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Picturing Listening in the Late Nineteenth CenturyAnne LeonardPublished online: 03 Apr 2014.

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Picturing Listening in the Late Nineteenth Century

Anne Leonard

An image can serve to introduce this article: a photographcaptioned "Bernard Berenson, 1959, after listening to YehudiMenuhin" (Fig. 1). Consider the three pieces of informationthat the caption provides, so neatly separated by commas. Allthree are important, but the last one is particularly intrigu­ing. Why should the knowledge that the person in it has justbeen listening to Yehudi Menuhin be significant to our ap­preciation of this photograph? The inclusion of this factseems to reflect both the power and weakness of music. Itsuggests that people who have just been listening to musicmust be affected by it in such a way that they appear differentfrom people who have not. At the same time, it implies thatthe way they appear is not in itself sufficiently different toconvey the fact that they have been listening; otherwise, thispiece of information would be unnecessary. Music trans­forms, yes, but perhaps not always visibly. Why, then, shouldlistening be an interesting subject for pictorial considerationif the visual effect it produces can sometimes be so subtle asto require a captioned explanation? In the absence of acaption, how would it be possible to render unequivocally theexperience of music? Those artistic challenges served as de­terrents over a long period during which, unsurprisingly,listening to music was much less common than making musicas a subject of art. Toward the end of the nineteenth century,however, certain visual artists in France and Belgium beganto embrace the challenge, finding in pure listening a worthyand stimulating subject of painting.

Music listening is but one category within a broader rangeof private activities, such as reading, writing, and knitting.Portrayals of such occupations convey a quality that MichaelFried taught us to call "absorption," in his groundbreakingstudy identifying the pictorial fiction of the beholder's non­existence as a new direction in eighteenth-century Frenchpainting.' Music listening does not figure among the absorp­tive activities that Fried anatomizes; portraying absorptivelistening would have been anachronistic in the eighteenthcentury. The historian James H. Johnson, surveying concertbehavior and listening habits in France from 1750 to 1850,investigated the reasons why attentiveness progressively in­creased over that period.f Peter Gay, meanwhile, noted art­ists' growing emphasis on the listener as a marker of thenineteenth-century "ascent of inwardness.":3 These social andcultural studies of listening have demanded a thorough arthistorical consideration of the listener's emergence in thecentury's closing years, when visual testaments to the new­found musical attentiveness emerge in full flower.

Two defining cultural movements of the late nineteenthcentury, Wagnerism and Symbolism, helped to revolutionizecontemporary notions of musical experience. Richard Wag­ner's music electrified the public in its Paris debut in 1860,even independent of his innovations in stagecraft. Listen­ing-to his music or that of others-began to have the

potential for much more powerful effects than ever beforeimagined. At the same time, the Symbolist article offaith thatmusic is the ultimate suggestive art contributed to an under­standing of listening as private and interiorized. Althoughthese developments opened up new representational possi­bilities for visual artists, they also reinforced the belief, thena commonplace, in painting's inferior status relative to music.Many of the advanced artists of the day reacted to this chal­lenge by seeking ways to appropriate for painting qualitiespeculiar to music, including its emotional force and its ca­pacity to command sustained attention.

Most discussions of the fin de siecle interrelation of paint­ing and music revolve around some kind of formal unitybetween the two arts (synesthesia, Gesarntkunstwerk, or whathave you). In contrast, the representation of subjective mu­sical experience, the artistic endeavor focused on here,points up the ineluctable differences between painting andmusic. Paintings of musical experience, by attempting tobridge or overcome those fundamental differences, helpedbring about significant changes in painting even outside thisrather narrow genre.

A painting's inability to capture events unfolding throughtime had been a central argument of Gotthold EphraimLessing's Laocoon (1766), an enormously influential work thatcompared the relative merits of painting and poetry. Poetry,as a temporal art, had the advantage of being able to narratea sequence of events, Lessing wrote, but it was much lessefficient at visual description. Painting, on the contrary,could convey action only by the artist's canny choice of asingle "pregnant moment" best evoking the totality of thataction. The potential for a painting to reach beyond thetemporal limits of the medium had huge implications, andnot just for scenes of action. It implied that an effectivepainting could harness the imaginative participation of view­ers, which would prolong their viewing and multiply theassociations the painting had for them."

This was a powerful tool in the hands of many nineteenth­century artists. The music to which their paintings alludedoffered a temporal framework in which the beholder's expe­rience could unfold; beyond that, the "new" (that is, atten­tive) listening being portrayed could serve as a model forbeholders. Visual artists were hardly disinterested parties inthe question of prolonging beholders' attention. The choiceof music listening as a subject was one way-but hardly theonly one-in which painters hoped to emulate music's statusas a temporal art.

For listening to become a subject worthy of painting, atleast two important developments had to occur. First, musichad to gain a place in cultural life that was distinct from otherentertainments to which it traditionally served as hand­maiden. Second, music listening had to be understood as anactivity centered not outside the self but within the self. These

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two transitions are, of course, closely entwined. Once music

began to justify attention without a drama or even a text, thatattention could be truly undivided.l' And with attention fas­tened to something abstract, the listener's musical experi­ence became private and very much his or her own." Untilthen, listeners were usually spectators above all.

"The listener" is a misleading term in reference to theancien regime, when opera (and the Paris Opera) dominatedFrench musical culture. Performances appealed primarily tothe faculty of sight for taking in the integral elements ofdrama, dance, and decor. Operagoers, to the extent that theylistened, fastened their attention more closely on the textthan on the music. 7 The place to look for the evolving figureof the music listener, then, is not the opera house but thechanging landscape of instrumental music.

With the remarkable exception of Nicolas Lancret, whoimmortalized Pierre and Antoine Crozat's legendary concertsof the 1720s in two oil sketches-including one from the firsthalf of the decade titled Concert in Crozat's Salon on the Rue de

Richelieu (Fig. 2)-no artist seems to have portrayed attentivemusic listening until late in the eighteenth century. A modeof expressing private musical experience did not yet figureamong publicly recognized behaviors. In 1784, an engravingcalled L 'assemblee au concert, after a gouache drawing by Nico­las Lavreince (Fig. 3), signaled a new importance of music inthe private realm. Present in this intimate gathering is anunprecedented figure: a man standing and imposing silenceon the listeners as the musicians appear to finish tuning theirinstruments. Lavreince's choice of the moment just beforethe music begins is the device that allows him to show itsprivileged place. Music has won the honor of being an objectof attention in itself rather than a mere accompaniment to asocial gathering. But not for another century would the in­dividual music listener appear as a figure of true prestige andindependence.

