Mind the Music and the Step – Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition
Posted by Kathleen Benton on Jun 10, 2009
For the following blog entry I am pleased to include the writing of Howard Marshall, MA BD STM. Howard is a scholar of religion and philosophy as well as an aesthete of art and music. – Kathleen
‘Modest’ seems an odd choice of name for someone who made such an exhibition of himself. Be that as it may, the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s well-known work, Pictures from an Exhibition, often comes to mind whenever I visit an art gallery to look at paintings.
On a recent visit to London I managed to fit in a visit to the wonderful National Gallery. Living as I do about 100 miles from London I don’t manage to get there anything like as often as I would like to. Still, it’s not as if I lived on the other side of the world and had to try and fit everything into a single visit. It is a real dilemma for a visitor to a great city, rich in museums and galleries, and with countless other things to do besides, to decide what to see and what to leave out. But no visitors to London should miss seeing the famous Trafalgar Square. The pigeons aren’t as welcome there as they used to be, but the spectacular column in honour of Lord Nelson is one place in London where you really must have your photo taken. Then it’s but a few steps to the National Gallery, and even those with only a passing interest in art would be foolish to miss that. But what are people to do once they are inside? There is just so much to see. With a limited time schedule and so much on offer is there perhaps some clever and sensible way to set about visiting an art gallery? It might be that Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition can offer some ideas.
I suppose if I had equipped myself with a clipboard and assumed an official air, I could just have sounded out a cross-section of the many visitors I saw at the National Gallery and asked them how they were using their time there. I was certainly curious as to why so many of them were to be found in the section devoted to 19th century French painting. Were these paintings the ’star attractions’ in the National Gallery? Did the works of Monet and Renoir and Degas attract such crowds because they were the artists that people knew something about? There is no reason at all why someone who enjoys Impressionist paintings shouldn’t want especially to view some, but was it enthusiasm alone that had brought so many people all to the same section of the Gallery? It might just be that because the gallery housing the 19th century French paintings is one of the first the visitor arrives at on climbing the entrance stairs is the likeliest explanation of why it is so popular!
But to return to Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition, it was the early death of his friend, the artist and architect Viktor Hartmann, that occasioned the writing of this work for piano (also given an orchestral arrangement). Mussorgsky was among the visitors at an exhibition later held of Hartmann’s work and Pictures from an Exhibition is a musical representation of that visit. The various pictures all have titles and Mussorgsky so cleverly depicts them in sound that we can almost see them in our mind’s eye. As it happens, history has not been kind to Hartmann and most of his paintings are lost. So, by this quirk of circumstance, Mussorgsky’s representation in sound is now all that we have should we want to ’see’ the Hartmann paintings which were on view at the exhibition.
Naturally it is the paintings themselves that provide the main focus of interest and enjoyment to the listener. And how well they are brought to life! There is the lumbering Polish cart on enormous wheels being drawn by oxen in the picture entitled Bydlo. We can vividly imagine the busy market scene at Limoges with a group of French women arguing and gossiping. And the last picture is perhaps the best known of all where The Great Gate of Kiev is depicted with an awesome grandeur and in true Russian style.
However there is something else to notice in Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition. It is the snatch of music at the opening of the work which also appears as a recurrent theme throughout. It is called the promenade and it is meant to suggest the visitor’s progress through the exhibition, the visitor in this case being Mussorgsky himself. When first heard it sounds firm and resolute and comes to a definite conclusion as if suggesting that the visitor having entered the exhibition has arrived at the first picture he intended to see. Thereafter, the promenade provides a link between the musical ‘pictures’, suggesting the visitor walking from one to another.
But just listen more attentively to the promenade. Sometimes it continues for a time only to break off abruptly in mid flow. We realize that that the visitor, having had his attention taken by one particular picture, has stopped at once to take it in. At other times it doesn’t occur at all between pictures: the visitor’s gaze passes naturally from one picture to its neighbor and so he just pauses where he is. There are times when the promenade unfolds at length; at other times we hear only a brief snatch, so that we have the idea of the visitor moving about the gallery as he explores the variety of pictures on display.
One last thing to notice about the promenade is that it never sounds quite the same each time we hear it. Sometimes it has a pensive quality; at others a light touch, signifying that the visitor’s steps are somehow responding to what he has just been looking at. And it also has a rather unusual ‘pace’, generally with five beats in each measure. People march to music with four beats, and they dance waltzes to three. The promenade, with its seemingly clumsy walking beat, is showing us that the action of walking about the exhibition is dictated wholly by what captures the eye — a step here; a step there; an unexpected change of direction as one particular picture captures the attention — or possibly even because the visitor is so engrossed in the pictures that sudden deviation is required in order to avoid bumping into someone else!
