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

Inner Animal

Where does the boundary lie between animal and human? Can the transformation of human into animal be positive as opposed to the frightening werewolves of horror stories?

Paula Rego’s ‘Dog woman’ was inspired by a story that a friend had written for her. She depicts women behaving like dogs in monumental poses, including howling at the moon, grooming and sleeping on her owners coat. Her use of pastels connects her work to the raw physicality of Degas women, relishing the resistance they give against the paper surface and eliminating the distance from the work that comes with a brush. The work challenges accepted feminine behaviour and conventions of representation. She explains; “To be a dog woman is not necessarily to be downtrodden; that has very little to do with it,” She explained, “In these pictures every woman’s a dog woman, not downtrodden, but powerful. To be bestial is good. It’s physical. Eating, snarling, all activities to do with sensation are positive. To picture a woman as a dog is utterly believable.“ A dog is a unique animal in its juxtaposition of the domestic and the wild, and parallels can be drawn with the lives of women – they learn behaviours from those around them but maintain a strong bodily independence. Casting a woman as a dog emphasises this physical side of the body. Rego says that the series of works is about the love she had for her husband Victor Wiling – having become the obedient wife herself, she explains how female students at the Slade were groomed to become the muse or empathetic partner of a male artist, which perhaps has something in common with the relationship between dog and owner. Although she used a model named Lila, with whom she had a very close relationship, she says that her model stands in for herself and the scenes depicted are based on personal stories. She first instructed Lila to ‘crouch there and growl’ and the resulting image gave way to a recurring theme.

Paula Rego, Dog Woman, 1994.

Eileen Cooper’s work most commonly features female nudes alongside animals, and there is an interesting lack of differentiation between the two. Both are painted with expressive and primitive qualities using line, so that animal approaches human and human approaches animal. The work encapsulates universal themes such as the dynamics of family relationships, female sexuality, fertility, motherhood, creativity and life and death. Like Paula Rego, Cooper paints women in unconventional poses, defying expectations of feminine grace for an animalistic physicality – A woman crouches naked on her studio floor to paint, her shoes cast aside as if to give way to her inner animal – the animalistic side of creativity. It could be said that these are women who are truly naked as opposed to performing ‘the nude’ as an art form. Imagination plays a large role in the conception of Cooper’s images - ‘I love the idea that the studio is the kind of place you might get a tiger walking through.’ Tigers are a recurring feature of her painting – As a woman stands on her head in a simplistic landscape, a tiger floats above her as though it were her spirit animal.

Eileen Cooper, Law of the Jungle, 1989.

Eileen Cooper, Law of the Jungle, 1989.

Sleepwalking

Sleep and dreams are the realm of the unconscious, making them of particular interest to Freudian psychoanalysis and surrealist artists. Sleepwalking can be seen as a physical manifestation of this unconscious. The surrealists believed that the subconscious of sleep could be tapped into and used as a source of artistic creativity. This reached a culmination in automatism, the act of creating art from the unconscious mind. It is a term is borrowed from physiology, where it describes bodily movements that are not consciously controlled like breathing or sleepwalking. Freud used automatism in the form of drawing to explore the unconscious mind of his patients. André Breton who launched the surrealist movement in 1924 defined surrealism as ‘Pure psychic automatism … the dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all moral or aesthetic concerns’. 

Dali’s ‘Sleep’ could be seen as an attempt to translate the dream world onto canvas. The spindly crutches, a Dali trademark, suggest instability before the inevitable collapse into sleep. The head hangs limply like a body in slumber. Dali said ‘I have often imagined the monster of sleep as a heavy, giant head with a tapering body held up by the crutches of reality. When the crutches break we have the sensation of falling.”’ Apparently Dali saw sleep as time ill-spent, and sought to overcome this drain on his creativity. When he felt sleep coming on he would sit holding a key poised above a metal plate on the floor. As soon as he nodded off the key would slip from his fingers and clang against the plate – waking him immediately. The painting ‘Sleep’ might be a rendering of this sensation and his rocky relationship with sleep.

Dali, Sleep, 1937.

Another surrealist, Rene Magritte explored the theme of sleep and the unconscious in his work. In ‘Reckless Sleeper’ a figure sleeps in a dark cloudy sky, above a stone tablet embedded with seemingly random objects. Magritte’s work often features banal, ordinary objects in extraordinary situations. These objects may represent the dream of the sleeping figure, and can be read as Freudian symbols. Although the equally spaced and clearly illustrated objects are reminiscent of children’s storybooks, there is an atmosphere of unease and disorientation, leading to an alternative comparison with a police crime recreation. The sleeper is contained within a coffin like box, which alongside the stormy sky suggests the painting may be a visual interpretation of a nightmare more than a dream.