If music's fundamental quality is extension through time, italso has another, inverse quality: no sooner is it heard than itvanishes. That fact is of immeasurable importance in the erapreceding recorded sound, when music, to be heard, had tobe performed live. Unlike our present-day access, virtuallyunlimited, to whatever music we wish to hear at whateverhour, the music lovers of the nineteenth century had only thevocalists or instrumentalists in their own ranks to turn towhen they wanted to listen. Instead of more than a century'sworth of recordings, readily available and transmissible di­rectly to a personal headset device, they had ephemeral,one-off performances. Accordingly, music was irrevocably al­lied with memory, even mourning. Painting constituted oneof the few ways (however imperfect) of capturing any givenmusical moment, of remedying music's constant disappear­ing act. These "recordings"-not of music, but of musicalexperience-merit attention.

WagnerismIt was pointed out above that eighteenth-century operagoerslooked much more than they listened; ironically, the FrenchWagnerians of the late nineteenth century by and large couldonly listen, because of prohibitions on staged performances ofthe master's works following the Franco-Prussian War of1870-71. Even though Wagner mania was at an all-time high

PICTl'RING LISTENING IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 267

1 "Bernard Berenson, 1959, after listening to YehudiMenuhin," from Looking at Pictures with Bernard Berenson (NewYork: Harry N. Abrams, 1974),39 (photograph provided byBerenson Archive, Villa I Tatti, Florence)

in 1885, few French had ever seen his operas performedonstage or read his aesthetic treatises. Their knowledge of hismusic came through indirect channels, such as EdouardDujardin's monthly Revue Wagnerienne, accounts from visitorsto Bayreuth, guides to the operatic plots, and piano transcrip­tions of the orchestral scores.

Thus it is that in one of the archetypal pictorial documentsof French Wagnerism, Henri Fantin-Latour's Around the Piano

shown at the Salon of 1885 (Fig. 4), the music is enjoyed ina private home, by a small audience, and is provided by a solepianist (the composer Emmanuel Chabrier)." Wagner's cel­ebrated Gesamtkunstwerk is strangely remote. All the same, thepainting had Wagnerian associations from the outset." Thiswas due partly to the known musical preferences of the menportrayed and partly to Fantin's own enthusiasm, which hesignaled publicly at the same Salon of 1885 with his litho­graphs of Wagnerian subjects.

Fantirr's painting would have resonated with many behold­ers who experienced orchestral music performed in pianoreduction at home. Like the television today, the family pianowas an everyday source of entertainment; its role in dissemi­nating symphonic music cannot be overestimated. As the

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268 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2007 VOLUME LXXXIX NUMBER 2

2 Nicolas Lancret, Concert in CrozaisSalon on the Rue de Richelieu, early1720s, oil on canvas, 141;2 X 18 in.(36.8 X 45.6 cm). AIte Pinakothek,Munich, inv. no. 14880 (artworkin the public domain; photo-graph provided by the BayerischeStaatsgcmaldesammlungen, AItePinakothek Munich)

3 Francois Dequevauviller afterNicolas Lavreince, L'assemblee au con­cert, 1784, engraving, 15% X 181;2 in.(40.4 X 46.9 em), plate, 161JR X19% in. (41 X 50.6 cm), sheet. TheArt Institute of Chicago, Gift of thePrint and Drawing Club, 1925.177(artwork in the public domain;photograph provided by the ArtInstitute of Chicago)

Symbolist critic Andre Fontainas recalled, "Often I wouldreturn [from the Pasdeloup, Colonne, or Lamoureux publicconcerts] accompanied by Paul Valery, and, opening thesacred music score, at the piano, together we would applyourselves, equally devoid of any training on the instrument,to unravel with our stiff and hesitant fingers the subtle causesof our most recent emotions.v'" His reminiscence demon-

strates that sight-reading piano reductions was not the soleprovince of trained musicians, even if it was an amusementtypical of a certain cultural elite.

While the experience depicted in Around the Piano is rep­resentative of French Wagnerians generally, it is particularlytrue of Fantin-Latour himself, whose reclusive nature kepthim away from large concerts and the Opera. He vastly

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PICTURING L1STENII':(; II': TilE LATE NINETEDJTH CENTeRY 269

4 Henri Fantin-Latour, Around the Piano, 1885, oil on canvas, 63 X 87% in. (160 X 222 em). Musec d'Orsay, Paris, inv. no. RF 2173(artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Reunion des Musees Nationaux [Herve Lewandowski] / Art Resource,NY)

preferred to enjoy his beloved music at home in the form offour-hand piano renditions played by his friends. 1

I Nine yearsbefore painting Around the Piano, Fantin had postponed hismarriage in order to attend the Ring performance that inau­gurated the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, but he never returnedthere, contenting himself instead (like so many of his com­patriots) with a mediated knowledge of Wagner's composi­tions and ideas.

By 1885, Charles Baudelaire's defense of Tannhiiuser(1861) had, in the quarter century since its publication, be­come paradigmatic of the experience surrounding Wagner'smusic. In this astonishing text, which singled out the poet asone of the first French partisans of Wagner, Baudelaire pos­tulated an entirely new kind of listening. 12 Beyond the longattention span demanded by the continuous operatic music(as opposed to the less stringent habits to which Italian operahad conditioned listeners: broad expanses of lax concentra­tion, punctuated by short bursts of attention to the arias), itwas something more profound, on the scale of a thorough­going physio-psychological upheaval. Baudelaire spoke of amusic that took hold of him and overwhelmed him, bringingon a feeling of being "delivered from the bonds of gravity . . . .Then I fully conceived the idea of a soul moving in a lumi-

nous space, of an ecstasy made ofpleasure and ofknowledge, andhovering above and well away from the natural world.t'"Before this, already on hearing the concert Wagner con­ducted in Paris in January 1860, Baudelaire had written aletter to the composer in which he confessed to a feeling "ofletting myself be penetrated, invaded, a truly sensual plea­sure, and which resembles that of rising into the air or rollingon the sea."!" What is essential to remember, in this firstextraordinary telling, is that Baudelaire's reactions owednothing to the wizardries of Wagnerian stagecraft. They arosefrom the music alone.

