly be remembered as the time of Matisse, Aragon, and Prokofiev, just as the Renaissance was the time of Michelangelo, Petrarch, and Monteverdi." This is a bit farfetched. Few critics would pick any of the three as the most significant contributor to his field in the first half of this century. Still, Matisse and Prokofiev, at least, are of sufficient stature to reward time spent exploring their work.
This title is gorgeous, the most visually attractive CD-ROM I have ever seen. It's partly because Matisse is a natural for the computer screen, favoring large blocks of uniform bright color. The original graphic art on the navigational screens is a knockout as well.
Matisse's work is well represented, and his vision and technique are very well explained. The treatment of Prokofiev parallels that of Debussy--the selections are excellent, if noisy, and there's good material about his life.
The weak link here is Louis Aragon, a communist activist, novelist, essayist, and poet. He is not well known in the English-speaking world. The poetry on this CD-ROM isn't terribly compelling, at least in English translation, and the original French is missing, since this title is English-only, not bilingual.
Nonetheless, Matisse-Aragon-Prokofiev provides good value: a solid introduction to the work of Matisse and Prokofiev, and a taste of the spirit of their times.
