NOTES ON THE ARTISTS AND THEIR PAINTINGS
This listening experience of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition here at
Rivier University is paired with reproductions of paintings by internationally
renowned modern artists that have been selected to match the mood and emotional
impact of each of the short pieces contained in Pictures at an Exhibition. The result is
a simultaneous experience of sight and sound as you view each painting while
hearing its musical counterpart. Approximate time: 35 – 40 minutes.
wOpening gallery music: the Stroll Theme. This theme is repeated several times as
you tour the exhibition and is always indicated by a silhouette of a strolling figure or
figures between pictures when it occurs.
First picture: Mountains of Saint-Remy, 1889
Artist: Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890/active mostly in France)
Medium and dimensions of original: oil paint on canvas, 28 ¼ x 35 ¾ inches
Location of original: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,
N.Y.
The passion in Van Gogh’s art arose from his intense and overpowering response to
the world in which he lived. For Van Gogh, expressing his feelings on the canvas
about what he saw was far more important than reproducing realistically what he
saw. The result is a bold application of paint that suggests powerful movement of
forms and intensely vibrating colors in what normally would be considered more
serene subject matter by artists working in traditional style.
wA shortened repetition of the Stroll Theme
Second picture: The Migrants Arrived in Great Numbers, Number 40
from the “Migration of the Negro Series,” 60 panels painted by Jacob Lawrence
from 1940 to 1941 narrating the migration of black men, women, and children from
the rural South to the industrial North after World War I.
Artist: Jacob Lawrence (American, 1917-2000)
Medium and dimensions of original: tempera on hardboard, 12 x 18 inches
Location of original: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y.
From the New York Times of February 12, 2016, excerpts of an article by Isabel
Wilkinson:
In winter of 1916, several hundred black families from Selma,
Alabama [in the Cotton Belt] began quietly defecting from the Jim
Crow South with its night rides and hanging trees. It was the start of
the Great Migration, a leaderless revolution that would incite six
million black refugees over six decades to seek asylum within the
borders of their own country. . . . They could not know what was in
store for them or their descendants, nor the hostilities they would face
wherever they went. . . . How might these now 45 million people, still
the most segregated of all groups in America, partake of the full fruits
of citizenship? How can deeply embedded racial hierarchies be
overcome?
Wilkinson reports that today, according to one analysis of F.B.I. statistics, an
African-American is killed by a white police officer roughly every 3½ days.
As a member of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s Lawrence was among the first
black artists to gain national recognition. Despite its small size the panel shown here
has an impressive monumentality, thanks to the simplified forms and flat colors.
wBrief variation of the Stroll Theme
Third picture: Green Violinist, 1923-1924
Artist: Marc Chagall (Russian, 1887-1985/active mostly in Paris & New
York)
Medium and dimensions of original: oil on canvas, 6 ¾ feet x 42 ¾ inches
Location: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, N.Y.
Chagall’s mature paintings demonstrate his inclination to liberate his subjects from
the laws of gravity and from the realistic use of color, as in dreams. The violinist
refers to the traditional Jewish form of music-making in Russian villages like the one
into which the artist himself was born in the late 1800’s. Fond memories of his
youth seem to animate Chagall’s fanciful approach to his subject matter in Green
Violinist.
Fourth picture: Woman Ironing, 1904
Artist: Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973/active mostly in France)
Medium and dimensions of original: oil on canvas, 45.7 x 28.7 inches
Location of original: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, N.Y.
Woman Ironing is an example of one of many styles of painting Picasso created over
the course of his long and very active life. It is typical of a brief period in his early
twenties when, using grayish tones of blue and rose, he painted melancholy subjects
of the poor working class of his day, depicting their relegation to exhausting physical
work for meager pay.
wFleeting reference to the Stroll Theme
Fifth picture: The Twittering Machine, 1922
Artist: Paul Klee (Swiss, 1879-1940/also active in Germany)
Media and dimensions of original: watercolor and pen-and-ink, over drawing
on paper, 25 ¼ x19 inches
Location of original: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y.
Klee saw the creative act as a magical moment in which the artist was enabled to
combine an inner vision with an outer experience of the world. To start the creative
process, he would begin to draw like a child; he said that children in particular “have
the power to see [imaginatively].” Of course his conscious adult experience and skills
also came into play. For example, at first glance The Twittering Machine seems to be
simply amusing, but could it feel a bit unsettling to the viewer as well?
Sixth picture: Soaring, 1950
Artist: Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917-2009)
Medium and dimensions of original: tempera on Masonite, 48 x 87 inches
Location: The Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont
Wyeth is widely considered a master of American realism. In some of his paintings,
however, the compositional structure and perspective can distort the supposed
truthfulness of the image. For example, although Wyeth’s meticulous rendering of
the three turkey buzzards in Soaring might seem to confirm him as simply a realist,
the imaginary position of the viewer at close range above the nearest bird suggests a
kind of “magic realism.” This is also demonstrated by the way Wyeth contrasted
the sharp-focus realism of the circling buzzards with an eerie, surreal landscape
deserted except for a tiny dwelling far below.
