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Takashi Murakami, Head of Isabel Rawthorne, 2016, Artsnap

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How Music Motivated Artists from Matisse to Kandinsky to Reinvent Painting

Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors — 7th Avenue Style, 1940. Stuart Davis Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The modern artists wanted to be musicians. So it seems, at least, judging from the titles of their paintings. The “Nocturnes” painted by James McNeill Whistler toward the end of the 19th century have as much, if not more, to do with Chopin’s solo piano compositions of the same name than with the night time scenes they depict. Paul Klee’s geometric abstraction, Polyphony (1932), bespeaks a boundless passion for Bach’s polyphonic choral works. Later avant-garde masterpieces gloried in the popular jazz music of the day, from Stuart Davis’s Swing Landscape (1938) to Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43) to Henri Matisse’s Jazz Suite (1947). A list of modern-art milestones almost reads like a timeline of Western music.

The visual arts have always been influenced by music, and vice versa. From the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, however, Western artists sought something more than the usual symbiosis between art forms. They strained to evoke music’s rhythms, structures, and tones in their work—in short, to transform oneart form into another. If the avant-garde project of merging painting with music never quite achieved its goals or made complete sense to begin with, so much the better—few quixotic quests have failed so interestingly.

Jazz - Pierre Beres, 1959. Henri Matisse ArtWise

'L'AVALEUR DE SABRES (JAZZ), 1947. Henri Matisse Gerrish Fine Art

You can’t talk about music and modernism without mentioning Walter Pater, the prolific 19th-century man of letters who is largely remembered for a single sentence he wrote in 1877: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” One interpretation of Pater’s observation is that music is the only art whose form and content are not just inseparable, but the same. This makes music fundamentally different from traditional Western painting, in which the same content can take hundreds of forms. The reason painting and music differ, Pater went on to argue, is that painting is mimetic (i.e., it tries to approximate the appearance of the physical world), and music is not.

Pater was writing at the dawn of the modern art revolution when literal representation was being purged from art and literature like pests from an old, dirty house. Abstract painters, abandoning the notion of a subject in favor of pure form, needed some rationale for their experiments. Small wonder so many of them looked to music.

Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 1957. Piet Mondrian Artsnap

To study the modern canon closely is to discover a host of ingenious solutions to an unsolvable problem: how to recreate visually what music does sonically. Swiss-born Paul Klee had been a violin prodigy before he turned to paint, but his knowledge of music animates virtually all of his best work. A dense, kinetic composition like May Picture (1925) feels like the oil-on-cardboard version of a Baroque counterpoint, with Klee’s bright squares providing the same a-ha! moment as the voices of a chorus sliding above and below one another.

In the 1910s, Klee was a loyal member of The Blue Rider, a group that also included Franz Marc, Albert Bloch, and Wassily Kandinsky. Though Kandinsky did not coin the word “synesthesia,” he helped popularize it by arguing—passionately, if not always coherently—that the greatest art should foster an overwhelming, multisensory experience in the viewer.

Kandinsky’s body of work represents the most ambitious, the most literal, and, perhaps, the nuttiest attempt to merge art and music. Where the Victorian Pater’s notion of the relationship between painting and music was hierarchical, Kandinsky’s was downright anarchistic: nothing less audacious than a completely new language, with music, literature, and art dissolving into a big, glorious mess. His unrealized theater piece wasn’t called “The Yellow Sound” for nothing.

May Picture, 1925. Paul Klee The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Kandinsky’s search for a new language of painting was inspired by one of his friends, the great Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. Though Schoenberg’s atonal pieces were widely dismissed as babble, they were actually rigorously controlled. His greatest innovation was with the 12-tone method of composition, whereby no note could be reused until the other 11 had been played. In paintings like Composition 8 (1923), Kandinsky offers something akin to the epiphany provoked by Schoenberg’s works: the slow realization that seemingly random colors and shapes are, in fact, tightly connected.

Modernist painters plundered popular American music, as well as the European avant-garde. It’s striking, indeed, to consider how thoroughly the melodies of the African diaspora—everything from bluegrass and the blues to jazz, swing, and bop—pervade the art of white Americans and Europeans. From the way Stuart Davis described his Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors—7th Avenue Style (1940), you’d think he was talking about a jazz sextet instead of a painting: “[The six colors] are used as the instruments in a musical composition might be, where the tone-color variety results from the simultaneous juxtaposition of different instrument groups.”

Composition 8 (Komposition 8), July-1923. Wassily Kandinsky Guggenheim Museum

You can—and should—fault Davis for misreading and misappropriating jazz here, interpreting it in strictly aesthetic terms and ignoring the social oppression that inspired it in the first place. The same goes for many of the modernist painters who incorporated African-American music into their work. But at least Davis, Mondrian, Matisse, et al. were humble enough to acknowledge the truth: the lofty aesthetic goals they held for their paintings had already been achieved by virtuosic black musicians.

When Davis wanted to convey the vibrancy of mid-century Manhattan, for instance, he didn’t turn to the Old Masters or Kandinsky or Schoenberg. He turned to jazz, and then named his painting after a synesthetic jazz term: hot.

from Artsy News

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Alex Israel Launches a Duchamp-Inspired Clothing Line Fit for His Surf-Pop World

Installation view of work by Alex Israel for “NEW WAVES” at Gagosian, Hong Kong. Artworks © Alex Israel. Courtesy of Gagosian.

Most people might not get why the artist Alex Israel’s new unisex athleisure clothing line has been given the seemingly inscrutable name “Infrathin.”

