“Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity.”
Modest Mussorgsky
As philosopher Richard Wollheim says, art is “one of the most elusive of the traditional problems of human culture.” In its simplest manifestation, art is a form of communication that serves as a vehicle for the expression of emotions and ideas. As ideas and beliefs are culturally specific and constantly changing over time, there really is no generally agreed definition of what constitutes art. That being said, the classical branches of the visual arts are identified as painting, sculpture and architecture. Literature and poetry are considered part of the humanities or as one of the arts, while music, alongside theatre, film and dance belong to the performing arts. In this section you will discover not only specific explorations of individual art forms, but also a more detailed probing of the relationship between the visual arts and music, including painting and music, sculpture and music and architecture and music. Originally, poetry and music were treated as a unity, but gradually they have become more independent. Nevertheless, the two art forms have never forgotten their shared genetic makeup, and been intertwined for millennia. Art and music have engaged in a dynamic relationship that reveals a diverse range of human activity intended to be appreciated for their beauty.
Henri Dutilleux: Timbres, espace, mouvement (ou, La nuit étoilée) In the late 1880s, the sky at night was a point of inspiration for Vincent Van Gogh. In September 1888, he depicted a café at night in the middle of the
B.R. Pearson’s Dance at Bougival Inspired by Renoir In his 1883 painting, Dance at Bougival, French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) created a near–life-size portrait of two dancers in the milieu of an open-air café. His painting has captured the couple
Melcher Melchers: La Kermesse Inspired by Peter Paul Rubens In his frolicking picture La Kermesse, Peter Paul Rubens gives us a village festival that takes over the entire foreground of the painting. Though at one time to be a picture
John Zorn’s Musical Work La Machine de l’être Inspired by Antonin Artaud French actor and writer Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) tried to move early 20th-century theatre away from its reliance on text and towards more primal expressions of sound, movement, and
Eleanor Cory: O’Keeffe’s Flora Starting in the mid-1920s, American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) started her 30-year exploration of flowers. By taking something that might be quite small and painting it multiplied by many times, she found a way to make
What was the music held by the Duke in Goya’s “José Álvarez de Toledo”? Around 1795, the Spanish painter Goya painted a picture of his patron, Don José Álvarez de Toledo Osorio y Gonzaga, 11th Marquess of Villafranca, Grandee of
Nell Shaw Cohen: The Course of Empire The English-born American artist Thomas Cole (1801–1848) was the first significant American landscape painter and was the founder of the Hudson River School in New York in the mid-19th century. Although his highly
In his 1990 opera Vincent, Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928–2016) took scenes from the life of the artist Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) and, to his own libretto, created a work that starts in the mental hospital at Saint-Rémy, where he
