“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.
How I find a musical voice from artworks Music in all its varied forms is the most accessible and affordable form of art we have today. The popularity of music as a recreational and active form of art participation for
When Charles Baudelaire published his collection of poems entitled Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) in 1857, he shocked an entire generation. “Candor and goodness are disgusting,” he wrote in the epilogue, describing his masterpiece instead as a
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), according to TS Eliot was the first modern poet, “the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language.” He produced unprecedented expressions of a complex sensibility and of modern themes within structures of classical rigor and technical
The German symbolist artist Max Klinger (1857-1920) took inspiration from Brahms to create his Brahmsphantasie, a book of music and images that took Brahms’ music to a level never before seen. In his Brahmsphantasie, Klinger divided the work into 3
“For Our Generation Walks as in Hades, Without the Divine” German idealist poets and thinkers working in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were primarily concerned with the descent of the French revolution into Bonapartism, noting Germany’s failure to
Today, as we celebrate the 250th birthday of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), we consider him among the greatest of German lyric poets. During his lifetime, however, Hölderlin gained little recognition—he was a colleague of Hegel and Schelling—and he was almost totally
Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) started his career as a porcelain painter. However, the young man had clearly grander ambitions, and he soon found himself in the company of the academic artist Charles Gleyre, Claude Monet, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley. The
When Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was elected President in 1860, seven slave states left the Union to form the Confederate States of America, and four more joined when hostilities began between the North and South. The American Civil War lasted for
