Tuesday 26 February 2013

Schoenberg's Paintings

It's a constant surprise when I see modernist paintings looking so radical a hundred years on, after watching the BBC Four 'Sound And The Fury', I sought more of Schoenberg's images. It was this one called 'The Gaze', that caught my attention. The colours in and around the eyes! Poor old Schoenberg, everywhere I look he is vilified, well I rate his pictures and his music. Like John Lydon said art should always upset those that deserve to be upset, or W.S. Burroughs when he said all true artists are at war with the world.

There was this great interview with Stockhausen by Bjork, they were discussing how long it takes for new ideas to be assimilated into the wider culture. Bjork asserted that we should now abandon Beethoven and Bach, but Stockhausen said that there are still mysteries in Bach's music that are still being understood, that it can take hundreds of years to absorb new thinking. I look at so much modernist painting in this way, it was so clever in ways that we can rediscover and re-learn.

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The Gaze 1910


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Hate 1910



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