The recently released film, ‘Mr. Turner’, by Mike Leigh focuses on the last 25 years of James Turner’s (1775-1849) life, the height of Turner’s career. The film opens with a beautiful Dutch landscape scene, with the sun rising at dawn,
Painting
In my last two Interlude articles we followed the development towards abstraction in art and music in Germany and France, but interestingly, it was artists in Russia who led the movement towards total abstraction. There was of course a constant
Paul Klee (1879-1940) craved the freedom to explore radical and modernist experimentations in his paintings. In music, however, he could never come to terms with contemporary works of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. In fact, he even disliked the compositions of
After Kandinsky’s and Schoenberg ground-breaking endeavors, many artists in France, Italy and Russia started to follow different paths — all towards abstraction.
“Must we not then renounce the object altogether,throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?”Vasily Kandinsky, 1911 In the early years of the 20th century the relationship between the arts and music was at its closest
‘Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent…. Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent’ (As long echoes confound from afar….perfumes, colors and sounds respond to each other’) Charles Baudelaire, ‘Correspondances’ The recent exhibition at the Sackler
One of the most eagerly encoded images in a number of different cultures and contexts is the angel sitting on a cloud and playing the harp. What could be more comforting upon leaving this earthly realm than being greeted by
Violins, guitars, mandolins, music sheets and references to classical composers are very much part of Braque’s oeuvre, particularly during his analytic and synthetic cubist period, which essentially started in the early part of the 20th century and lasted well into