Magic Power of the Music in Me Art Drawings
In 1868, fine art critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton wrote near the 'contempt' many contemporary artists were starting to experience with regard to 'literary interest, dramatic interest, historical interest and all other such extraneous interests', adding that the 'especial merchandise' of painting consisted of 'visible melodies and harmonies – a kind of visible music – significant as much and narrating equally much equally the music which is heard in the ears, and nothing whatever more than.'
It was true. Nineteenth-century painters, anxious to costless their fine art from the shackles of narrative, looked to music as an art form that could produce an impact on the listener without needing images or stories or whatsoever kind of representation. So did theorists, critics and other writers on art. Reviewing an exhibition in London that included works by the Russian Wassily Kandinsky, Roger Fry turned to precisely the same analogy when he alleged that, on closer inspection, Kandinsky's paintings became 'more definite, more than logical and more closely knit in structure, more surprisingly beautiful in their colour oppositions, more exact in their equilibrium. They are pure visual music.'
In fact, Fry was not merely describing Kandinsky'due south paintings – he was as well echoing the Russian creative person'due south concerns. In his book On the Spiritual in Fine art, published a year before, Kandinsky had written:
'An artist who sees that the simulated of natural appearances, no matter how creative, is not for him – the kind of creative creative person who wants to, and has to, express his own inner world – sees with green-eyed how naturally and easily such goals can be attained in music, the least material of the arts today.'
Limerick IV, 1911 #kandinsky #vasilykandinsky pic.twitter.com/3RXhe3CmwQ
— Wassily Kandinsky (@artistkandinsky) February 15, 2022
Effectually that time, Kandinsky started giving musical titles to his paintings, calling them 'Improvisations', 'Compositions' – even, on one afterwards occasion, 'Fugue'. Of these, his Composition IV of 1911 is specially meaning, being one of the very few works he ever described or analysed in item. Interestingly, he identified a number of objects within what might otherwise exist mistaken for an 'abstract' picture – a boxing, a castle on a hill, lances. These aforementioned motifs are also visible in a smaller painting, chosen Cossacks, which reproduces in an almost literal fashion the left-paw role of the larger composition.
Only he also writes at some length about the purely emotive effects of the colours and forms he uses, describing the lines that create movement as 'angular' and 'abrupt', the colours equally 'calorie-free', 'cold' and 'sugariness'. Regardless of the presence – or absence – of objects, Kandinsky clearly expected those 'abstract' elements of the moving picture to touch on his audition straight, but like the tones of music.
Not only the colours and forms only also the motifs themselves may too have a 'musical' significance. Conspicuously visible in the smaller, truncated version of the composition is the outline of the castle on a hill, which Kandinsky himself identifies, and a rainbow, which he does non mention.
To opera lovers, these two motifs in juxtaposition volition inevitably phone call to mind the closing pages of Wagner's music drama Das Rheingold, the starting time office of his ballsy Ring cycle. The castle is surely Valhalla, which Wotan, the father of the gods, and his companions volition enter by crossing the rainbow span that spans the River Rhine. Meanwhile, in the waters beneath, the Rhinemaidens bewail the loss of their magic gilt, stolen from them and used to pay for this, Wotan's long-dreamt-of (and newly completed) building project.
Nowhere does Kandinsky refer specifically to this scene from Rheingold; merely he did know a good deal about Wagner. In his 1912 essay 'On Stage Limerick', he discusses the composer's operas in some detail, including the famous musical device of the Leitmotif. And in his autobiographical Reminiscences, published a year later, he describes a formative feel he underwent every bit a boyfriend: seeing Wagner'due south Lohengrin at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Still, it was the music itself, rather than the drama or the staging, that had a profound event on him:
'I saw all my colours in my mind, they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in forepart of me... It became quite clear to me that art in general was far more powerful than I had thought, and that painting could develop just such powers as music possesses.'
In Rheingold, the theft of the gilded – which, when forged into a magic ring, will convey limitless ability on its owner – is merely the prelude to a tragic chain of events which will ultimately bring near the downfall of the gods and the end of the old club – the 'twilight of the gods'. An apt metaphor, ane might think, for the end of narrative painting and the advent of an entirely new, object-less course of visual art.
Peter Vergo, Emeritus Professor of Fine art History at the University of Essex
Source: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/music-and-abstract-painting-the-case-of-kandinsky-and-wagner
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