Well of course there can never be any hard and fast rule about viewing works of art; Mussorgsky’s promenade simply makes us think about it. Undoubtedly with any great painting the more we study it and the more we find out about its background and the intentions of its creator the more it will have to say to us. However we must always remain open and receptive to the delight of first impressions, however brief and superficial they must at times be. An impression, once formed, remains in the memory, and it can always be returned to later. And mention of the word ‘impression’ brings us back to the people in the 19th century French section in London’s National Gallery. “You can’t have too much of a good thing,” might have been their answer if I had questioned the reason for their apparent enthusiasm. Well, perhaps you can — if it is at the expense of all the other things you are missing. And that, I think, is what the promenade in Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition might just be trying to tell us.
Howard Marshall
Click here to get Free Music Downloads at EZ-Tracks.com
If you would like to listen to the entire compostion for piano of Pictures from an Exhibition click on this link: Serg van Gennip – Music
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Ilya Yefimovich Repin, Portrait of the Composer Modest Mussorgsky, 1881. Oil on canvas. 69 × 57 cm. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Image Source: musopen.com. Musopen.com also features recordings of the complete composition for orchestra.
All other art works featured are by Viktor Hartmann (1834-1873). Catacomb, Bydlo, Plan for a City Gate, and Egg progressively.
Viktor Hartmann photograph and art images courtesy of Wikipedia.
© 2009 All rights reserved Kathleen Benton | You Can Hire an Artist
All comments are moderated. Only comments expressed in English will be considered. Please allow twenty-four hours for your comment to appear.
Custom Art and Greeting Cards Considerations
Posted by Kathleen Benton on Nov 30, 2008
One of the most exciting aspects of the work I do is working with people to create custom art work or greeting cards. I have found that clients also enjoy being a part of the process by giving me an idea of what their preferences might be and helping to make decisions for a project.
Custom art is sometimes commissioned for one’s own satisfaction, say to create paintings based on a theme for decorating a room in one’s home. But just as often projects are requested as a gift to others, such as a drawing for a retiring colleague, or a special birthday portrait. Custom art becomes more meaningful to the recipient because the content will have elements that have personal associations. This content can be as simple as a favorite color or as complex as the documentation of entire family reunion at Disney World. Any subject can be the basis for a custom art project. All it takes to get started is to contact me by email with a description of your idea.
I thought an explanation of how some projects have come about might help illustrate how the process of creating a custom request begins and the results that follow.
A photograph from a coach/bus enthusiast was sent for consideration. The image was of the famous Routemaster double-decker buses of London. The idea was to use the buses as the subject for note cards. I thought it best to emphasize the buses as the subject by removing the street scene. I left in some of the pedestrians to create a spatial reference in the composition. As I made the painting it occurred to me that because of the bright red color this subject could easily be used to make a unique Christmas greeting card as well by adding some greenery to the buses. So I used a little artistic license and added some wreaths to the bus fronts and Seasons Greetings at the bottom. So out of this process I have as a result three products, the original painting, the note cards and the Christmas cards created from the painting.
Additionally I was sent another bus image which I found to be a wonderful subject on which to base a painting because of the rich color and wet look of the surfaces. The painting was done on archival-quality watercolor paper. It will be framed to be given as a gift, but I think it would also make a nice image for a note card as well, if floated on a card with a white border. So from the initial knowledge of a person’s interest in coaches/buses we have come up with several options for projects, all realized from just two photographs.
Another way custom art projects begin is by a client’s expression of his or her own interests. For example I made several paintings for a family to decorate the rustic-looking home they were building in Colorado. They requested that I make some work influenced by Native American Art. I did some research into some old authentic Native American drawing styles and symbols and used that information as inspiration. The clients request was that all the pieces be four feet square so there was some continuity in the format and the installation. The results are three paintings and two relief collages on wood.
For this project then there was no initial photograph or memorabilia from which to begin the project. I was given a genre and needed to develop the art work subjects. After some research and preliminary work, I presented some sketches with detailed explanations to the client which were approved before the final paintings were begun.
I presume each custom art project I take on might be a bit different and require a new approach. That possibility is challenging but it also makes my work fun for me. So let me hear from you and let’s see what we can do. Describe to me what you might want to consider for yourself or someone close to you.
Kathleen Benton
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Bus photographs used with permission of the photographers.
© 2008 All rights reserved Kathleen Benton | You Can Hire an Artist
All comments are moderated. Only comments expressed in English will be considered. Please allow twenty-four hours for your comment to appear.