Seventh picture: Black Lines, 1913
Artist: Vasily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866-1944/active mostly in Germany)
Medium and dimensions of original: oil on canvas, 51 x 51 5/8 inches
Location of original: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,
N.Y.
In his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art published in 1911, Kandinsky formulated
ideas that had obsessed him since his student days in Russia when he had devoted
considerable time to exploring the analogous relations between art and music. This
research strengthened his conviction that art had to be concerned with the nonmaterial rather than the material. Eventually he arrived at an art entirely without
subject matter, other than abstract colors, shapes and lines as shown here in Black
Lines – an art that he could readily claim as being analogous to purely instrumental
music in particular.
Eighth picture: Tomorrow Is Never, 1955
Artist: Kay Sage (American, 1898-1963)
Medium and dimensions of original: oil on canvas, 37 7/8 x 53 7/8 inches
Location of original: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y.
Tomorrow Is Never exemplifies Sage’s preference for muted colors and hints of
architectural structures by means of rigidly straight lines. Also typical is her inclusion
of drapery that suggests the presence of completely draped human figures within the
straight lines. The resulting effect is one of entrapment, dislocation, and loneliness.
Art historian Whitney Chadwick found in Sage “a sense of motionlessness and
impending doom found nowhere else in Surrealism.” On the other hand, like many
other Surrealists, she utilized landscape imagery as a metaphor for the mind and for
psychological states of being, in her case possibly reflecting her own documented
painful life experiences of rejection and alienation.
Ninth picture: Mother and Child, 1967
Artist: Alice Neel (American, 1900-1984)
Medium of original: oil on canvas. Dimensions unavailable.
Location of original: private collection
Neel, the painter best known for rejecting artistic fashion in favor of documenting
overlooked and often marginalized persons, once referred to herself as “a collector of
souls.” Her expressionistic and at times off-kilter studies, which brought her
immense fame relatively late in life, are classics of American portraiture. She once
described herself to a prominent New York art critic as “a sympathetic, or sometimes
not so sympathetic translator.” Using crooked lines and just slightly off-base colors,
Neel lovingly captured the character of those who sat for her in all their flawed
humanity. With Mother and Child, Neel was unafraid to reveal, alongside the
tenderness that mothers experience, the ambivalences, conflicts, and fears that
women also face as mothers.
Tenth picture: Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental, 1941-1942
Artist: Richard Pousette-Dart (American, 1916-1992)
Medium and dimensions of original: oil on canvas, 7 ft. 6 in. x 10 ft.
Location of original: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y.
The original Symphony No. 1 is monumental in scale, and so densely and thickly
painted that it looks almost like a huge sculptured surface. Its subject matter is
organized according to an uneven grid, over which appears a composition made up
of circles, teardrops, ovals, arcs, diamond shapes, crosses, etc. These are positioned
in a rhythmic spread of black, white, and earth tones with accents of bright color,
which together evoke cosmic and organic forms. Here and there a nuanced reference
to something identifiable emerges, but also seems to fade away. The artist’s musical
title for this work seems to imply a desire on his part to create in paint an intensely
personal aesthetic experience for the viewer, like that of a huge orchestral symphony.
Eleventh picture: Ruin by the Sea [seen with three related works in the gallery
wing]
Artist of all four paintings: Lyonel Feininger (American, 1871-1956/Born in
New York City of German immigrant parents, became active in Berlin,
Germany in 1913, returned to New York in 1937.)
Medium of all four originals: oil on canvas
Titles, dates, dimensions, and locations of all four originals, in chronological order:
1. Church of the Minorites [Franciscan monks] II, 1926, 42 ¾ x 36 5/8 in.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
2. Regler Church, Erfurt, 1930, 49 7/8 x 40 ½ in.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
3. Ruin by the Sea, 1930, 27 x 43 3/8 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, N. Y.
4. Gelmeroda [name of town], 1936, 39 5/8 x 31 ¾ in.
The Metropolitan Museum, New York, N. Y.
Although Feininger never completely dissolved forms into abstractions he began to
fracture the shapes of medieval buildings and cityscapes in his paintings into facets
of color, and by 1930 his crystalline style was well established. He had adapted the
angled fragmentation of form and space found in Cubism to his unique personal
goals, declaring that rather than stopping at straightforward portrayal of a subject,
“paintings have to sing, must enrapture.” To this end, Feininger painted semitransparent, luminous sharp-edged shards to form streams of light falling on and
emanating from his churches. His highly personal style conveys especially well the
spiritual nature of medieval architecture in all its grandeur.
The arrangement of the reproductions of Feininger’s paintings in the gallery wing as
the climax to the gallery tour is as follows:
Ruin by the Sea is the centerpiece of the group of three paintings on easels.
On the left is Regler Church, Erfurt, and on the right, Gelmeroda.
Church of the Minorites is hanging on the diagonal wall at far right.
Enjoy the Feininger group while listening to the triumphant finale of Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition.