When you look at everything that the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was involved with, you have to cover most of the fine arts and then add a good slog of literature. He was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and

Reading American literature during my student days in Europe was a rather thankless and boring task. I simply had no connection to the naïve optimism of the American frontier mentality or the preachy virtues of the Puritan legacy. For me,

Over the course of the last two centuries, there has been an interesting, changing relationship between music and the other arts, and concepts and depictions of nature. During the Classical period nature was represented as a backdrop in paintings for

What do Queen Victoria, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Tsar Nicholas II, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and numerous others have in common? They all purchased and played instruments produced by the Leipzig piano manufacturer Blüthner. Around 1900, Blüthner was

When we think of the artist Cecil Beaton, we think, perhaps, of two things: his photographs and his designs for the Broadway and film productions of My Fair Lady.

Once hailed as Time magazine’s top ten cultural figures of the millennium, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) should perhaps also be known as one of the most foul-mouthed classical musicians of all time. Although the musical genius has passed away for

Dmitri Shostakovich (1905-1975) had a hard and troubled career within the political machine that was the Soviet Union. At times the model composer and at others, the reviled modernist, he moved between the extremes of popularity and marginalization. His 11th

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.