Magritte, The Reckless Sleeper, 1928.

Paul Delvaux’s encounters with contemporaries such as René Magritte introduced surrealistic influences into his work. Like the surrealists, he was interested in exploring humanity and the hidden depths of the subconscious. He expressed this using bizarre subject matter rendered naturalistically rather than abstraction. The believability of his style adds to the uneasy feeling of his scenes. Delvaux didn’t give as much importance to Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas as the surrealists. He stated that he did not aim to paint his dreams but rather “to transcribe reality to make it into a kind of dream.” He was also interested in the relationship with the alter ego. The imagery of ‘The Dream’ brings to mind an out of body experience -  that which typically involves a feeling of floating outside of the body or perceiving one’s physical body as if from the outside, initiating a lucid dream state. His use of the woman to represent this is significant as Delvaux’s relations with women were troublesome (he had a domineering mother, a platonic affair and an unsuccessful marriage). Thus he represented women as mysterious and beautiful but unobtainable. ‘The Dream’ could be read as the mystery of the woman’s subconscious mind.

Paul Delvaux, The Dream, 1935.

Dance

Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes were taking France by storm in 1909-11. With their music movement and colour they were ‘a total work of art’ which broke free from the codes of classical dance. This new perspective on ballet may be what stimulated the growing interest of painters and sculptors who took it as their subject. Isadora Duncan’s pioneering dance style based on natural movement reflected increasing freedom in the arts. In the context of such developments, links between art and dance were strengthened, with a shared taste for rhythm and the primitive. The new styles of dance were particularly suited to artists working from life, as unlike classical ballet, the poses and movements were natural and unpredictable.

Matisse’s painting ‘La Danse’ is often associated with ‘The Dance of the Young Girls’ from Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’, written for the Ballets Russes. The composition or arrangement of dancing figures is reminiscent of William Blake’s watercolour “Oberon, Titania and Puck with fairies dancing” from 1786. It was painted with a companion piece ‘Music’ and originally hung together, comprising the two main elements of Ballet. It features five muscular dancing figures in red against a simplified blue and green landscape. The simple style and strong contours reflect Matisse’s interest in primitive art whilst using a fauvist colour palette of intense red figures against a cool background. Form matches content – the rhythmical pattern of nudes dancing in a circle conveys feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism. With hands linked, they are swept off their feet giving an impression of momentum. There is only a slight break in the circle between the hands of the two foremost dancers, creating a sense of tension but also an invitation for the viewer to join in.

Mastisse, La Danse, 1910

Like Matisse, J.D Fergusson depicts a group of nudes dancing in a stylised landscape, titled ‘Les Eus’. This time the figures are more densely layered and include male as well as female dancers. Their free rhythmic actions also correspond with the new dance style of Isadora Duncan and the Ballets Russes. Fergusson moved to Paris in 1907 for the artistic stimulation which Scoltand couldn’t offer him. Whilst there he absorbed the new ways of looking at the world pioneered by French artists like Matisse and Cezanne, and would have seen Matisse’s ‘La Danse’ at the 1910 Salon d’Automne. His interest in the subject of dance grew when he began to receive free tickets to the Ballets Russes and regularly sketched the dancers there.

His use of bold line and strong tonal contrasts emphasise pattern whilst supressing depth. A sense of rhythm is created by repetition of the curved lines of the dancers in the surrounding foliage. The title is believed to have come from the term “Eurythmics”, coined by Emil-Jacques Delacroze in 1911 for his new science of dance. The Eurhythmics movement emphasised the relationship between dance and health, and promoted the understanding of music through physical movement. It was highly influential on Fergusson and his work.

J.D. Fergusson, Les Eus, 1911-13

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was a French artist and sculptor living and working in London from 1911-14. Like Matisse and Fergusson, it is likely that Gaudier’s innovative translation of movement in his sculpture ‘Dancer’ was influenced by the liberations taking place in contemporary dance. Gaudier found inspiration from the Ballets Russes when they came to London. He worked closely from his friend and model Nina Hamnett. Although the proportions of Dancer appear to have been manipulated, observation from life is seen in the otherwise anatomically correct pose and sensitive modelling of the muscle and bone structure. She is poised in dance with her hands above her head, legs bent as if dismounting her plinth.

