Connections between music and painting in Arnold Schoenberg’s works

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to highlight some of the directions taken by the artistic trends connecting music and painting at the beginning of the twentieth century, with special reference to the musical creation and paintings of the expressionist composer Arnold Schoenberg. The epoch of his creation was characterised by continuous tensions between classicism and modernity, between old and new, and between tradition and innovation. The artistic aspiration towards impersonal and conventional music, to rationalism, objectivity and constructivism was frequently noticed in those times. The artists who made use of synaesthesia created astonishing correspondences between colour and sound, between colour and idea, which resulted in so many different analogies, due to the attempt to convey human sentiments, feelings, and emotions in a refreshed manner. Then was the time the idea that painting could emulate music, and the other way around bloomed, a fact which inspired a part of the most progressive visual arts of the twentieth century. The aim of our research is to formulate concise correlations between some of Arnold Schoenberg’s paintings and his musical creations belonging to his expressionist period, having as starting premise the fact that he goes beyond the possibilities of music in his pictorial endeavours, characterized by a blunt, sombre, often striking and contrasting palette, by the combination of split and sinuous lines and a broken rhythm.