Drawing music

This week our violinist model, Tim, will fill the space with music and energy. The idea that an artwork could capture such an energy originated with the Italian Futurist movement in the early 20th century. Giacomo Balla experimented with this in ‘Rhythm of the Violinist’. The staggered repetition of shapes gives the impression that the hand is moving through space and time, while the short, sharp strokes convey a sense of musical vibration.

Giacomo Balla, Rhythm of the violinist, 1912

Balla’s depiction of the mechanical action of the violinist’s hand bears something in common with Marc Chagall’s puppet-like ‘Green Violinist’. He makes a feature of the wooden-looking figure, formed by a collage of angular shapes in a nod to cubism. Chagall favoured magical symbolism over realistic representation, which explains why the musician is dancing, suspended over the rooftops of a miniature village. The symbolism stems from Chagall’s upbringing in the Jewish community in Russia, where the fiddler was a vital presence in ceremonies and festivals, due to the belief that it was possible to achieve communion with God through music and dance.

Marc Chagall, ‘The Green Violinist’, 1923-24

Our own model Tim has been deftly sketched in action along with the other members of the band S I N K, by the wonderful artist that is Alan McGowan. The figures strike a harmony of tensions between definition and elusiveness, a creative answer to the perpetual question of how to capture a living, moving subject in a static medium.

Alan McGowan, S I N K, 2017

The Circus

Throughout the 19th and 20th century many artists turned to the modern city and its late night entertainment for their subjects, including the circus. They made innovate use of colour, perspective and movement to convey its vibrant atmosphere.

‘The Circus’ is the third panel in a series by Seurat, whose style evolved from impressionism. It is seen as one of the most successful applications of his theory of divisionism – placing small strokes of contrasting colour side by side so that when seen from a distance they blend to create the effect of luminosity. This can be seen most clearly upon close examination of the stage floor, which is made up of a combination of red, yellow and blue dots. Only the three primary colours and white are used, but flat colour is nowhere to be found. This technique conveys the vibrancy of the circus.

The canvas is divided into two spaces – the stage and the audience. As well as being divided spatially, it is divided by motion. Whilst the audience’s space is geometric and rigid, movement is injected onto the stage space in the foreground using the strong  dynamic curves of the circus ring, acrobat’s bodies and ringmaster’s whip. Seurat depicts the circus as a vortex of energy. 

Seurat, The Circus, 1891

German expressionist painter Kirchner saw Berlin as a city of excitement and glamour, but with an undercurrent of artificiality and chaos. He painted urban life and the everyday world, with a particular interest in human naturKirchner was drawn to the circus for its constant action. He wrote in his manifesto “I believe that all human visual experiences are born from movement.” He often sketched the action from life whilst seated in the audience, later working up the surface texture to inject movement into the canvas. He uses pictorial devices to capture the full sensory experience of an observer at the circus. His revolutionary use of colour conveys the vivid costumes of the performers, whilst the compressed composition and angled perspective forces everything into one plane of space, recreating the claustrophobic sense of being enclosed in a circus bursting with noise and energy. The circus would bring together an audience from diverse classes and backgrounds, providing a wide range of human subjects to sketch. Kirchner’s unnatural colour and perspective come together to communicate the heightened artificiality of the urban spectacle.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Circus, 1913

The circus was an influence on Chagall throughout his life, beginning with a fascination with the travelling acrobats he saw at village fairs as a child in Russia. When he lived in Paris he would regularly visit the circus to sketch from the audience like Kirchner. This explains the similar dramatic perspective in ‘The Circus’ which situates the viewer as a member of the audience looking down on the performers. He was captivated by the chaotic and colourful atmosphere. The circus performers in their extravagant costumes and garish makeup fitted perfectly into his dream like compositions. He said, ‘For me a circus is a magic show that appears and disappears like a world.'The primary attraction of the circus for these artists was the microcosm of life it contained, from the comic to the tragic as well as the broad range of social classes it brought together.

Marc Chagall, The Circus, 196

Art inspired by music

Charles Baudelaire believed that all the arts are linked, as seen in the ability of colour to inspire musical thinking – we speak of colour in terms of harmony and line in terms of rhythm. This relationship works both ways, evidenced by a plethora of visual artists who were inspired by music.

Although Degas is known for his paintings of dancers, In ‘The Orchestra of the Opera’, he takes the musicians in the orchestra pit as his focal subject, many of whom he knew personally. In doing so he obscures the main event taking place on the stage above which would typically be prioritised in a painting. The composition is dramatically cropped, foreshadowing his passion for photography. It captures the sense of a snapshot of a busy opera, and intersecting instruments such as the head of a double bass connect the spaces of audience and stage and position the viewer as a member of the audience. Charles Stuckey compared the viewpoint to that of a distracted spectator at a ballet, and says that it is Degas’ fascination with the depiction of movement, including the movement of a spectator’s eyes during a random glance, that makes him an impressionist. Whilst the musicians are treated as group portrait and their instruments accurately depicted, the legs and tutus of the dancers above are treated much more loosely like a quick study. In this way Degas blurs the distinction between genre painting and portraiture.

Degas, The Orchestra of the Opera, 1869

Chagall’s musical inspirations went deeper than the representation of musicians. They are expressed in his choice of colours and application of paint. He loved Bach and Mozart, and was also a big jazz fan. Connections between music and art in his work were extended by his creation of the sets for the New York Ballet, including the colourful performance of ‘The Firebird’. His painted ceiling of the Paris Opera house was a 2,600-square-foot canvas covered in 440 pounds of paint. Music inspired the composition and colour intensity as well as the subject matter, commemorating contemporary and historic composers, actors and dancers. He said ‘Colour is vibration like music. Everything is vibration.’ He channelled this by listening to music, with a particular preference for Mozart’s Magic Flute during the painting of the Paris Opera House ceiling, having designed the sets and costumes for the 1967 Metropolitan Opera production of the piece. It is represented in a commemoratory panel to Mozart - a giant angel fills the blue sky while a funny-looking bird plays the flute.

Scottish colourist J.D Fergusson was particularly inspired by music and the idea of rhythm. Rhythm was the title of an arts periodical launched in 1911, of which Fergusson was art editor. The cover design was a reworking of one of his paintings, also known as ‘Rhythm’, which depicts a seated female nude. For Fegusson, rhythm meant a vital energy and harmony seen in nature, represented by woman as the source of natural life. Ideas of rhythm also come across in his bold use of line and repeating curves, creating the dynamic forms of the figure and background. Like Chagall, Fergusson took inspiration from the meeting of music and art in ballet, in this case the Ballets Russes which were taking France by storm from 1909-11. Elizabeth Cumming compared his paintings’ themes of surging nature, primitivism and expressive sexuality to Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring.

J.D. Fergusson, Rhythm, 1925