“It sounds like it could be a weight-loss program, or a technical fabric, or something that, if you wear it, looks very flattering,” Israel said in the early hours on Thursday, calling from the ancient city of Angkor Thom in Cambodia. “And I like all those strange associations because they don’t have anything to do with its meaning.”

The name is actually a reference to the trinkets that Marcel Duchamp used to sell while sitting in booths at expos such as the 1935 Concours Lépine inventor’s fair—items that were explicitly designated as not being art, but were made by an artist who sometimes took a shovel and deemed it a ready-made sculpture.

Israel takes a similar approach to his extracurricular activities—his first foray into apparel was his line of sunglasses, Freeway, which debuted in 2010. He dropped Infrathin on May 24th at a pop-up shop within Gagosian’s Hong Kong gallery, which is running concurrently with his show, “New Waves.” There are T-shirts, shorts, pants, swim trunks, sweatshirts, hats, varsity jackets, and bags in two sizes. And while Israel isn’t the first artist to create merch, it’s less a frivolity than a performance integral to the actual show, and to his practice in general.

Alex Israel, Wave, 2018. © Alex Israel. Photo by Martin Wong. Courtesy of Gagosian.

Alex Israel, Wave, 2018. © Alex Israel. Photo by Martin Wong. Courtesy of Gagosian.

There’s a conceptual rigor to Israel’s Pop art exercises, which extends through his whole practice. In 2017 he released SPF-18, a feature-length film about cute surfing teens who luck into staying at Keanu Reeves’s house in Malibu, and over the course of a summer, they fall in love and nurse heartbreak on the beach. It’s a totally faithful contribution to a genre that includes classic high school films such as Can’t Hardly Wait and Clueless, and early-2000s oceanside television masterpieces like The O.C. and Laguna Beach.

Israel wanted SPF-18 to be, more than anything else, accessible. Works by Israel can be hard to come by—only 26 have ever come to auction, and the very first one that did tripled its high estimate, selling for over $1 million—but his film is available to anyone with a Netflix subscription. And after the movie’s premiere, Israel spent more time screening SPF-18 in high schools than at museums like the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, all of which hold his work.

Items from the clothing line cost as little as $40 for a shirt and top out at $1,000 for an Infrathin bag, Israel said. The latter is not that much less than an editioned artwork of his—Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (2014), a silkscreen edition of 100, is currently available from Artsnap for £1,300. But they’re not artworks. Or at least not fully.

Installation view of work by Alex Israel for “NEW WAVES” at Gagosian, Hong Kong. Artworks © Alex Israel. Courtesy of Gagosian.

Israel said he doesn’t want Infrathin to be constrained within an art context. “It might just be a T-shirt. Or a hat. They don’t necessarily have to be art—they can exist just outside of that frame, and get touched, and get dispersed in a different way,” he said.

He likened the line to Duchamp’s “rotoreliefs,” one sort of the little tchotchkes the artist used to sell—colored disks that someone could place on the needle of a phonograph and watch spin. They were made by Duchamp, but they were not actual artworks—unusual for an artist known for “saying everything is art, or anything can be,” Israel said.

“For him to say, ‘Oh that isn’t art’—it’s kind of a powerful gesture,” he said.

This distinction—the space between objects that were art and objects that were not art—is one interpretation of what Duchamp meant by “infrathin.” As Israel put it, it’s “the imperceptible difference between two identical things,” such as a T-shirt that is a T-shirt and a T-shirt that’s a ready-made. One has been transformed into art and the other has not.

The works in the clothing line are still untransformed, but that’s not the case with all of Israel’s more accessible output. It’s tempting, for example, to place SPF-18 in the “non-transformed” bucket, as it is an earnestly made, straight-faced entry into the canon of coming-of-age beach cinema. And, when watched with no knowledge of its creator, it’s a hang-ten success by those parameters. But it’s actually a Trojan horse full of Alex Israel artworks—a distillation of his practice, presented to the unknowing as a teen drama on Netflix.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off, 2014. Alex Israel Artsnap

SELF PORTRAIT (WETSUIT), 2015. Alex Israel KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Israel said that the fashions of the young stars in his film were inspirations for the clothing line. “It’s been the blueprint for the last couple of shows,” he said. “The work is all part of a larger narrative—it’s like one project, or one work, and it takes on different forms as it continues.”

The film is also referenced several times over in “New Waves,” Israel’s show in Hong Kong. There’s a wing-flapping installation of a pelican, which is a replica of one of the real pelicans that swooped into a shot during the making of the film (he called the work a self-portrait). The vibrantly colored waves, made by stretching acrylic over fiberglass, that are installed on the gallery wall were first seen on the album cover that the film’s surfer guy, Johnny, makes for Ash, an aspiring singer-songwriter.

At Art Basel in Basel last year, an Israel work called Self Portrait (Wetsuit) (2015) reprised the wetsuit another character, Camilla, designs after deciding she doesn’t like the all-black “goth” wetsuits at the surf shop in SPF-18. The day-glo numbers prove a hit, and other beachgoers start clamoring for them, asking her: “Where can I get one of those wetsuits?”

“At Almine Rech’s booth for $180,000,” an eagle-eyed member of the art world might have replied.

Infrathin doesn’t include a wetsuit in its line—yet. But the Israel-designed apparel will soon be available for purchase at the hip retailer Dover Street Market, as well as online. At least for a little while: Israel said there’s only a limited run of these not-quite-Alex-Israel-artworks being made, which nonetheless embody the art of Alex Israel.

from Artsy News

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