“Many a long winter’s evening can be devoted to discussing the relationship between painting and music.” 

--Dave Brubeck Quartet, 1996

(Quoted in Brenda Lynne Leach,  Looking and Listening: Conversations Between Modern Art and Music, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015)

Music and art have been aligned for centuries, perhaps millennia; the courtly drawing rooms of Europe were filled with music and paintings and African sacred rituals employed masks, statues, and clothing along with music. But the relationship between the two art forms in the Modern era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is a unique and striking one. In a period of industrial expansion, cultural change, political upheaval, and intellectual developments, avant-garde movements in both the visual arts and music exploded. Artists and musicians wrote treatises about the link between art and music, and painters and composers made the exchange visible and audible in their works. This was a period of cultural synesthesia; creators saw music in their art and art in their music. The belief that this was the dawn of a truly modern epoch fueled experimentation and produced some of the most original works of art of the twentieth century. We will look at some of these extraordinary “conversations” which are included in Leach’s Looking and Listening: Conversations Between Modern Art and Music. 

Arthur Dove and George Gershwin

Jazz is the link between Arthur Dove and George Gershwin. A creation of the twentieth century, jazz was a wholly American musical form, specifically an African American art form. Like many artists of the Modernist period, Dove was influenced by jazz. The artist frequently listened to music while he painted and created numerous music-related works throughout his career. He took a particular interest in the improvisational techniques of jazz; his diaries refer to his favorite music: Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin, the big-band sounds of Paul Whiteman, and the work of the avant-garde composer Igor Stravinsky.  

Arthur Dove (1880-1946) was an early American Modernist and produced the first purely abstract American paintings. He travelled to Paris in 1907, remaining there until 1909, where he was influenced by the work of Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. His friend, the artist Alfred Henry Maurer, introduced him to members of the international avant-garde. When he returned to New York, Dove met the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz. The two men shared the belief that art should embody modern spiritual values, not materialism or tradition. Dove’s paintings, abstractions based on natural forms that he referred to as “extractions,” because he extracted the essential forms from nature. The artist’s first exhibition at Stieglitz’s gallery was in 1910, Younger American Painters (which included works by John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Edward J. Steichen). Influenced by Cubism, the Expressionism of Kandinsky, and the writings of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, “who stressed the importance of a mystical, rather than analytical, understanding of the world. Bergson proposed the existence of an “élan vital,” a spirit or energy that constantly animates all living things in their fight for existence. This idea appealed to Dove, who himself was fascinated with natural cycles of growth and renewal and sought to make those universal harmonies visible in his work. He was also frequently inspired by the parallel between the visual arts and music” (The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Dove’s 1912 show at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery was the first public exhibition of abstract art by an American.  

Like George Gershwin, Dove was interested in the concept of synesthesia: “he worked with the idea that certain combinations of form, color, and line could evoke the same emotional and physical responses as the dynamics and harmonies of musical sound” (The Met). “Seeking a nonrepresentational form for his painting, he expressed his desire ‘to make something that is real in itself, that does not remind anyone of any other thing, and that does not have to be explained—like the letter A for instance’” (Whitney Museum of American Art).  

In the 1920s, Dove literally painted music. The series of six abstract works inspired by music—specifically jazz--were exhibited together at Stieglitz’s The Intimate Gallery in 1927. They are George Gershwin—Rhapsody in Blue, Parts I and II, I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise, An Orange Grove in California—Irving Berlin, Rhythm Rag (lost), and Improvisation. Dove was an amateur musician and singer; his interest in jazz was likely piqued when he attended one of Paul Whiteman’s concerts in December 1925. He bought five jazz albums the following year, including Rhapsody in Blue and listened to them regularly. By December 1926, and into the next year, he was painting works specifically inspired by the records. 

