Visible Deeds of Music : Art and Music from Wagner to Cage

by Simon Shaw-Miller

• ISBN13: 9780300083743
• ISBN10: 0300083742
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2002-06-10
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

This thoughtful and provocative book explores the relationship between music and the visual arts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the modernist period. Reassessing the work of composers and artists such as Richard Wagner, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Josef Matthias Hauer, and John Cage, Simon Shaw-Miller argues that despite modernism's advocacy of media purity and separation, the boundaries between art and music were permeable at this time, as they have been throughout history.

Shaw-Miller begins by discussing the place of Wagner's music and ideas at the time of the birth of modernism, presenting Wagner's aesthetic of the Gesamtkunstwerk as an alternative paradigm for modernist art. He goes on to analyze Picasso's use of musical subjects in his cubist works and Klee's adoption of music and the issue of temporality in his paintings and drawings. He concludes with the radical aesthetic of Cage, the silencing of sound, and the promotion of intermediality in the work of Fluxus artists. Through these fascinating examples, Shaw-Miller raises

Author Biography

Simon Shaw-Miller is lecturer in the history of art at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xiii
Ut Pictura Musica: Interdisciplinarity, Art, and Music	1	(35)
``Deeds of Music Made Visible'': Wagner, the Gesamtkunstwerk, and the Birth of the Modern	36	(53)
Instruments of Desire: Musical Morphology in Picasso's Cubism	89	(32)
Quasi Una Musica: Kupka and Klee, Music, and the Idea of Abstraction	121	(42)
``Out of Tune''; Hauer's Legacy and the Aesthetics of Minimalism in Art and Music	163	(45)
A Chorus of Voices: Seeing Music in Cage and Fluxus, the Birth of the Postmodern	208	(37)
Notes	245	(38)
Index	283