What Baudelaire did, in the course of trying to find somesmall sliver of acceptance for Wagner in the crowds of Pari­sian music lovers, was above all to supply an altogether newvocabulary for verbalizing the experience of music. Hetapped into sensations of such utter strangeness that peoplewere shocked to face the possibility that they might have widecurrency. As idiosyncratic as his testimonial may seem, it gavevoice to the responses many others had found inchoate andineffable. And it can be interpreted as offering a challengenot just to writers but also to artists. Baudelaire had suc­ceeded in making listening verbally interesting: Could paint­ers make it pictorially interesting?

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270 ART BULLETIN JUt\E 2007 VOLUME LXXXIX t\UMBER 2

5 Fantin-Latour, Music and Poetry, 1883, lithograph, 14% X

18'VR in. (37.4 X 47.5 em) (artwork in the public domain;photograph provided by the Boston Public Library, PrintDepartment) .

It must be said that Fantiri's canvas is unequal to therepresentational challenge set up by Baudelaire's over­wrought account. True, Fantiri's concern is piano music inthe home rather than a full-scale orchestra concert. Furthercomplicating matters, however, his chosen medium does notproceed through time, as music does (and as Baudelaire'swords do). Painting asserts the fiction of a moment capturedand thus requires the establishment of a temporal unity. Allthe same, a work of visual art in which music is at issue onlyexaggerates what is already an inherent temporal dimensionof the "spatial" art. As Theodor Adorno put it, in an obser­vation that we can link with Lessing's pregnant moment,"The paintings that seem the most successful are those inwhich the absolutely synchronic appears to be a temporalunfolding that holds its breath." 15 The composer Carl Mariavon Weber remarked that the perception even of a landscapeseen in nature was successive, just like music. If;

Successive perception of a fixed visual object was not alwayscounted as a pleasure. In 1885 Alfred de Lostalot likenedWagner's music to a visual experience through time that be­comes unbearably boring:

The texture of Tristan is, it is true, of a marvelous varietyand richness; it seems that one has before one's eyes oneof those Oriental carpets where the flora and fauna of animaginary world blend into disquieting arabesques andwhere the warm colors produce a sort of intoxication ofthe senses. But hold on! Is there an "amateur" on earthwho could bear the contemplation of a carpet for fourconsecutive hours without flagging? I 7

He faulted Wagner for the same lack of formal itinerary thatallows the eye to wander where it will over a two-dimensionalwork of art. Camille Mauclair used a similar metaphor, but ina positive sense, in his essay "Eaux-fortes d'apres l'orchestre":music is a tapestry woven by orchestral musicians unable tosee the pattern they make. Only the audience has the privi-

6 Fantin-Latour, Tannhiiuser, Act III, Scene 3, ca. 1877,lithograph, 9'12 X 12\1<2 in. (24.1 X 31.8 em) (artwork in thepublic domain; photograph provided by the Boston PublicLibrary, Print Department)

lege of viewing this "curtain of divinely transparent images"from the proper side. IS Unlike de Lostalot, Mauclair empha­sized process over product-and he hazarded no guess as tohow long the tapestry might hold an audience's attention.

In Around the Piano, Fantin sought to maximize duration, atthe cost of exposing the fiction of the arrested moment. Whathe gained was an interior emotional dimension that wellcharacterized the "new listening" described by Baudelaire.His careful psychological individuation in this work consti­tuted an effort both to document and to incite a new kind ofattention: for the music's listeners and the painting's behold­ers alike, a full concentration that did not disperse in aninstant. The critic Andre Michel, for one, felt Fantin hadsucceeded: "Nothing distracts the attention."!"

Fantins Wagnerian lithographs, ethereal flights of fancy,have traditionally been considered the antipode of his solidlyrealistic paintings such as Around the Piano/" These two sup­posedly irreconcilable halves of his oeuvre-reverie and re­ality-look more compatible when one considers theirshared concern with the problematic of attention. The fig­ures in the lithographs sometimes appear in states of purelistening, oblivious of the visible. In Music and Poetry of 1883(Fig. 5), the allegorical figures of Music with her lyre andPoetry with her open book resemble apparitions in a light­filled realm of mirage. On the right, a man deep in concen­tration does not look at them. But he is listening. InTannhiiuser, Act III, Scene 3 of about 1877 (Fig. 6), whereWolfram tries to hold back Tannhauser from returning to theVenusberg, it is the chant [unebre of Elisabeth's funeral cor­tege that sways him. Listening becomes drama. Tannhauser islooking away from the procession; he does not see it, hemerely hears it.

In those lithographs, much as he had done in Around thePiano, Fantin explicitly thematizes listening in what I perceiveas an attempt to elicit a special kind of attention on the partof his beholder. In the painting, he had found that theconstraints of realism did not permit the figures both to listen

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7 Magnus Enckell, The Concert, 1898,oil on canvas, 35% X 29% in. (90 X76 em). Ateneum Art Museum, Hel­sinki (artwork in the public domain;photograph provided by the CentralArt Archives, Finnish National Gallery)

PICTlIRIN(; l.lSTENING IN TIlE LATl': NINETEENTH CE:>:TURY 271

attentively and to invite the attentive listening of their be­holders. As Charles Tardieu wrote, "Around the piano, thefirst thing to do is listen, especially when the piano is playedby the author of Espana and Ctoendoline" But the critic notedthat for the most part, the men

look at us more attentively than they listen. Maybe theyknow the score by heart, Tristan or Parsifal. Mr. Chabrierhimself seems distracted.... The beholder is struck by therealistic aspect of the scene to the point that he takeshimself for a guest. It is he who disturbs Mr. Chabrier; it isat him that Mr. Adolphe Julien [sic] is smiling; a few moreinstants, and with the help of the lovely music, he will bea Wagnerian like you and rne.:"

