[JPL] Art's brush with boogie-woogie

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Art's brush with boogie-woogie

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 30/06/2007


A new exhibition shows how great artists have been seduced by the giddy
syncopation of jazz. Martin Gayford reports

In pictures: Eye-Music: Kandinsky, Klee and all that Jazz

Would Vincent van Gogh have been a jazz fan? The question, of course, is
entirely hypothetical, since when the Dutch artist died, in 1890, the idiom
was not even a twinkle in the eye of the New Orleans cornettist Buddy
Bolden.

     
In the swing of things: Mondrian's 'Broadway Boogie Woogie'
But if Van Gogh had lived another few decades, he might have become a jazz
aficionado. That is one conclusion of Eye-Music: Kandinsky, Klee and All
That Jazz, an exhibition opening at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester
today.

Many major figures in modern art were fascinated by the relationship between
visual art and music, especially those who followed in Van Gogh's footsteps
and experimented with colour in novel ways. Vincent himself took music
lessons from an organist in Eindhoven, but they were not a success, because
he constantly compared chords with pigments such as Prussian blue and
cadmium yellow. His teacher concluded that he was dealing with a madman.

But just such comparisons became commonplace with later artists such as
Kandinsky, who was obsessed with synaesthesia - the ability to experience
one sense in terms of another (which it sounds as though Van Gogh
possessed). So the jazz pianist Marian McPartland once observed that the key
of D seemed like "daffodil yellow".

Kenneth Noland, one of the major figures in "colour-field" abstract painting
during the 1950s and '60s, once remarked that the formal qualities of art
"exercise the senses as do string quartets, piano concertos, Dixieland".
It's no surprise that he has been a life-long jazz enthusiast.

I remember attending the opening party for a Noland exhibition at which he
had invited the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy to perform unaccompanied
solos. It was a pungent meeting of abstract painting and edgy, free-form
jazz.

With the late abstract-expressionist painter Morris Louis, Noland
experimented with a series of "jam painting sessions" inspired by the
informal musical gatherings of jazz musicians. During these they developed
the poured paint technique, which become Louis's signature method.

There might well be a connection between the rhythmic improvisations to be
heard in New York jazz clubs and Jackson Pollock's drip technique. Certainly
Pollock was a jazz fan, though his tastes ran not to the bebop of Charlie
Parker but to earlier styles. Ruth Kligman, with whom he had an affair at
the end of his life, told me that he would take her to Eddie Condon's club,
bastion of Chicagoan Dixieland.

Music provides a fascinating analogy for entirely abstract art, of the kind
Noland, Louis, Pollock and Kandinsky all wished to create in diverse ways.
Kandinsky and Paul Klee were obsessed by classical music. But as the 20th
century wore on, a striking number of important artists turned to jazz.

Like all analogies between sounds and sights, this is hard to pin down. Not
everyone thinks the key of D is yellow, and it would be absurd to suggest
that a patch of green in a painting was influenced by Charlie Parker or
Sonny Rollins. It is more a matter of feeling and improvisation. A joyful,
carefree spirit was probably all that Matisse had in mind when he named his
great 1947 series of paper cut-outs "Jazz".

Occasionally, though, it is possible to be more specific. Czech painter
Frantisek Kupka was fascinated by analogies between art and music, and by
the syncopated rhythms of jazz - which no doubt accounts for the title of
Jazz Hot No 1 (1935).

Rhythm was crucial too, to the art of Piet Mondrian, an enthusiastic dancer.
In his Paris studio, the painter Winifred Nicholson recalled, he had a
gramophone painted a vivid red, "and on it he played the hottest blue jazz -
only jazz, never the classical stuff". He claimed that both his art and the
music were "life realised through pure rhythm".

This rhythmic sense was transformed when he fled from wartime Europe to
America. When the art dealer Sidney Janis remarked on the changes Mondrian
had made to his first painting done in New York, the great abstract artist
replied, "Yes, now it has more boogie-woogie." He wasn't joking.

On October 3, 1940, the night that Mondrian arrived as a refugee, his friend
Harry Holtzman took him to hear the three jazz/blues pianists Pete Johnson,
Meade "Lux" Lewis and Albert Ammons, who performed as a thunderous trio.

"His response," Holtzman recalled, "was immediate. He clasped his hands
together with obvious pleasure. 'Enormous! Enormous!' he repeated." By that,
in his idiosyncratic English, Mondrian was not referring to the size of the
piano players - though they were all pretty hefty - but to the impact of
their music.

Two of his late masterpieces, Victory Boogie-Woogie (1942-44) and Broadway
Boogie-Woogie (1942-43; pictured above but not featured in the Pallant House
show), were named after that rambunctious genre. And as the critic David
Sylvester pointed out, their accelerated visual rhythm, in contrast with
Mondrian's earlier work, is comparable with the driving "eight to the bar"
pace of the music.

Mondrian's friend, the US painter Stuart Davis, was, of all artists, perhaps
the most immersed in the jazz world. "I had jazz all my life," he told the
curator Katharine Kuh. "I almost breathed it in like air. I think all my
paintings at least in part come from this influence, though I never tried to
paint a jazz scene. It was the tradition of jazz music that affected me."

Davis tutored perhaps the only two jazz musicians of any artistic
distinction on canvas, clarinettist Pee Wee Russell and drummer George
Wettling. Like rock stars' efforts, most art by famous jazz musicians is
distressing to contemplate.

It was more the general mood of the music that seems to have appealed to the
French master Fernand Léger. As Kuh recounts in her recently published
memoirs, he loved the jazz clubs of Chicago's South Side, where he had come
for the opening of an exhibition:

"Fernand would sit for hours, drinking it all in... totally hypnotised by
the enveloping smoke, the noise, the beat of the drums, the early-morning
uninhibited interplay of drinkers and performers."

It is the much more esoteric idiom of the pianist Lennie Tristano that
appeals to Bruce Nauman, one of the great contemporary video and performance
artists. In his studio, he says, "I think about Lennie Tristano a lot." When
I met Nauman three years ago I asked him why.

"Because he would begin playing at a very high level of density and
intensity and just continued until he quit," he said. "There wasn't any
build-up. I was very impressed with that."

Again, it sounds as if it's partly the rhythm that does it for Nauman.
Perhaps in art and in all music - not only jazz - the truth encapsulated by
Duke Ellington applies: it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

'Eye-Music: Kandinsky, Klee and All That Jazz' is at Pallant House Gallery,
Chichester (01243 774557), from today until Sept 16.