Do an artist’s eyes listen…?

 

 

Artists face a great temptation to bolster their arsenals with the ever-persuasive metaphor of the musical act — a time-tested method of heightened impact on human consciousness. The most striking use of music’s power occurs in ideological and religious ritual.

 

Artists most commonly turn to musical allegory in an effort to map the movement of their own souls, employing musical symbols to reveal the fundamental orientation of their own natures. Often, the figure of a musician or musical elements in a painting or sculpture become the artist’s personal trademark — just as the silhouette of a church’s cross-crowned cupola, roving the canvas’s plane, might serve this purpose, or whatever similar symbol the artist holds most dear.

 

At virtually any art exhibit, you’ll find at least one musical instrument depicted in some form — even if only as a decorative detail in a larger composition. This is always a winning element, with its inherent spirituality lending the entire work an aura of transcendence beyond the material world. In such cases, the artist’s technique and skill matter little — the symbolic instrument guarantees the viewer’s response “in advance.” Goethe’s words, “I always discern it, like a star or candle, or a tongue of flame amid smoke, or a familiar, beloved gaze, like a bright ray in a strange, numberless crowd” (from Boris Pasternak’s Russian Faust translation), could well describe this precisely targeted, sniper-like musical effect.

 

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to attempt — at least provisionally — to classify how artists professionally relate to the art of music. So what exactly is MUSIC for an artist?

 

a) The musical instrument (or “living musical mass”) simply as an object, attractive by virtue of its beautiful, hardly trivial form and coloration.

 

b) Musical allusions that characterize the artist’s orientation through choice of subject — figures for compositional arrangement, background details, still-life elements.

 

c) Musical symbols as testimony to the artist’s refined worldview and elevated perception of reality — a spirit of transcendence that suffuses the entire atmosphere of the canvas.

 

d) Musical allegory or “musical fantasy” as an expression of the artist’s personal philosophy.

 

e) The introduction of musical imagery as ideological reinforcement — when purely painterly means prove inadequate to the task at hand.

 

f) The expressive world of musical art as an object of rapturous contemplation in its external, poeticized form, viewed through the lens of visual aesthetics without any tendency toward deeper meaning.

 

g) The phenomenon of music and its natural musical environment as a generalized model of existence, beyond any allegories or metaphors — as a sphere for study, comprehension and immersion (that is, genuine interest in music itself).

 

Rarely does the role of musical imagery transcend a purely auxiliary or decorative function, and even more rarely does music truly “sound” from the canvas.

 

Is music necessary for the artist at all? In and of itself, as such?

 

At the foundation of organic fusion between musical and visual arts lie love, respect and knowledge.

 

Yet it must be noted that carelessness — flaunting its ignorance and introducing sometimes far-fetched imagery into paintings on the level of kitsch — occasionally achieves an even greater impact on an untrained viewer’s eye, moved by easily accessible and recognizable trite stereotypes of musical refinement and sensitivity. Conductors and pianists with spidery little hands, cellists fastidiously gripping their bows with two fingertips — apparently this represents the popular conception of sophistication, and it always finds demand among “kindred tastes.”

 

How much more charming are those naive, awkward little figures of musicians — earnest offspring of an artist’s “holy ignorance” — of the kind we mainly know from Chagall’s violinists, so touchingly free of affectation.

 

It’s hard for artists to resist the alluring decorativeness of the musician’s black formal wear, but consider this: couldn’t many paintings replace their violinists quite successfully with, say, an exotically uniformed chimney sweep (if the practice of wood-stove heating had survived to this day)?

 

Beauty is always functional. A musician playing poorly cannot captivate the eye — only inspire tears of pity and vexation. But musicians deserve neither pity nor condescending tenderness. They convince, command, they inspire and always triumph. Their beauty is directly proportional to their mastery (like a ballerina’s beauty, for instance) — even when this runs counter to conventional aesthetic norms. Why do artists so rarely appreciate this?

 

The shoulders turned like in Michelangelo’s figures, the intense concentration, the persuasive and justified movements — they are magnificent, they possess an organic and meaningful plasticity, reminiscent of an inspired calligrapher, and their purpose is precise: they are what give life to music.

 

Fortunately, though, there is and can be no strict canon here, much as everywhere that concerns the particulars of perception — which is always individual and in any case has the right to exist. It’s quite another matter that artists must defend this right — that’s what makes them artists, that they alone are responsible for what they create and what they seek to immortalize.

 

Deliberately salon-style musical backgrounds have their worldly charm, while the melodies of gloomy stairwells and courtyards possess their own undeniable appeal. Here it no longer matters whether the figure actually plays (or how well) or merely flirts — caressing the delicate instrument with a silk skirt, fingering a keyboard instead of more prosaic needlework, casting a hand upon strings (the guitar stays silent, but couldn’t it speak up at any moment?).

 

It’s gratifying enough that this shadow of sound penetrates such diverse artistic minds, touches their imagination, and compels them to seek a musical intonation.

 

What matters most is that they notice music, that they love it — each as best they can. After all, did anyone ever say only Caravaggio was allowed to do that?