Many 20th century and contemporary artists claim not only to have been inspired by music, but make a very compelling case for a close connection between a particular kind of music and their art.

In January 1911, the painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was in Munich and went to a concert. He and the other members of the Munich New Artists’ Association heard something that changed Kandinsky’s whole artistic theory. The concert was of music

Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes brought music, art, and dance into the 20th century. Eschewing the traditional, Diaghilev worked with the leading artists in all fields to bring a new life to a fairly moribund art form.

Most of the music and art connections have been fairly simple: a picture of art and piece of music. In the case of Grünewald and Hindemith, we have a more complex inspiration that also has a political side. Matthias Grünewald

Paul Klee (1879-1940) was a Swiss-German painter with a unique style sometimes humorous, sometimes childlike, and always able to draw us into his work. Of all the composers we’ve looked at in this series, it is Klee who has inspired

In our series on Music and Art, we’ve been looking at works of music inspired by works of art. The influence also goes the other way, where works of art have been inspired by music. Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) came from

In this series on Music and Art, we’ve mainly been looking at representational pictures (people, trees, and landscapes). When we look at an artist from the world of abstract expressionism, all of our horizons open wide. Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was

In 1902, after the successful debut of his opera Pelléas and Mélisande, Claude Debussy published many articles as a music critic under the pseudonym Monsieur Croche (similar to Paul Valéry’s pseudonym ‘Monsieur Teste’) in the ‘Revue Blanche’ and other publications.