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue debuted in 1924 at New York’s Aeolian Hall. Gershwin played the piano with Paul Whiteman’s jazz orchestra. The inspiration for the work came to the composer when he was on a train to Boston: “It was on the train with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty-bang that is so often so stimulating to a composer … And there I suddenly heard—and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the rhapsody from beginning to end…” The resultant work was a fusion of mechanical elements with jazz syncopation and harmony within the traditional format of a rhapsody (Christie’s). Gershwin added an element of synesthesia with “blue,” changing the title from American Rhapsody at the suggestion of his brother Ira after James McNeill Whister’s painting titles, “suggesting a visual element to the aural experience, as well as a reference to the old-time musical ‘blues’” (Christie’s). “This amalgamation of influences reflects the unique experience of American culture during this era, as embodied by Gershwin’s statement, ‘And what is the voice of the American soul? It is jazz … It is all colors and souls unified in the great melting-pot of the world’ (quoted in Leach, p. 17).  

According to Christie’s, Dove’s Rhapsody in Blue paintings “stand among the most radically experimental works of an artistic career known for its innovation.” Created in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, the artist’s works evoke the improvisational nature of jazz. In addition, for both Gershwin and Dove, it was significant that jazz was a distinctly American and unmistakably modern musical form. According to Donna M. Cassidy: “By painting jazz Dove not only stamped his art as native but did so using a modern style” (Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, Washington, D.C., 1997, p. 81). Dove would listen to the music over and over again while working, creating ticker-tape-like long pieces of paper filled with notations transcribing the musical rhythms. This linear style translates to the final works as well, in which “swathes of broader color are overlain with gestural cross-hatched lines and swirls” (Christie’s). Rachel Z. DeLue describes, “Sweeping and spiraling lines and sizzling color mark the quick and deft cadences and the brash energy of the compositions in question, while linear couplings call to mind the call-and-response effects typical of jazz. This includes … the clock spring and its painted almost shadow in Rhapsody in Blue, Part I, and the staccato slashes welded over wending lines in Rhapsody in Blue, Part II. … Quick-seeming and all-over brushwork engenders a sense of improvisation in each of the canvases … something Dove probably associated with jazz even if the recordings were not themselves products of improvisation” (Arthur Dove: Always Connect, Chicago, IL, 2016, p. 158).  

Based on Dove’s designations of Part I and Part II in the Rhapsody paintings, scholars have deduced that the artist must have been listening to one of the early 78 rpm recordings of Rhapsody in Blue, which featured 2-3 minutes of music on each side of the album: Part I, the allegro opening, and Part II, the slower middle section and quick finale. The long vertical lines of Part I have been related to the clarinet glissando which opens the song, and the “sweeping whirlwind” of Part II to the building crescendo of the finale (Christie’s). Dove added a collage element to Part I: a metal spring. The artist also incorporated metallic paint in the works. It has been suggested that the spring and paint refer to the train tracks that inspired Gershwin; it also references the spring-driven motor and hand crank of the phonograph by which Dove listened to the music. More generally, the paintings evoke the Machine Age.

Dove explored intellectual and spiritual themes by relating them to popular music. He wrote to Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keefe: “[Friends] have waxed enthusiastic over a ‘thing’ of mine being done from Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ not as yet completed, but I feel it will make people see that the so called ‘abstractions’ are not abstract at all … It is illustration.” “With his jazz paintings, Dove evoked the fast-paced tempo of twentieth-century life, and, in so doing, he came as close as any American modernist to achieving visual music on the two dimensional canvas” (Judith Zilczer, “From Modern to Postmodern in Visual Music,” The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art, Oxford, England, 2016, p. 22). 

Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg 

Unlike Gershwin and Dove, the Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky and the Viennese composer Arnold Shoenberg corresponded and shared their theories on art and music from 1911-1922. A 2004 exhibition at The Jewish Museum, New York, Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider is, according to The Chicago Tribune, “at base the story of an artistic friendship between two of the greatest pioneers of the modern period” (January 18, 2004). Kandinsky first heard Schoenberg’s music on January 2, 1911, when he and other members of the Expressionist Blaue Reiter group attended the first all-Schoenberg program at the Munich Jahreszeitensaal, the same concert that had caused a riot in Vienna. The day before the event the artist Franz Marc wrote: “The uncanny thing about [Schoenberg] seems to be his complete abandonment of tonality—he no longer works crosswise through the keys but does so longitudinally—which seems to be related to Kandinsky’s ideas” (quoted in John E. Malmstad, “Review: Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider by Esther da Costa Meyer and Fred Wasserman,” The Russian Review, July 2004, Vol. 63, No. 3, p. 519). Some of the pieces broke with nineteenth-century conventions by “emancipating dissonance.” Finding a kindred spirit in Schoenberg, Kandinsky, himself a talented amateur musician, made two sketches and an abstracted painting, Impression III (Concert), based on the concert. The painting depicts a black form that suggests a grand piano and black-outlined shapes that suggest an audience. The work, however, is primarily a riot of color, with a yellow “sound” predominating. Kandinsky, a synesthete, put onto canvas what he heard in music: the color yellow. In his treatise of 1911, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the artist described yellow as a sound: “Yellow, if steadily gazed at in any geometrical form, has a disturbing influence, and reveals in the colour an insistent, aggressive character. The intensification of the yellow increases in the painful shrillness of its note” (quoted in Leach, p. 56). The artist’s words reflect what he heard in Schoenberg’s music. 

Soon after Kandinsky first heard Schoenberg’s music, he wrote to the composer expressing his admiration for his work and what he perceived as a shared outlook on art: “I have just heard your concert here and it has given me real pleasure. … In your works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent life of the individual voices in your compositions is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings. At the moment there is a great tendency in painting to discover the ‘new’ harmony by constructive means, whereby the rhythmic is built on an almost geometric form. My own instinct and striving can support these tendencies only halfway. Construction is what has been so woefully lacking in the painting of recent times, and it is good that it is now being sought. But I think differently about the type of construction. I am certain that our own modern harmony is not to be found in the ‘geometric’ way, but rather in the anti-geometric, antilogical way. And this way is that of ‘dissonances in art,’ in painting, therefore, just as much as in music. And ‘today’s’ dissonance in painting and music is merely the consonance of ‘tomorrow’” (quoted in Leach, p. 56). Schoenberg confirmed his affiliation with Kandinsky’s thinking in his letter to the artist on January 24, 1911: “Surely, among the best striving today, there are secret relationships, commonalities, which are probably not coincidental” (quoted in Antonio Baldassarre, “Review, Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider by Costa Meyer, Fred Wasserman and Joan Rosenbaum, Music in Art, Spring-Fall 2003, Vol.28, No. 1/2, p. 250). Schoenberg also wrote “what you call the ‘unlogical’ I call the ‘elimination of the conscious will in art’” (quoted in Roberta Smith, “Kandinsky and Schoenberg, Seen and Heard on Canvas,” The New York Times, October 24, 2003). The same year Kandinsky published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Schoenberg published Theory of Harmony, a treatise on music and aesthetics. An excerpt appeared on the poster for the 1911 concert. It read: “Dissonances are only different from consonances in degree; they are nothing more than remoter consonances. Today we have already reached the point where we no longer make the distinction between consonances and dissonances. Or at most, we make the distinction that we are less willing to use consonance” (quoted in Leach, p. 56). According to Smith, the men established a rapport as “kindred Modernist soul mates.”  

Kandinsky’s 1912 artist’s book, Klänge--which will be on exhibit at the David Barnett Gallery this month--incorporated poems and visual art and was the realization of the painter’s synesthetic approach to art as well as his desire to create a total work of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk. As I discussed in last month's newsletter, Klänge combines sound (the spoken words of the poems) and images (fifty-six woodcuts) with the effect of merging the visual and the aural, moving away from the representational, and embracing the “dissonant.” This “musical album,” as the artist referred to it, contains the leitmotif of the horse and rider, a symbol of the departure from representation. Kandinsky’s move toward abstraction in art echoes Schoenberg’s shift toward atonality in music. 