In short, Fantin allowed his beholders to intrude in return forthe chance to grab hold of and transform them, in an almostevangelical sense-all by redirecting their attention exclu­sively to listening. Yet many critics found that the cost to theunity and credibility of Fantins painting was too high. Thegeneral critical discomfort with Around the Piano indicates

that Fantin had hit an impasse in his endeavor to represent

musical experience that was both collective and interior­

ized.22

A work that manages to combine the private and public

experience of music with remarkable success is The Concert of

1898 by Magnus Enckell, a Finnish painter who spent the

early l890s in Paris (Fig. 7). Enckell faithfully portrays four of

his friends listening to a concert in the festival hall of theUniversity of Helsinki, recognizable by the pillars and lamps

in the background. These lamps do little to illuminate theother audience members, who dissolve in a blur. Instead,

light converges on the shiny face of the central listener, thecomposer Selim Palmgren, whose intense absorption in themusic becomes the uncontested focus.~:\

How does Enckell resolve the tension between public andprivate? Omitting the musicians entirely, he allows his be­

holder's relation to the scene to oscillate between participa­tion and identification: to join the scene as an "extra" audi­ence member, so to speak, and, at the same time, to identitywith the experience of a single listener. Unlike Fantiri's lis-

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272 ART BULLETIN .JUNE 2007 VOLUME LXXXIX NUMBER 2

8 Edgar Degas, Manet and His Wife, ca. 1868-69, oil oncanvas, 25% X 28 in. (65 X 71 em). Kitakyushu MunicipalMuseum of Art, Japan (artwork in the public domain; photo­graph provided by the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art)

teners in Around the Piano, Enckell's Palmgren is unaware ofand undisturbed by us.

The contradictions of this hybrid approach to the be­holder, however, were such that most artists found it unten­able-just as they found the two aspects of music's temporal­ity, instantaneity and duration, unable to coexist happily in asingle work of art. Those artists seeking to emulate music'sduration plunged deep into the subjective experience of onelistener, whose place they invited the beholder to occupy.Provided that the psychological portrayal was compellingenough to forge such a bond, in this approach music's visualaspect receded in favor of privacy and interiority. Such worksrelied on the premise that listening to music is distinct fromother experiences and induces an emotional state particularto it.

SymbolismThroughout the Symbolist years the question of whethervisual art was capable of representing musical experienceremained unsettled. As late as 1909, Camille Mauclair said itstill had not been done. "Current painting offers us no phys­iognomist capable of recounting incisively for us the dramathat the symphony creates on faces. In the few paintings thatgroup people around a piano, the music remains impercep­tible.,,24 Still, he thought the experience of music a subjecthighly worthy of painting. Odilon Redon, to the contrary,believed the challenge fatuous, not to say impossible. Hiscritique of Fantin's Wagnerian paintings rested on the beliefthat "no color can translate the musical world which isuniquely and solely internal and without any bearing in thereal world.,,25 By the end of the century, the exterior realitiesof music listening had dwindled in importance to such anextent that representations of listening largely became pro-

jections of interior visions. The musical stimulus for thosevisions might be remembered, reconstituted, imagined, orinvented entirely within the mind; it might lie at a distantremove from any actual event. Even if James Ensor, FernandKhnopff, Edouard Vuillard, Paul Gauguin, and other artistsessentially agreed with Redon's declaration that "the musicalworld ... is uniquely and solely internal," they saw no reasonnot to try to paint it.

The Symbolist climate favored an emphasis on the innerexperience of music, yet the pictorial shift toward the listeneris traceable to an artist rarely associated with Symbolism:Edgar Degas. With his portrait Manet and His Wife of about1868-69 (a famously mutilated work that set off a quarrelbetween the two painters) ,26 Degas revivified the "woman atthe piano" genre27 and produced a precocious image ofintimate listening (Fig. 8). He retained that focus in Degas~5

Father Listening to Lorenzo Pagans Playing the Guitar of about1871-72 (Fig. 9). Here the music score forms a sort of aure­ole around the elder Degas's head, helping to convey hisutter absorption in the sound world that Pagans creates forhim. His attitude of wary concentration and his keenly ren­dered engagement are the subject of the painting, even morethan Pagans's spirited playing.

It was within naturalistic conventions, then, that a newvision of the listener emerged, arising from artists' freshinquiry into the psychological states induced by listening. InEnsor's Russian Music of 1881 (Fig. 10), bourgeois trappingsbelie the work's novelties. The musician and the listener findthemselves on equal footing; if anything, the identity of theperformer (unconfirmed) begins to cede to the commandingpresence of the listener, the painter Willy Finch. (Finch was,like Ensor, a member of the Belgian avant-garde artists'group Les XX.) Reception is the key word pronounced by thevisual vocabulary of vases, glass globes, and other vessels­even the upturned top hat on the table. The mirror in theupper right corner behind the listener's head suggests thathe is more than just a passive receptacle: interior reflectionplays a part in his experience.

Ensor's painting went head to head with Khnopff's 1883canvas Listening to Schumann (Fig. 11) at the third Salon desXX, in 1886, touching off a celebrated dispute in whichEnsor made a thinly veiled accusation of plagiarism. ButKhnopffs work goes further than Ensor's, notably becausethe central figure covering her face with her hand listenswithout looking at the music maker. That is a major aspectdistinguishing Degas's Listening to Lorenzo Pagans, too. Oncethe performer ceases to engage the listener's visual interest, itmatters little where the source of music is; the listener's innerexperience becomes the chief concern. In such cases, theartist directs the beholder's attention toward the listener; inhim or her the beholder finds a natural counterpart. Bothengage in the contemplation of an aesthetic object.

