The Sound of Painting: Music in Modern Art (Pegasus Library)

Painters and musicians have always found inspiration by sharing ideas from both disciplines. How this relationship developed from Philipp Otto Runge's "compositions" in painting to Jean Tinguely's and Niki de Saint Phalle's musical sculpture is the focus of this volume. Selected images and quotations from composers and artists are blended into this study. Runge and Richard Wagner recognised the interdependency of music and art in the creation of abstract, symbolic language. However, as in the work of Matisse, the figurative representation of musicians or instruments soon developed into a structural relationship between sound and color. By the 1960s the two arts, represented in particular by Jackson Pollock and John Cage converged in the Fluxus "happenings" where participants such as Joseph Beuys and Yves Klein sought to push back the boundaries of modern art . In the 1990s the sculpture of Pol Bury or Takis contunues the quest to make sound tangible and new digital technologies have introduced even further possibilities.