- In this fascinating study, Peter Vergo reveals - how music and painting drew on each other for inspiration and stimulation during the emergence and development of modernism.
- Explores how artists attempted to translate - musical rhythms and structures into painting, and how musicians developed visual themes in their compositions.
- Analyses individual pieces of music and - works of art, from Paul Signac's musical seascapes and Modeste Musorgsky's popular piano pieces to Wassily Kandinsky's abstract paintings and John Cage's silent works.
- An accessible and insightful exploration of - ideas, useful to scholars of art history and music, and fascinating to the general reader.

The music of painting

The Music of Painting - Music, Modernism and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to John Cage

Emil Nolde est l'artiste allemand le plus important de l'époque moderne. Après avoir achevé sa formation à Paris en 1899-1900, il élabore dans la première décennie du XXe siècle un style novateur qui est à l'origine de l'Expressionnisme allemand. La couleur, employée en toute liberté, le dessin, incisif et sans concession, sont au service d'une vision émerveillée et tragique, où s'expriment le sentiment de la nature et le mystère des origines. Attaché à sa terre natale du Schleswig, à la frontière germano-danoise, Nolde n'a pas hésité à rompre les amarres pour un voyage vers la Papouasie et la Nouvelle-Guinée qui marque son œuvre d'une humanité profonde et universelle. Sa peinture religieuse est probablement l'une des plus significatives de l'époque moderne. Nolde renoue avec une spiritualité archaïque où la joie et la douleur s'expriment avec une émotion sans retenue. Considéré par les nazis comme " artiste dégénéré " à partir de 1937, frappé d'une interdiction de peindre en 1941, Nolde se replie dans sa maison de Seebüll, où il continue en secret son œuvre. Réhabilité après guerre, il crée avec son épouse Ada une fondation qui lui survit, la Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. Le catalogue, qui réunit les contributions des meilleurs spécialistes de Nolde, français, allemands et anglais, une iconographie abondante et une chronologie détaillée, est la première publication complète en langue française sur l'artiste.

Emil Nolde

Ever since antiquity, philosophers have pointed to the supposed 'divine' character of music, and following Pythagoras' discovery of the mathematical basis of the musical scale, have posited a link between the mathematical order of music, the physical order of the universe and the moral order of human society. Both practising artists and moralists came to believe that, by demonstrating an analogy with music, they could claim a dignity and 
value for their art - whether painting, architecture or sculpture - that it might otherwise lack. Why was this so? What was the point of such analogies? What advantages was music believed to enjoy by comparison with the visual arts? Artists and critics frequently cited music as a manifestation of God-given order to which visual arts should aspire. But on what evidence was this belief in the inherently systematic character of music based; and in practical terms, how might visual art seek to emulate any such divine order or system? In what way might Gothic cathedrals have been based on systems of harmonic proportion? How did Poussin's search for a compositional principle derived from antique 'modes' in music resemble, or differ from, Palladio's attempts to embody musical 'harmonies' in architecture? And how did each artist conceive of the sense and value of such analogies? Systematic answers to such questions have hitherto been lacking, and, for the first time, Professor Vergo makes direct and detailed comparisons between musical and pictorial practices in the long period covered by the book. He also provides a broad analysis of changes in the character of the analogies drawn at different times, using in his analyses critical and philosophical sources as well as evidence about artistic and musical practice.

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