Traditionally, looking was and is a substantial componentof music listening. That is why the audience cares about thediva's dress, and why obstructed-view seats are sold at a lowerprice. The great violin virtuoso Niccolo Paganini grumbledthat "no one ever asks if you have heard Paganini, but if youhave seen him.,,28 Wagner's concealment of the orchestra inhis theater at Bayreuth left the stage drama as the sole claimon the opera audience's visual attention, even if the sight of

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9 Degas, Degas's Father Listening toLorenzo Pagans Playing the Guitar,ca. 1871-72, oil on canvas, 211/ 2 X

15% in. (54.5 X 40 cm). Museed'Orsay, Paris, inv. no. R.F. 3736 (art­work in the public domain: photo­graph provided by the Reunion desMusees Nationaux [Herve Lewan­dowski] / Art Resource, NY)

PICTURING LISTENING IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 273

the orchestra hitherto had been little more than a distrac­tion. The obscuring of the instrumentalists prompted Ador­no's vehement objection that "the product presents itself asself-producing," leading the audience to believe in an illusionof production without labor.f" How much more starkly thenegative commodity-fetishistic connotations of the "occulta­tion of production" might emerge in the absence of any stagedrama-that is, in a concert setting, where the musicians arethe main attraction. Adorno's account being entirely con­cerned with Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, he disregarded thispotential adaptation. Would a concert audience tolerate mu­sic issuing from an invisible source, and if so, what would theyfind to look at? The philosopher Paul Souriau concluded thatthe practice could not be generalized outside of Wagnerianopera: "For certain, it is admissible only at the theater. At a

concert, the listeners would not know what to do with theireyes in the idle moments of music listening.Y" What to dowith their eyes, indeed?

Especially in the age preceding recorded music, soundswithout a visual correlate were a rarity. The production ofmusic tended to be concealed only when the music wasserving to enhance a designed visual experience. At josephinPeladans first Salon for the occultist painters of the Rose +Croix, in 1892, for instance, invisible organs played the pre­lude to Parsifal. As early as 1821, Jean-Auguste-DominiqueIngres had imagined the disappearance of the orchestra for arequiem Mass where "nothing would come to distract fromthe effects themselves of the music.t''" In art as well as in life,isolating the aural experience of music was the key to givinglisteners primacy. As long as they were visually linked with

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274 ART IHiLLETIN Jl'NE 2007 VOLUME LXXXIX NUMI\ER 2

10 James Ensor, Russian Music, 1881,oil on canvas, 52'% X 43Y4 in. (133 X110 cm). Royal Museums of Fine Artsof Belgium, Brussels, inv. no. 4679(artwork © 2006 Artists Rights Society[ARS], New York I SABAM, Brussels;photograph provided by the RoyalMuseums of Fine Arts of Belgium)

music making, they would continue to be overshadowed by it.Separate from it, their experience could be more definitivelytheirs. It is ironic that painters were willing to insist on andwiden this separation between listening and its visual dimen­sion.

In Khnopff's Schumann, the listener takes center stagewhile the pianist, at the left edge of the canvas, is reduced toa disembodied hand on the end of the keyboard. The poetand critic Emile Verhaeren's first text on this painting, on itsexhibition at Brussels's Cercle Artistique in 1883, describedthe listener at the center as an "unforgettable motif.,,32 Sev­eral years later, Verhaeren discussed the painting at length ina twenty-three-page essay on Khnopff, first noting how itstood out from the many mediocre examples of the woman­at-the-piano genre. Even so, immediately after praising thework's power and originality, Verhaeren chastised Khnopfffor a failure of nerve in not eliminating the pianist entirely:

Was it necessary to show that bit of piano and that pianist'shand at left? Wouldn't we have understood without that?

Hasn't the painter simply given in to a preoccupation withpicturesque [aponismei In any case, the painting's atmo­sphere was musical enough to leave out this detail and letus figure it OUt. CICI

Verhaerens statement is remarkable for its assertion of a"musical atmosphere" independent of the piano and theperson playing it. Though Verhaeren does not explain this,he seems to be alluding to pictorial strategies that PierreBonnard and Vuillard would develop more fully. One won­ders why Verhaeren expresses disappointment at the sidelin­ing of the musical source, a device that was hardly typical ofthe music-listening genre. The central figure's pose has clas­sical associations with melancholy, but its further associationwith music is Khnopff's own.

Indeed, the central figure seems to huddle in a cocoon oftragic sorrow. Khnopff employs the same strategy-the con­cealment that reveals-used by the ancient painter Timan­thes, as Pliny recounts, in order to express the extreme griefof Agamemnon at the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia.'14

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PICTlIRIN(; l.ISTENING 11'\ TilE LATE NI"IETEENTH CENTCRY 275

11 Fernand Khnopff, Listening to Schumann, 1883, oil on canvas, 40 X 45VH in. (101.5 X 116.5 em). Royal Museums of Fine Arts ofBelgium, Brussels, inv. no. 6366 (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts ofBelgium)

According to Pliny, Timanthes, having squandered all theexpressions of distress on the more minor figures, had to veilAgamemnon's face, for which no adequate expression re­mained. Pliny grants Timanthes' ingenuity while implyingthat a more accomplished painter would never have foundhimself in such a quandary. But as Jennifer Montagu pointsout, the rhetorician Valerius Maximus, writing before Pliny,saw the strategy as engaging the beholder in imagining theextent of Agamemnon's anguish.i" For Khnopff, with hiscommitment to the Symbolist aesthetic of suggestion, thiswould have been a virtue. Since he was portraying only oneperson, there was no question of distributing degrees of grief.Having the single figure cover her face with her hand was nota dodge but rather a means to underscore the emotions

induced by music as among the profoundest in human ex­perience.

Verhaeren wrote that Khnopffs Schumann recorded a his­torical shift: "It has only been a few years that music is listenedto in this way-not with pleasure: with meditation. The effectof art, of our art, is an influence of vague attraction toward asad and solemn ideal.,,36 The new listening was independentof repertoire. Khnopff did not need to choose a moderncomposer, nor a lachrymose one, as his vehicle. Rather, hepresented the music of Robert Schumann, a composer indel­ibly associated with sentiment and humor despite his tragiclife, as an agent of dread and unbearable intensity.

