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Music and Plastic Arts Our Near History. Points of Contact

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Music and Plastic Arts Our Near History. Points of Contact núm. 004 Revista de pensament musical any2009 Music and plastic arts (second part) Our near history. Points of contact > JUAN ANTONIO MURO www.juanantoniomuro.com Juan Antonio Muro Painting 1 - William Turner, 1775-1851, ”The Shipwreck”,1805, oil on canvas, 171 x 241 cm Tate Collection At the end of the 19th century and in the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries plastic art runs into a period of radical transformation. Pushed by the new appearing technologies it loses its informative and didactic role. www.webdemusica.org 1 núm. Sonograma 004 Revista de pensament musical any2009 The values that until then had been unquestionable and highly respected suffer from a serious crisis. Art reaches a point of deep tiredness. Common criteria breaks and something amazing and unexpected is about to begin. The century of the ”isms” starts with an unstoppable energy. The new aesthetics compete with each other in an atmosphere of unlimited freedom. They develop influencing strongly one another, competing and fighting for power. This aggressive break seems logical to us now when we think about the politics, economics and the social struggle of that time in our western civilization. The changes and the scientific achievements create new ways of thinking, new philosophies. Human being in the western world becomes more rational. The idea of God disturbs him. He wants to trust only in himself. But at the same time he feels unsure about his own origins and about his role in life. Nietsche declares the death of God. Darwin demonstrates that man kind descends from animals. Freud revels the secrets of the unconscious, etc. Seen from that point of view the art revolution is not a miracle. Changes in society result as changes in arts. It can seem amazing, but a typical consequence of this crisis is that arts get nearer to each other both theoretically and in practice. 2 www.webdemusica.org núm. Sonograma 004 Revista de pensament musical any2009 IM PRESSIONIS M Painting 2 - Edouard Manet, 1832 - 1883 , ”Le déjeuner sur l’herbe” ,1962-63 after Giorgione’s ”Concert champêtre” oil on canvas, 208 x 265 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris The key for understanding this approach is in the so called Impressionism. At the beginning of the 19th century the idealism of Romanticism had opened the doors to Individualism and exaltation. After that - and always speaking about plastic arts - Realism had demanded a strict objectivity in the realization of the model. And then comes Impressionism that has something of both Romanticism and Realism. In the second half of the 19th century happens something that will change completely the idea of art. 3 www.webdemusica.org núm. Sonograma 004 Revista de pensament musical any2009 This change begins concretely with this painting of Edouard Manet ”Le déjeuner sur l’herbe” ”(Breakfast on the Lawn”) It appeared at the right moment and in the right place: Paris. This painting and also this one of the same painter, Edouard Manet: Painting 3 - Edouard Manet ”L’Olympia”, 1862-63 after Titian ”The Venus of Urbino” oil on canvas, 130 x 190 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris ”L’Olympia”, painted in the same year, brought public into a shock, The paintings were a scandal. But for the young painter generation the elements that provoked that shock in the public represented exactly the newness, the novelty, the new point of what was yet to come. And this novelty was not in the nudity of the persons in the painting. No, because there had been before naked figures in paintings. People were used to it. The novelty was first of all in the attitude of the figures in the painting, the models, 4 www.webdemusica.org núm. Sonograma 004 Revista de pensament musical any2009 and in the way color was used. They were normal people looking straight into your eyes. Anybody you could meet in the street. They were not mythologic or historical personages. They didn’t have any reason to be in the painting. They were not idealized, or anonymous characters, in a dark melancholic crepuscular light saying something transcendental, as people were used to. That light ... cold, banal, the normal daylight ... and those colors ... the way they were used, almost aggressively. People were used to dark, brown broken warm colors, mixed colors, not clean and trivial like these. And Manet revealed a new attitude towards color, bright and full of light, cold, objective. Everything was against the tradition and the rules of good taste. And that was questioning the character and the meaning of the traditional way of conceiving art. In ”Le