“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.
In our series on Music and Art, we’ve been looking at works of music inspired by works of art. The influence also goes the other way, where works of art have been inspired by music. Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) came from
In this series on Music and Art, we’ve mainly been looking at representational pictures (people, trees, and landscapes). When we look at an artist from the world of abstract expressionism, all of our horizons open wide. Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was
In 1902, after the successful debut of his opera Pelléas and Mélisande, Claude Debussy published many articles as a music critic under the pseudonym Monsieur Croche (similar to Paul Valéry’s pseudonym ‘Monsieur Teste’) in the ‘Revue Blanche’ and other publications.
The American West was a unique inspiration for a number of artists, but it is in the work of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe that a new eye was cast on the broad horizons. Her three watercolors from 1917, Light
Watteau, in many ways, was a painter of rococo love. His pink and frothy paintings overflow with courting couples and cupids galore. His 1717 painting, L’Embarquement pour Cythère (The Embarkation for Cythera) is such a work, with cupids circling in
In 1894, the French writer and poet Stéphane Mallarmé gave a lecture in Oxford and Cambridge, England, about the relationship between music and literature, in which he alluded to the origin of the artistic creation — the ‘trace’ — whether
We looked earlier at the Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746 – 1828) and how his ‘maja’ pictures influenced the 20th century Spanish composer Enrique Granados (1867-1916) to create his Goyescas.
Within the context of fine arts, the term naïve is used to describe artists who work in an unsophisticated style with a child-like simplicity. Frequently such works ignore artistic conventions like the rules of perspective, and employ strong patterns and
