núm. 004 Revista de pensament musical any2009

Music and plastic arts (second part) Our near history. Points of contact

> Ju a n An t o n i o Mu r o 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.

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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.

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Im p r e s s i o n i s 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,

The key for understanding this approach is in the so called .

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.

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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’”, 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,

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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 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.

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Painting 4 - , 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.

Bu t , w h a t w a s i t a l l a b o u t ?

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

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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

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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.

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Wh a t h a p p e n s t o m u s i c a t t h e s a m e t i m e ?

Impressionism in music is more or less as much as Claude . 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.

Debussy doesn’t care about leaving dissonance’s freely, without resolution. Neither is Monet afraid of clean colors and of the appearance of his free brush.

In the music of Debussy there are undetermined, ambiguous, apparently unsettled

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intervals, chords and forms that develop themselves organically, even if the ABA form, for example, is somehow present, haunting like a ghost.

Painting also keeps an identifying form. A tree looks like a tree. But there are no more details or drawing lines. The color is determined by the light, and the unexpected compositions of forms are, they too, full of surprises

Western music had not before been interested in the personality of the sound. Nor had plastic arts been specially interested on color itself. Color had always been a servant of drawing and sound had had mainly a constructive function.

However Debussy didn’t yet give complete independence to sound. Neither did Monet make color absolutely independent. That was to come later.

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Painting 7 - Paul Cézanne, 1839-1906 ”Château Noir”, 1902-05 oil on canvas, 70 x 82 cm Private collection

We have to analyze even if briefly the post-impressionist period and specially Cézanne because his work has a clear and important role in the transition to abstraction, which is our next subject. Cézanne’s work is the meeting point of many of the theories where further tendencies begin.

Cézanne looks for an ideal communion between experience and emotion, between reason and feeling. He speaks about the need to examine the nature through basic geometric forms. The cylinder, the sphere and the cube. And that statement has been good enough, for those who want to make of Cézanne the creator of .

We can understand that, because if we analyze his work we notice first of all that he has a tendency to synthesize form, to look for a geometric correspondence. The

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traditional perspective, according to which, everything gets smaller as it goes further away, is not interesting anymore. We also see that Cezanne’s colors are concentrated in fields. And the fields are like volumes, something that is full of something.

In this sense Cézanne’s art is the opposite to impressionist art. Impressionist art tries, on the contrary, to eliminate the outline, to eliminate the ”silhouette”.

Painting 8 - Cézanne ”Le Cabanon de Jourdan”, 1906 oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm Private collection

He uses a clean color-scale. Clean color means here that the color works as color and not as an element that fills the inside of a drawing. He uses a clean color-scale because for him color is also form, and when color is clean it becomes a volume, a form full of something. It becomes ”abundance”.

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Painting 9 - Cézanne ”Mont Sainte Victoire”, 1902-04, oil on canvas, 69 x 89 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Every brush stroke has a concrete form, it is smooth and part of a construction. That is why we could say that this is the first time in history when a ”brush stroke” has the same function as a ”note” in a composition. The form is built by independent strokes of the brush in the same way as a composer builds the form of his composition with independent sounds.

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Ka n d i n s k y ’s a b s t r a c t i o n a n d Sc h ö n b e r g ’s expressionis m a n d dodecaphonis m .

Wh y d o w e h a v e t o u s e a m o d e l ?

We shall see now how the Impressionism and the post-impressionism, that seemed like a revolution, were not the top of the revolutionary movement. They only showed the way for the real dramatic changes to come. They were only preparing the aesthetic chaos that affects us still today.

Once again the change starts from inside the world of the plastic arts and it is plastic arts that brings it up. The reason is clear:

Music has always been an abstract art form that has never needed an object.

Plastic art had always been attached to an object. It had always needed a model. Also during the Impressionist period, even though the character of the model didn’t have any importance. Even then the object had been a necessity, it had been unavoidable.

Of course, it made no difference weather it was a cathedral or a water lily, but it was there because the painter needed something to paint.

And that was the point: if the character of the model doesn’t have any importance, why do we have to use a model? ... do we need it at all?... what is the model doing?

Let’s eliminate it!, it leads our attention to the wrong track.

And that is how the real revolution started: The object was eliminated, the abstraction was born

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Mu s i c a n d p a i n t i n g r e a c h t h e s a m e l e v e l o f a b s t r a c t i o n

Painting 10 - , 1866-1944 Without name, first abstract painting 1910 water color on paper, 50 x 65 cm

It was Wassily Kandinsky who, by the way, had been a post-impressionist until then, the first in noticing that painting didn’t need any object. Expressive color and the strength of the form were enough to create artistic vibrations.