While Schoenberg is remembered predominantly as a composer, he was also a self-taught painter. He briefly worked with the expressionist artist Richard Gerstl. He was also an autodidact as a composer, but in music he studied the greatest models. The composer turned to visual art around 1907 after his break with tonality and after his wife abandoned him, temporarily, for Gerstl. His period of greatest activity as a painter was from 1907-1912. He exhibited at the Heller Gallery in Vienna in 1910, and his work was included in the first exhibition of the Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter at Munich’s Thannhauser Gallery in 1911. He also contributed a musical composition, Herzgewachse, and an essay, “The Relationship to the Text,” to the Blaue Reiter Almanach. Schoenberg’s paintings are often categorized as “gazes” or “visions,” as he called them, expressing some inner psychological state. While Schoenberg’s exhibition in 1910 was not successful, it was the music critics who “seemed to offer a context and understanding of the essence of these visual works” (Leach, p. 60). Music critic Elsa Bienenfeld of the Neues Wiener Journal wrote: “Schoenberg paints these portraits and fantasies with brutal simplicity, in a style of Kokoschka. One large blot of color stands wild and mutinous next to another. … And yet one cannot deny, that as dreadful, as audacious, as childish as his manner of painting appears to be, there is always a flash of something elemental and peculiar to the person or mood portrayed” (quoted in Leach, p. 60). Paul Stefan, of the journal Der Merker, connected Schoenberg’s music and art: “Only musicians, only those who know Schoenberg’s music and its secrets, should look at these pictures, for only they will experience them elementally as sounds transposed across all the accidental boundaries of form. It was therefore virtually essential to have the music of Schoenberg ringing in one’s ears as one viewed this exhibition” (quoted in Leach, p. 60). A contemporary critic did not see the Expressionist influence in Schoenberg’s paintings: “The psychological penetration of Schoenberg’s self-portraits, landscapes and fantasies came more from an awareness of the paintings of Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh. The expressionism of such artists as Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka or Kandinsky himself was not an influence. Schoenberg’s vigorous brushstrokes, thick impasto and flirtation with abstraction were all his own, and while they resulted from inner necessity, he nonetheless knew how to control them” (The Chicago Tribune). 

The conversation between Kandinsky and Schoenberg is an essential part of the avant-garde discourse between art and painting in the early twentieth century. As Christian Meyer, who was curator of the exhibition “Schoenberg, Kandinsky, Blauer Reiter and the Russian Avant-Garde” at the Schoenberg Center in Vienna in 2000, wrote: “While Schoenberg’s music was an inspiration to Kandinsky as he explored abstraction, today Kandinsky’s paintings function as ambassadors for Schoenberg’s musical works. The strong colorful essence of Kandinsky’s pre-war works has the same richness of sound colors in Schoenberg’s compositions. And even his own paintings reveal much to those searching for a musical understanding of the works by the composers of the Second Viennese School. It seems that in today’s visual world the fine arts are still required to understand music, the most abstract of all the arts” (quoted in Leach, p. 61). 

Dave Brubeck and Joan Miró 

Dave Brubeck (1920-2012) was an American jazz pianist and composer. Often regarded as the foremost exponent of cool jazz, Brubeck’s work is characterized by unusual time signatures and superimposing contrasting rhythms, meters, and tonalities, and combining different styles and genres, such as classical music, jazz, and blues (Wikipedia). Jazz critic John Fordham wrote: “Brubeck’s real achievement was to blend European compositional ideas, very demanding rhythmic structures, jazz song-form, and improvisation in expressive and accessible ways.” In 1951, he formed the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Between 1958 and 1967, the quartet included Brubeck on piano, saxophonist Paul Desmond, bassist Eugene Wright, and drummer Joe Morello. Brubeck’s 1959 album, Time Out became his highest selling album, despite its esoteric theme and unusual time signatures. It was the first of several albums to focus on the element of time in music. It was also his first record to use an image of modern art on its cover, a painting by the Hawaiian-born artist Neil Fujita (1921-2010). Influenced by Picasso, Braque, and Klee, Fujita said “jazz called for abstraction, a certain kind of stylization, using modern painters” (quoted in Leach, “Dave Brubeck and His Reflections on Miró: Music and Art across Time,” in Looking and Listening: Conversations Between Modern Art and Music, p. 67). His next album, Time Further Out, from 1961, also featured an “experiment with time” (Steve Race, who wrote the liner notes for the original album), and a modern art cover by the painter Joan Miró (1893-1983), the 1925 painting L’Addition. Time Further Out was subtitled Miró Reflections.  