déjeuner sur l’herbe” happens for the first time a transfer of attention from the object itself to the presentation of the object, to the way of treating it. Let’s say a nude, for example, is no longer important as a nude. We don’t care about the nude, the subject of the painting can be anything. Manet wants a light spot in his painting and some elements close to it in order to underline it and he paints a nude with two men with a black jacket. Or a black woman and a black cat. What is importance now is in the way we paint the nude or whatever we have in front of our eyes, how we use colors, and under which light. This represents one of the most important steps in modern art because we are saying that the object is meaningless and through this lack of meaning of the object we simply open the doors to abstraction. 5 www.webdemusica.org núm. Sonograma 004 Revista de pensament musical any2009 Painting 4 - Claude Monet, 1840 - 1926, ”Impression soleil levant”, 1872 oil on canvas, 48 x 63 cm Musée Marmottan, Paris The real agitator of this movement was nevertheless Claude Monet. He was the one who made Impressionism an universal aesthetic. BUT , WHAT WAS IT ALL A B OUT ? This was an art that had an immediate effect. An art that didn’t care about showing us a clean but artificial picture of reality. This was an art that wanted to show us reality as we see it. An art that used a different technique that had been found investigating different effects of light. Impressionists use clean colors and put them on the canvas with free strokes of the 6 www.webdemusica.org núm. Sonograma 004 Revista de pensament musical any2009 brush, straight and roughly. Not like the old technique where colors were carefully mixed and put on the canvas by thin layers. Colors took the place of drawing. There is no drawing in nature, no lines. Forms and colors get all mixed up. The meaning of Impressionism is to investigate the spontaneous vibrations of light. Find the essential and forget about the details. Painting 5 - Claude Monet ”Houses of Parliament, Sunset” 1903 oil on canvas, 81 x 92 cm Chester Dale Collection This building ”happens to be” The Parliament of London but this is not an important fact. The importance is in these mysterious gray blueish and greenish tones on a 7 www.webdemusica.org núm. Sonograma 004 Revista de pensament musical any2009 building that is like a fairy tale castle, seen through the fog influenced by the orange light of a certain moment of the day. Painting 6 - Claude Monet ”La cathédrale de Rouen”, 1892 oil on canvas, 100 x 65 cm Musée Marmottan, Paris Neither here is the cathedral’s architectonic anatomy important. It’s the light that rests on it. How it changes through the day. 8 www.webdemusica.org núm. Sonograma 004 Revista de pensament musical any2009 WHAT HAPPENS TO M USIC AT THE SA M E TI M E ? Impressionism in music is more or less as much as Claude Debussy. It would anyway be unjust to say that plastic Impressionism has had a decisive influence in Debussy. He used the term ”impression” because it was everywhere. And he used it because it defined in a certain way an attitude which was important to him. eW could say, on the contrary, that Debussy’s genius helped to universalize the concept of Impressionism. In any case. This is one of the periods in history where arts meet and have an evident connection. -Allow me to repeat that the philosophy of Impressionism is not based in the object itself but in the way the artist treats the object. The artist makes us to see the power, the intensity of the object, not the object, which is important only as a producer of vibrations-. Connection doesn’t mean fusion; arts are not blending, absorbing each other. They connect because they do not imitate each other, they remain independent, and use the methods that belong to each one’s identity. Color becomes the soul of impressionist painters. Sound that of composers. Each one with its own methods and material. Independent from each other. This is the real connection, the similarity of attitude. The music of Debusssy is based on sensations. Debussy communicates to us sensorial impressions that he describes, as the impressionist painters do, with the neutral attitude of an observer. His vision is a challenge for traditional harmony and for the classic forms and therefore he is obliged to take a distance from them. Doing so he liberates the sound and discovers the color of it. Monet used clean colors that show a tendency to be independent. Our eyes absorb them and put them together in a totality of light. Debussy used sounds, chords, whose tonal function becomes unclear. They also show a tendency to be independent. And the same way as our eyes absorb and synthesize the colors, our ear too changes the sounds into free feelings of our mind.
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