Great Painters Have Drawn Inspiration from Classical Music
The connection between art and music goes back a long way. It is well known that great artists such as Leonardo, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix were also excellent musicians whose creative work in the field of painting was inevitably accompanied by music. Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa in a studio full of musicians who played for the occasion, while Delacroix is said to have painted the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris to the accompaniment of an organ playing in the background.
Although the relationship between the two arts has always been a part of history, this synergy gained a greater intensity in the twentieth century for one reason in particular: the emergence of the fascinating human tool of psychoanalysis. The complex paths of psychoanalysis can be traversed in a variety of ways, and the crossroads of these paths can be found in Matisse and Kandinsky, as well as Mondrian and Paul Klee. For them, music was not just a muse, but a tool for exploring the inner world. It was with the help of music that these painters realised rhythms and tones on the canvas.
In order to better understand these changes, we should reflect on the experiences of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. While the former attempted to transfer to the canvas the energy of the music he was listening to (such as the music of the great Johann Sebastian Bach), the latter took one step further in his artistic exploration. Kandinsky was the first artist to consistently talk about the desire to create works that trigger a multi-sensory journey in the viewer, saying that he wanted to capture the inner sound of the elements. He argued that there was another dimension that could not be expressed in words, but only through pure art, independent of classical means.
Matisse loved classical music and hosted concerts of works by Mozart and Beethoven in his house, especially in winter. His desire to recreate the purity and harmony of Bach’s compositions in visual art is obvious in masterpieces such as La Danse and La Musique. Writing in 1877, English essayist Walter Pater explained: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” According to Pater, this is because in music, form and content coexist at the same time. The attempts of visual art to approach the purity and formal unity of music may not have led to art and music becoming equal on an expressive level, but they have nonetheless given rise to interesting combinations: true artistic melting pots capable of changing those of us who enjoy both listening to music and viewing art.