Helping to underpin this "sad and solemn ideal" was thephilosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, rediscovered and much

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276 ART lIl'LLETlt'> Jl'NE 2007 VOLUME LXXXIX :'-IUMlIER 2

111 vogue, which greatly influenced contemporary under­standings of listening. In Belgium, Khnopffs friend GeorgesRodenbach was an important conduit for Schopenhauerianthought, which he absorbed in lectures at the College deFrance during the winter of 1878-79 and then disseminatedin his own lecture series on his return to Belgium.f" InFrance, Theodule Ribot's book La philosophie de Schopenhauer

heralded a spate of Schopenhauer translation and publica­tion in the 1880s.38 Ribot quoted Schopenhauer's key pas­sages on music in his popularizing commentary, concludingthat of all the arts it exerts the most powerful effects and ismost associated with contemplation.:'"

In Schopenhauer's system, music is a projection of theWill; the other arts are merely representations of it. More­over, music communicates without the need of an interme­diary. Recapitulating this widely held view, Ribot wrote in La

psychologie des sentiments that whereas most arts stimulate ideas,which in turn produce emotions, music directly affects theemotional state of the organism/'" Lionel Dauriac's treatiseon musical sensation draws similarly from Schopenhauer:unlike in literature and the visual arts, he says, where intel­lectual tasks (recognition of words, for example, or compar­isons of forms) intervene between the sensations receivedand the emotions produced, music directly produces sensa­tions and feelings."

The concept of music as a projection of the Will had aprofound consequence: it meant that the listener became aquasi-generator of music. Here the Symbolists took their leadfrom early German Romantic theories of painting and po­etry, which proved easily adaptable to music, to arrive at aradically subjective notion of listening. The increasing powerof the beholder (or reader) vis-a-vis the artist emerges ro­bustly from statements by Novalis and others, in which thework of art is defined as a process rather than a self-containedentity.42 Its successive perception by different viewers is alonewhat marks its various stages of completion, or incompletion.Thus, the perceiver cannot be "exterior to" a work of art;simply by engaging with it, he is taking part in a never­finished creative process. As Novalis wrote regarding poetry,'The true reader must be an extended form of the author.He is the higher authority who receives the object in apreliminary form from a lower one.,,43 The author, in adiminished role, offers his work to the reader in an act ofconsiderable humility. A similar assertion by Friedrich Schle­gel concurs that a book is incomplete without the contribu­tions of its eventual readers.44

These forebears, whose importance to the Symbolists isdifficult to overestimate, had newly conceived the work of artas a product of the spirit rather than an imitation of nature."In this idealist tradition, the blurred distinction between theself and the work of art presents a possibility of exchange andreversibility that was one of the most influential aspects ofearly German Romantic thought in the Symbolist period.After adding to it Schopenhauer's maxim "The world is myRepresentation"-a maxim that, as Paul Smith has pointedout, the Symbolists took further into solipsism than the phi­losopher intended46-the new generation of listeners gradu­ated from passive instruments to active generators of music.

Fantin-Latour's 1883 Evocation ofKundry (Fig. 12), in whichKlingsor calls up her apparition with a gesture, could be an

12 Fantin-Latour, Evocation of Kundry, 1883, lithograph, 19 x13% in. (48.3 X 34.6 cm) (artwork in the public domain;photograph provided by the Boston Public Library, PrintDepartment)

illustration of the Symbolist idea of listening. Evocation rep­resents the means by which one can call up music in the mindwithout a performer present. More than that, the word evo­cation had allusions to black magic and the occult, as thenineteenth-century Larousse dictionary tells us: "Action ofevoking, of causing to appear by sorcery.T'" The meaningderived from the ancient tradition (mentioned in the OldTestament) that a person leaves behind two corpses at thetime of death, one physical, the other purely spiritual andinvisible, which can be summoned by necromancy. Just asFantin tried to evoke in his beholder an experience of musicby definition immaterial, the hearer of any music was under­stood as in some sense a conjurer, complicit in the produc­tion of that music.

One of the most vivid accounts of this phenomenon comesfrom Theophile Gautier, who had an exceptional reactionwhen an assistant played piano music by Weber: "The notesvibrated with so much power that they entered my chest likebright arrows; soon the melody being played seemed to me toissue from myself; my fingers fidgeted on an absent keyboard;the sounds sprang forth from it blue and red...."48 Asidefrom its obvious interest as a document of synesthetic expe­rience, this passage helps to explain how the performer couldwane in importance to the point of becoming superfluous.

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Even listeners in a large concert hall had a role in "com­pleting" orchestral music by virtue of their contribution to it,according to Mauclair: "these great baths of diffuse sonori­ties, to which we found ourselves invited, with a frequencyunknown in days gone by, inclined us to pour into thesymphony the expansion of nervous forces that we used tokeep bottled up inside ourselves.T'" Mauclair's notion ofmusic listening not as pure reception but as an exchange,and music itself as a kind of diffuse and permeable substanceconstituted in part by the listener's own psychologicalmakeup, bears unmistakeable traces of Schopenhauer andearly German Romanticism.

With the listener's response now as never before the guar­antee of music's very existence, there could be no doubt ofmusic's fundamental alliance with the emotions. The criticTeodor de Wyzewa, particularly loquacious on this point, isrepresentative of a whole host of writers during the period.One can easily establish consensus on the following remarkof his: "Music must translate, by symphonic melody, ourfeelings and emotions, because neither novels, nor poetry,but music alone can express this emotional substratum whichsometimes lies beneath our ideas.,,50Yet the more critics suchas Wyzewa trumpeted music's supreme suitability for express­ing emotions, for expressing what no other art could, themore visual art fell behind. This was felt most acutely by thosevisual artists whose principal goal, whether they adopted theSymbolist label or not, was the representation of the emo­tions and what could not be expressed.

