music
Symbolist printmakers and musicians sought each other out in fin-de-siècle Paris, reflecting the modernist ideal that all the arts were intimately related.
They believed that the notes of the music and the lines and patterns of visual art corresponded with one another at a higher level.
Alongside this spiritual dialogue, more worldly connections were also made between music and printmaking.
Artists earned money by designing lithographic covers and illustrations for the sheet music of popular songs performed at the café-concert.
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The influence of Wagner
The German composer and theatre director Richard Wagner (1813–1883) had become a cult figure by the fin de siècle.
Printmakers like Henri Fantin-Latour and Odilon Redon included scenes and figures from his operas in their lithographs.
His influence extended much further, however. Printmakers were inspired by Wagner’s ideas about the gesamtkunstwerk, in which different disciplines combined to achieve a total art that was greater than the sum of its parts.
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Music as subject
It is striking how often printmakers chose to depict figures playing music.
In some cases, they attempted to emulate the music itself. Alexandre Charpentier, for instance, surrounded his Girl with a Violin with subtle flowering vines in relief. These decorations have the same abstract quality and rhythm as the musical notes flowing from her instrument.
Félix Vallotton, meanwhile, created the atmospheric print series Instruments de musique, in which the musicians appear totally absorbed in the interior world of their performance. The shapes of the furniture and the patterns of the wallpaper echo the instruments being played.
Further Reading
Pierre-Louis Mathieu, La génération symboliste, Geneva 1990
Henri Dorra (red.), Symbolist Art Theories. A Critical Anthology, Berkeley 1994
Ronald de Leeuw, ‘Wagner and Painting’, in Symbolism in Art: in Search of a Definition, Amsterdam 1994