It can be that impressionist music owes perhaps something to impressionist painting, OK, but now music takes a revenge: Kandinsky found the inspiration for his extreme change in the music. The music did never have to go through that kind of radical identity changes, because it had always been an abstract art.

Painting doesn’t want to imitate anymore, not even light. Painting wants to be only painting. The totality of its colors and its forms is the important thing and this feeling is the only content, the only subject matter.

Music, the most absolute of all arts. Music, which is absolutely unable to tell any

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kind of concrete story, has always been free and independent.

Now, at last, painting was able to carry out the same idea.

This is, officially of course, the first abstract painting in art history. A small water color (50 x 65 cms)

We can see here some kind of completely undefined biomorphical forms that are flying in a space with no clear meaning. You cannot recognize anything in them nor can we compare them to anything. They are not insects, nor plants. Nevertheless their strength, their freshness and vitality makes them organic. They move and we can even predict their direction.

However they are in perfectly controlled balance. They don’t give an anarchistic idea of dispersion, going anywhere out of the paper.

And that happens because the artist has put them on this limited surface of a paper according to well known compositional rules.

The composition is a half circle with some diagonal lines of elements crossing it. And that accentuates the movement up and to the right which is one of many classical ways of composing a picture.

However, look at the green form in the upper edge of the painting. It stops the movement before the elements have the possibility of ”scaping” the space where the artist wants them to be. Details like this create tension and drama.

There is an evident tendency for democracy in the picture. All the elements are different, however none of them is dominated or dominates the others.

If we think about the democracy represented by the twelve tones of the scale. What would be nearer dodecaphonism than the style represented by this painting?

Composer organizes sounds according to mathematical or emotional, formal and acoustic laws. Kandinsky started organizing his material according to the interaction of colors and the natural laws of composition. Nobody had done this systematically before.

Abstraction is an accumulation of visual problems that the viewer has to resolve

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himself in the same way as music is an acoustic one. We could also say that abstraction is an accumulation of propositions that the viewer and the listener translate to themselves according to their cultural heritage and knowledge.

Kandinsky painted constructions of colors and forms that didn’t offer the viewer the answers that the identification of an object offers. He offers feelings, ambiguous significance’s, nothing quite concrete, he offers insecurity. Just as the music was doing.

Music and painting reach at last the same level of equality.

Kandinsky and Schönberg (1874 - 1951) were in near contact almost all their life and their mutual influence is more than evident.

According to Schönberg, represented an ”acoustic vice”, a bad habit that had to be stopped. The role of the 12-tone system was to create rules to control the new atonal anarchy. It’s meaning was to avoid chaos.

Kandinsky followed the same process. Object too, was a ”visual vice”, a bad habit to which our eyes had been accustomed. Also Kandinsky was aware of the chaos, where plastic art could have fallen into, without the system he created in order to control it.

Fu r t h e r e v o l u t i o n

There are, naturally, other interesting meeting points in the 20th century.

We can for example relate the collage in the Cubism to the typical music quotations of our post-modernist music.

There are similarities that can be found between a part of the american Abstract of the fifties and the cluster technique of Ligetti for example. Why not the european informalism and the aleatory music.

An other interesting point of contact is , of course, as a reaction to the complexity of certain aspects of .

The inevitable , himself a visual artist, has many meeting points with some aspects of the american painting of the sixties and above all with conceptual

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art where the importance is in the idea, not in the technique. Where intelligence and vision can be enough to create a piece of art.

It is also interesting to analyze the pluralism of our eclectic where everything is possible.

We cannot predict the future. We are again nowadays living in a socially and economically restless period, where everything changes in a high speed. Art has always had a fast reaction to these processes, but art itself is also restless in its evolution.

We can somehow notice a kind of tiredness towards this amazing speed and this abundance of styles that doesn’t appear to be in any apparent order.

One can see in this process, if one wants, a tendency to deterioration, a feeling of decadence. But decadence is not always negative. Decadence leads to something new, something we can, perhaps even soon, witness.

Ju a n An t o n i o Mu r o , 2009

The pictorical work of Juan Antonio Muro can be seen in the website www.juanantoniomuro.com and is musical work through the Finnish Music Information Center www.fimic.fi

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