Paragone refers to competition between arts, usually paint­ing and poetry or painting and sculpture. Leonardo is afamous early exponent who in fact treats the relative merits ofpainting and music (many writers on paragone do not), to thedetriment of music, mainly because it is fleeting and cannotbe perceived all at once.I" Eugene Delacroix followed Leo­nardo in believing painting superior to music because it canbe apprehended instantaneously.V Nonetheless, the notionthat music is a higher art than painting prevailed in theSymbolist period; its many virtues included abstraction, im­materiality, and indeterminacy (or, put more strongly, mean­inglessness). Here is a typical summation: "Sounds in them­selves have no absolute, direct meaning.... Music is es­sentiallya mystery, an empty space, an impression, since it isinvisible and impalpable.v'" The partisans of music had adistinguished predecessor in Jeanjacques Rousseau, who be­lieved it wider in its reach than painting and more profoundin its effect on the emotions. In the nineteenth century,Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche provided most of thephilosophical ballast for the arguments in music's favor.

Too often, studies of Gesamtkunstwerk and the Symbolistfusion of the arts have operated on the happy premise of fullcooperation between the arts. If visual artists admitted mu­sic's supremacy, the assumption goes, it was in a spirit ofadmiration and deference.?" Competition, however, is histor­ically central to the meaning of paragone and was no lessprominent a feature in this late-nineteenth-century episode.Paul Valery, for instance, defined Symbolism explicitly as acontest between literature and music: "that intention com­mon to several groups of poets (otherwise antagonistic to oneanother) to recover from music the heritage that was dueto them.,,55 Symbolist painters had that intention, too. Even

PICTlIRI:\J(; l.lSTENIN(; IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 277

while conceding music's higher status, they could not helpbut resent it. They saw an opportunity to piggyback on itsstature for as long as the stubborn materiality of their own artremained a liability. This worked in several ways, the firstbeing to link painting's emphasis on the emotions with mu­sic's prestige.

In the Symbolist climate Delacroix's remark that intellecthas no share in the pleasure of music.i" even if accepted, wasno longer seen as a shortcoming. Intellectualism even beganto equate with philistinism in certain circles. Stephane Mal­larrne's belief in music's preeminence has been proposed tostem from its "relative freedom from the intellectualist mis­interpretations under which poetry is so liable to suffer."r,7This was the classic dichotomy of ideas in poetry versussentiments in music, going back to an age before instrumen­tal music had successfully challenged vocal music's tradi­tional dominance.

If Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had posited the text asthe solid piece that "rescues consciousness from that dream­ier element of feeling without concepts" induced by music.i"suffice it to say that the Symbolists preferred not to be res­cued. They approved Schopenhauer's definition of a com­poser as one who "expresses the deepest wisdom in a lan­guage which his reason does not understand; as a personunder the influence of mesmerism tells things of which hehas no conception when he awakes.Y" Moreover, they as­serted feeling as a legitimate and even superior way of know­ing, bypassing cognition.P"

Poetry, the most intellectual of the arts, had been put onnotice. According to Valery, the perceived superiority of mu­sic was the stimulus for the Symbolist experiments in poetry:

A time came for poetry when it felt itself pale and weakenbefore the energies and the resources of the orchestra....Perhaps never before had the confidence which the poetsput in their own genius, ... their immemorial possessionof the lyre, and this first rank which they flatter themselvesthat they occupy in the hierarchy of servants of the uni­verse, appeared so precisely under threat. They emergedfrom concerts overwhelmed.i"

Poets were uncomfortably aware that the status of their ownart was sliding in relation to music's climb. Even well into theera of Symbolist poetic innovations, many of which wereadopted from the musical art, Wyzewa could say to wideassent: "To translate emotion by precise words was obvi­ously impossible: it amounted to decomposing the emo­tion, hence destroying it.,,62 This left the door open forvisual art to step in.

Painting itself was very often credited with the musicalqualities that words lacked. Art criticism was awash in musicalmetaphors: catchphrases, emotional shorthand, an easy outfor writers who fell speechless before powerful works of art.To describe the effect of an unspecified painting by PeterPaul Rubens, Wyzewa wrote, "The colors and lines have them­selves acquired, by a slow association with stirring objects, apower to produce emotion directly. They have become thenotes of a new music.t''" Semantic overlaps, meanwhile (suchas harmony, dissonance, symphony), were quickly wearing

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278 ART Bl'l.LETIN .JUNE 200i VOU'ME l.XXXIX NUMBER 2

13 Pierre Bonnard, preliminary coverdesign for Le petit solpKe illustre, 1893,color lithograph, 81f2 X 101f2 in,(21.6 X 26.7 cm). The MetropolitanMuseum of Art, New York, the ElishaWhittelsey Collection, the ElishaWhittelsey Fund, 1967, inv. no.67.753,1 (artwork © 2006 ArtistsRights Society [ARS], New York /ADAGP, Paris; photograph © TheMetropolitan Museum of Art)

out from critical overuse; the language of synesthesia had, bythe 1880s, become conventional.

Critics who relied on such musical metaphors hardly knewwhat they meant anymore. The failure of language, suddenlyperceived as too blunt an instrument to convey supremeaesthetic experience, forced them at times into extraordinaryadmissions of inarticulacy:

Never has a painting given me a sensation somehow more

musical. I would be obviously very uncomfortable if I hadto explain this idea clearly; but in looking at this portrait,it seems to me that I hear a sweet, low-pitched cello tune. It'sthat art is a mystery; there courses through our souls asacred emotion, terrifying or tender, that we experiencedelightfully without being able to reason it OUt.6 4

Language, says Octave Mirbeau, the tool that distinguishescreatures that can reason from those that cannot, is uniquelyill-suited to the aesthetic emotions. This is the effective abdi­cation of the critic who, each time he proposes an equiva­lence between art and music, simultaneously admits the fail­ure of language to achieve an equivalence with them.

Thus, we can understand the implications of music's per­ceived supremacy for the relative status of painting and po­etry. The lesson of Khnopffs Listening to Schumann was thatmusic evokes emotions too powerful to be expressed. Lan­guage, because of its determinacy, was too clumsy to charac­terize musical experience, but visual art, by taking over thisrole from language, could put itself on a par with music.

Yet painting, relative to music, suffered from a lesser powerto claim attention. Music surrounds, but visual art can beignored. For artists seeking a way to compensate for thisfactor, musical subjects focusing on the listener could pro­pose another, more sustained mode of attention-in effect,modeling the behavior of the beholder. Listeners pictured in

a work of art as exemplars of single-minded focus on anaesthetic object might spur the actual viewers to follow suit. Ifart could simulate a musical experience for the viewer andelicit a reaction more like that caused by music, it might alsobe capable of reinforcing and prolonging attention. In thisway the spatial art of painting feigns an appropriation, how­ever brief, of music's duration.

