IMAGE OF CARMEN IN EUROPEAN PAINTINGS OF THE LATE 19TH – MID-20TH CENTURY

Abstract

The image of Carmen is the most famous in world culture artistic embodiment of the personality of a Roma girl in Prosper Mérimée’s novel (1845) and Georges Bizet’s opera (1875), dedicated to the love story of Carmen, endowed with a charismatic temperament and a desire for freedom in everything, and the Basque young men Jose. The study is concentrated on the image of Carmen in the works of art of the late 19th – mid-20th century. The artists expressed their vision of Carmen in two ways: literary and opera, where her image was formed by artists’ interpretation of the original sources; and personalised, which is associated with the portraiture of Carmen’s performers (artists’ contemporaries) – actresses and singers in opera and ballet performances, who successfully demonstrated on stage the vision of behavioural characteristics and temperament of the Roma character. The purpose of the study is to comprehensively analyse the peculiarities of the embodiment of the image of Carmen in paintings of artists of the late 19th – mid-20th century. The scientific novelty is that despite the fact that the artistic expression of the image of Carmen is present in the works of many artists of the late 19th – mid-20th century, this study is the first to analyse it in detail. Conclusion. By analysing the works of Henri Lucien Doucet, Edouard Manet, James Bell Anderson, Richard Jack, Pablo Picasso, it was found that each of these artists had different genre, plot, and expressive approaches to the embodiment of the psychological portrait of Carmen depending on the direction in which each of these artists worked. However, what is common and indisputable is the fact that the figure of Carmen is emotionally coloured in each of the described works, which indicates the unity with the plot of the original sources. Another feature that unites these works is that they are classified as examples of the portrait genre.