All Art is Quite Useless
Posted by Kathleen Benton on Oct 26, 2008
“All Art is Quite Useless” is the title I have chosen for my blog. This line is not my creation, in case you are not familiar with the quote. It was written by Oscar Wilde in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. I suppose I chose this title in an attempt to be provocative and ironic about this blog. For it is through this web site and its accompanying blog that I am intent on creating an art business out of the fact that all art is indeed quite useful in many ways.
I won’t go into a lengthy analysis of what Oscar Wilde meant. Writers much more capable than I have already done so. But Wilde wasn’t making a dismissive statement about art. Far from it. Essentially Wilde was responding to a philosophical debate which preoccupied most the 19th century. The idea which embodies the discourse had been evolving slowly ever since the time of the Renaissance. That is the notion of “art for art’s sake”. The Realists, Romanticists, and Impressionists of Wilde’s day wanted to rid art and artists from the requirement of having any other ambition, purpose, or responsibility to anything other than the artist’s own expression. The idea of “art for art’s sake” was used to protest the power of established social groups and institutions which would impose their standards or censorship on art and artists. These groups often decried or banned any art which was perceived to represent ideas they found particularly threatening to their own conventions.
Artists are now rarely influenced by their historical sponsors, the monarchs, popes, institutions, or wealthy patrons who supervised their activity and content. Now most people think of artists as a fringe group of specialists working to express themselves. Often artists are imagined like a caricature of Van Gogh, quite removed from conventional life, a bohemian toiling away in seclusion, and very poor. Today’s fine artists do work for themselves and to their own beat, putting the results out for public scrutiny in various venues to see if their work produces enthusiasm and success. If they are lucky, they become very rich and their work becomes very sought-after.
This idea of artistic independence has become quite accepted now. But even today the debate is sparked anew when artists and institutions collide. Museums supported by tax money mount an exhibition that sometimes citizens find unsuitable. Films are boycotted when a social group finds content offensive. Books are still banned in some places. The idea of “art for art’s sake” still makes for lively discussion, but for the most part, artists now make what they want with nobody stopping them. But even though artists are now free to make art as they please, they still must try to integrate their activity and products into society in order for it to have meaning to anyone else.
This description fits the artist creating “fine art”. On the other hand, there is also the activity of commercial artists. These artists are usually employed by manufacturers like Hallmark or the Danbury Mint, design and advertising companies, or retail suppliers. Commercial artists make products for mass consumption. They focus their creativity on things which will have universal appeal. In some ways, they still follow the traditional role of the artist. They answer to a company board of directors. We assume that commercial artists are different from fine artists and that each has their own groups of consumers.
As a result of the changes in the role of the artist, most people seem to find the notion of hiring an artist for their own purposes, fine art or commercial, to be completely beyond their imagination and means. But now we have entered the age of the Internet. Here the ideas of communication, commerce, business services, specialists, and accessibility are now all tossed into the World-wide Web to be reconsidered and made new again. Through the Internet everyone has the possibility of expressing themselves to the world. Anyone can be engaged in the sale of that expression as well. Through the Internet consumers also have the ability to hire the services and/or buy the products of anyone in the entire world. People are no longer dependent on what is stocked at their nearby store or provided by local business.
So it is with this understanding of possibilities of the Internet that here I submit my artwork for your evaluation. I have named my site optimistically, You Can Hire an Artist. In the site I have incorporated all the various aspects of my artistic activity, in both fine and commercial art. I invite you to find in my artwork a piece that speaks to you, knowing it is made more affordable by being offered directly from me rather than through a gallery. I hope that you will consider using my artistic skills to realize personal commissions. You have the opportunity here to celebrate your life and the lives of those that are important to you with the creation of one-of-a-kind objects that express personal milestones, relationships, and interests. I encourage the business owner to think of your establishment as extraordinary enough to require the use of distinctive, custom-made visual campaigns and accessories. In doing so you can make your place of business a profitable and inviting experience, to be considered by your customers as in a class by itself.
Together we can take the initiative to produce artwork that will result in your own pride and joy at being part of the creative process. I think this is a way of making art quite useful, don’t you?
Kathleen Benton
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Oscar Wilde photograph by Napoleon Sarony, c 1882. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
Jimmy Carter and Andy Warhol, 1977. White House Staff Photographers, National Archives and Records Administration
Marcel Duchamp. Fountain, 1917. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Image Source: www.beatmuseum.org
© 2008 All rights reserved Kathleen Benton | You Can Hire an Artist
All comments are moderated. Only comments expressed in English will be considered. Please allow twenty-four hours for your comment to appear.
