“Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity.”
Modest Mussorgsky
As philosopher Richard Wollheim says, art is “one of the most elusive of the traditional problems of human culture.” In its simplest manifestation, art is a form of communication that serves as a vehicle for the expression of emotions and ideas. As ideas and beliefs are culturally specific and constantly changing over time, there really is no generally agreed definition of what constitutes art. That being said, the classical branches of the visual arts are identified as painting, sculpture and architecture. Literature and poetry are considered part of the humanities or as one of the arts, while music, alongside theatre, film and dance belong to the performing arts. In this section you will discover not only specific explorations of individual art forms, but also a more detailed probing of the relationship between the visual arts and music, including painting and music, sculpture and music and architecture and music. Originally, poetry and music were treated as a unity, but gradually they have become more independent. Nevertheless, the two art forms have never forgotten their shared genetic makeup, and been intertwined for millennia. Art and music have engaged in a dynamic relationship that reveals a diverse range of human activity intended to be appreciated for their beauty.
The unfinished church of “Sagrada Familia” in Barcelona is Antoni Gaudí’s exceptional creative contribution to the development of architecture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. George Orwell called it “one of the most hideous buildings in the world!”
In a recent conversation on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the architect Frank Gehry, the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen and the art critic Nicolai Ouroussoff discussed the concept of
Believe it or not, the dictionaries and most prominent reference books of 1878 did not have a word to identify what we now think of as abstract art. The best anybody could do at the time was to compare paintings
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,
Between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter lays a vast region of space occupied by numerous irregularly shaped celestial bodies. Known as asteroids and minor planets, this so-called asteroid belt was formed by violent primordial collisions. Scientist have
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.