Rodin’s ‘Dance Movements’ are a likely source for Gaudier’s conception of Dancer. Gaudier took many of his ideas about what sculpture should achieve from Rodin’s book L'Art, which promoted the goal of capturing life through movement. Rodin’s words are echoed in Gaudier’s own expression that 'Movement is the translation of life and if art depicts life, movement should come into art, since we are only aware of life because it moves’. In imitation of Rodin, Gaudier said he wanted ‘a model who didn’t pose at all, but did everything he wanted to, walked, ran, danced’. He fulfilled this desire when sculpting Dancer, with his request that Hamnett 'turned around slowly’ whilst he worked. Dancer captures a paused moment, where the twisted tension of the body anticipates a release of energy. The elongation of the limbs and sinuous form modelled in clay add to the sense of fluid movement.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Dancer, 1913

Fruit

Still life was at the bottom of the hierarchy of genres during the renaissance. Artists would sometimes justify a fruit bowl still life through the inclusion of a nude, or by creating visual puns from the symbolism. Some highlighted the erotic associations of certain fruits, with their anthropomorphic shapes. The associations between fruit and sensuality come from the notion of the forbidden fruit, and fruit’s fertile, tactile nature. Like the human figure, fruits were seen as one of God’s creations deserving of representation. Still lifes of fruit bowls could be used to balance out a figure composition and demonstrate the broad range of the artist’s skill in tackling multiple genres in the same work.

Caravaggio was one painter known to use fruits as sexual metaphor. He painted over a dozen pictures containing seventeen different fruits and vegetables. In his ‘Bacchus’ an effeminate young boy with a grapevine in his hair offers out a goblet of red wine. This is quite literal symbolism for Bacchus who was the God of wine, madness and ecstasy. In front of him is a basket of fruit, some ripe and some rotting, leading it to be interpreted as a vanitas – a type of still life common in the renaissance and baroque periods intended to remind the viewer of the fleeting nature of earthly life. Like his figures, Caravaggio painted the fruits from life, including precise representations of disease symptoms and insect damage. One of the vine leaves on his head is turning red, probably an indication of crown gall, a bacterial disease causing swellings on stems and roots. There may be a simpler explanation for the inclusion of rotting fruit, as painting such precise detail would have been a timely process. The fruits include black, red, and white bunches of grapes; a bursting pomegranate, figs, a large green pear, three apples and a half-rotten quince. Whilst some interpret the bursting pomegranate as sexual metaphor, others argue that he was simply displaying his painterly skill, and his love of the shapes and lushness of the fruit.

Any erotic overtones are heightened by Bacchus’ fingering of his loosely draped robe, as he appears to be inviting the viewer to join him with the offer of wine. Upon closer inspection the façade of the Greek God gives way to the reality of a half-drunk teenager with a men’s shirt slung over his shoulder, resting against a grubby mattress in the studio. It has also been discovered that Caravaggio included a miniature  self portrait of himself painting his subject in the reflection of the wine glass.

Caravaggio, Bacchus, 1595.

Jan Sluitjers often painted female nudes accompanied by still lifes such as flowers and fruit bowls. These fruit bowls are positioned to the side, in front and behind the model. In both ‘Seated nude with flowers and fruit’ and ‘Still life with standing nude’, the fruit rests on an abundance of crumpled coloured drapes, which continue over the nude’s shoulder and leg, turning her into a part of the still life. Whilst Caravaggio’s ‘Bacchus’ is primarily a painting of the Greek God, adorned by fruit, the fruit and figures in Sluitjers’ paintings are invested with equal significance. It is possible that the artist was drawing parallels between women and fruit, a theory supported by the feminine forms of the various vases and vessels alongside the pears in ‘Still life with standing nude’. The upright vase is a definite echo of the shape of the standing nude, which in turn echoes the pear. Decorative porcelain fruit bowls, as well as the jewellery in ‘Seated nude with flowers and fruits’ suggest the exotic spoils of geographic expansion. Unlike Caravaggio’s fruit, the fruit here all appears to be fresh and ripe, standing as a symbol of female fertility, youth and vitality. However like youthful beauty, we are aware that the fruit is perishable and ephemeral. As the apple is associated with the Tree of Knowledge and the Garden of Eden, the female nude alongside the apple may be a reference to Eve and the notions of temptation and sin.

Jan Sluitjers, Seated Nude with Flowers and Fruits, 1927.

Jan Sluitjers, Still Life with Standing Nude,