Brubeck referred to Time Further Out as a “jazz interpretation” of the painting by the Catalan Spanish artist Miró (Leach, p. 65). The album is a “blues suite” which “combines elements of the blues, namely the use of the twelve-bar blues form or a variation upon it, within the overall organization of the ‘suite,’ a term used for centuries in classical music to refer to a collection of dance movements. While these two overarching ideas helped to create the architecture for this record, Brubeck’s innovations in time and rhythm continued to develop a new sound” (Leach, p. 69). Miró’s work was influenced by his native Catalan, poetry, music, and dance. He said “I make no distinction between painting and poetry. It therefore happens that I illustrate my canvases with poetic phrases and vice versa” (quoted in Leach, p. 73). He was also interested in music, listening to all genres of avant-garde music, including jazz. In fact, he gave his blessing to allow Brubeck to use L’Addition for the album cover of Time Further Out. According to Leach, Miró’s work of the middle 1920s reflected a “system” he created in which symbolic meanings were connected to numbers and figures within a specific context (p. 69). The artist referred to abstract figures in his work as “personages.” These “personages” in L’Addition reminded Brubeck of a quartet. Brubeck worked through the sequence of numbers in the upper right of Miró’s canvas using them as meters for the songs on the album. For example, on the first track, “It’s a Raggy Waltz,” Brubeck executed a “rhythmic variation” on both a rag and a waltz. Like ragtime, accents shift often unexpectedly, creating a feeling of triple meter within a quadruple meter (Leach, p. 70). This technique was not new to music, but it was new to jazz. Leach points out that composers of the ‘20s, like Gershwin, sometimes used this technique (p. 70). Gershwin used this idea in his song “Fascinating Rhythm” and in Rhapsody in Blue. Brubeck stated that “The number 6 on the Miró painting reminded me of an effective 6/4 rhythm I had heard sung at a welcoming ceremony given us by the Maoris in Wellington, New Zealand when the Quartet played there in 1959” (quoted in Leach, p. 70).  

Miró’s painting could be said to be like jazz in that it is dictated by the unconscious and at the same time meticulously elaborated. Similarly, Leach points out a commonality between the painting and the work of the quartet: “[This work] also create[s] a feeling of spontaneity within a carefully planned composition, not unlike jazz improvisation (p. 72).  Brubeck said: “Mindful of the capricious spirit of the Miró painting, there is a suggestion of whimsy in these reflections and a conscious attempt to distill rather than magnify rhythmic complexity. … My gratitude to Joan Miró for his inspiration” (quoted in Leach, p. 70). Finally, Brubeck sums up his affinity for L’Addition in the album’s liner notes: “To explain the relationship of the Miró painting to music is not a simple task. I can point to the numbers in the upper right hand corner of the painting and the time signatures of each of the pieces in the album. There is a more tenuous link in the Miró abstract forms, suggesting human figures moving in a visual rhythm which could be interpreted as a jazz quartet. However, beyond these objective relationships of symbols and figures, I feel that in Miró’s painting he has expressed in visual terms my own approach to music—that is, a search for something new within old forms, an unexpected perspective, a surprising order and inner balance that belies the spontaneity of composition” (quoted in Leach, p. 73). 

By Jennifer McCormick