cranky, arrogant, angry, self-doubting, and monstrous (www.newsweek.com), где прилагательные darkly comic, cranky, arrogant, angry, self-doubting, monstrous служат
средством выражения отрицательной оценки, о чем сви-
детельствуют их дефиниции. В справочных изданиях за-
фиксированы следующие значения указанных лексиче-
ских единиц: darkly comic – dealing with something that is
bad or upsetting in a funny way (LDCE, 2006: 396); cranky – strange; bad-tempered (LDCE, 2006: 366); arrogant –
behaving in an unpleasant or rude way because you think you
are more important than other people (LDCE, 2006: 69);
angry – feeling strong emotions which make you want to
shout at someone or hurt them because they have behaved in
an unfair, cruel, offensive etc. way, or because you think that
a situation is unfair, unacceptable etc. (LDCE, 2006: 49), self-doubting, являющееся производным от self-doubt –
the feeling that you and your abilities are not good enough
(LDCE, 2006: 1488); monstrous – very wrong, immoral,
or unfair; unusually large; unnatural or ugly and frightening
(LDCE, 2006: 1064). Очевидно, что все представленные
единицы содержат общую сему «being bad/ unpleasant»,
усилиями которой передается негативная оценка автора
искусствоведческой статьи.
Обратимся к следующему примеру:
19) Painting is something obscene and vicious, and ut-
terly compelling, when Bacon wields the brush. His studio,
preserved as a sealed room into which you peer anxiously as
if you were looking into a poisonous snake’s glassed box, is at
once a monument to the solitude and mystery of creation and
a scary claustrophobic nightmare in pink and purple and unshaded light bulbs. His paintings are like that, too.
Bacon found himself as a painter in the repressive aftermath
of the Second World War, with paintings that turn surrealism
inside out and expose the mind’s viscera. But it is the Old
Masters, their rich cream surfaces and heavy frames on velvet
wallpaper, with whom Bacon converses. His series of paint-
ings of imprisoned, suffering, ridiculous popes meditate on
Velázquez’s great ruddy-faced Pope Innocent X and on the
tyranny of the portrait; there is an idea in Bacon of art as vio-
lence, as cruelty, and his eviscerated nudes are never the ob-
jects of sentimental compassion. His art can oppress in the
mass but when you come across one of his paintings in
some dull and predictable collection of postwar art, it’s like