An interesting commentary on the possibility of a silent,visually provoked experience of music comes from an 1884article by Edmund Gurney, quoted by Ribot: "there is plentyof music from which I have received as much emotion insilent representation [that is, interior hearing while reading ascore] as when presented by the finest orchestra.Y" InSchopenhauerian fashion, the performers wither in impor­tance, even becoming unnecessary. This experience of musicobtained by looking at a score-a skill at which much of themusical public was apparently adept-recurs in an 1897 re­view of Vincent d'Indy's Feroaal, a Wagner-influenced musicdrama. Here, the writer dares to imagine a "music of thefuture" independent of performance:

with the singing and the orchestra eliminated, the com­poser will no longer have to worry about the executabilityof his work, and the impossible will no longer stop him asit does today. He will imagine, if need be, violins withtwenty strings, oboes three meters long, trumpets to makethe walls come tumbling down, and voices with a limitlesslyideal range... , all the spectators will each have the scorebefore their eyes and there, in that religious silence, theywill sample ineffable pleasures in their direct, intimatecommunion with the composer's genius.l'''

Were this fantasy to be realized, the full visual shift from theperformers to the printed page would be accomplished. Sucha vision-which the author says is only "a step" away from the

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PICTt'RING L1STEi\:ING IN THE LATE NIi\:ETEENTII CENTeRY 279

14 Bonnard, illustration for Le petit solfege illustre, Paris, 1893,1, color lithograph, 8% X I nOj in. (21.3 X 28.5 cm). NationalGallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Virginia and Ira JacksonCollection, Partial and Promised Gift, 2000.180.56 (artwork© 2006 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York I ADAGP,Paris; photograph © 2006 Board of Trustees, National Galleryof Art, Washington)

objects represented, Vuillard adopted an unevenness of sur­face that suggests asymmetric patterns of attention to thoseobjects. 1i7

Another strategy for representing the experience of musicconsisted in withholding from view the intended object ofattention. This approach, much like Khnopffs near suppres­sion of the source of music in Listening to Schumann, under­scores the essential unattainability of music in a picture. Forno matter how the artist evokes music's presence visually, itcannot be given to the beholder aurally. A dramatic exampleis Gauguin's Flowers, Still Life or Artist's Interior, Rue Carcelof

1881 (Fig. 16). The first title indicates that the primary sub­ject might be the generous bowl of flowers sitting on theembroidered tablecloth. Half hidden, in the back, is a woman(Gauguin's wife Mette?) playing an upright piano on which aman (Gauguin?) leans, facing her. Already the presence of anattentive listener invites the beholder to stand in his place, soto speak, and pay attention, too. The empty chair at right canalso be read as soliciting the beholder to join the group as alistener. But of the pianist one can see only half of the faceand part of the torso. A screen, itself partially hidden fromview by the more assertive foreground elements, obscures thelistener below the shoulders, as well as most of the piano. Theresult of this unusual composition is an overdetermined con­cealment, both visual and auditory: one strains to see just asone strains to hear. Prolonged effort yields inevitable frustra­tion.

It is worth noting here that Schopenhauer's pessimisticview of the Will, forever repeating a cycle from desire tofrustration to (sometimes) fulfillment, coincides with his un­derstanding of musical structure: "The nature of melody is aconstant digression and deviation from the keynote in athousand ways, not only to the harmonious intervals, thethird and the dominant, but to every tone, to the dissonantseventh, and the extreme intervals; yet there always follows afinal return to the keynote.t''" Paintings like Gauguin's Flow-

music of his own day-is premised on an experience of musicseparate from its performance. The works of art discussedhere suggest that artists were well aware of this possibility and

sought to exploit it.Short of providing a score for the viewer, what visual means

of simulating musical experience were available? Artists inthe 1890s, perhaps feeling that the realistic portrayal of lis­teners as seen in the work of Fantin-Latour and Khnopff wasa spent force, experimented with new formal and perceptualstrategies that boldly confounded the beholder's expecta­tions. A motif of swirling treble-clef wallpaper, for example,appears in Bonnard's preliminary cover design for Le peti!

solfege illustre, dated 1893 (Fig. 13). In this illustration, show­ing a group of people singing and playing instruments, thebackground-or, more precisely, the confusion of figure andground-gives the sense of "music in the air." On the firstpage of Le petit solfege illustre, a line emerges from the fluteand curls upward, smokelike, to blend with the wisps of theflutist's hair (Fig. 14). This line is, of course, the figure forsound; the three listeners at the left sit with head bent, twowith chin in hand. Bonnard uses the visual convention of thecurling line as an element of a universal language: a sche­matic method that relates to the pedagogical function of theSolfege album.

It was Vuillard in his paintings who best exploited back­ground elements to refer to inner experience-that is, torepresent the distorting or transforming effects of the indi­vidual perceiving mind. Already the bourgeois interior ofListening to Schumann, a metaphor for psychological enclo­sure, had emerged softened and muffled by Khnopffs paint­brush. That had been in order to achieve the appropriateemotional tenor: to underscore the contemplative quiet ofthe listener. Vuillard more aggressively aimed for what mightbe called mind pictures that allow beholders not only torecognize the act of listening but also to experience it vicar­iously. These works play up the highly idiosyncratic nature ofperception, notjust the objective duration of the music beingperceived.

During the latter half of the 1890s, Vuillard repeatedlypainted Misia Natanson (nee Godebska), wife of the Revue

Blanche editor, Thadee Natanson, playing the piano for asingle listener. This listener's position and posture vary, andhis identity cannot always be ascertained. He does not alwaysdominate the composition; indeed, his physical presencesometimes seems dispensable. His sensory experience, on theother hand, is made central. Vuillard relied on pattern, color,and distorted perspectives to convey the listener's envelop­ment by the music. The effect is particularly powerful in Misia

at the Piano (Fig. 15), where Misia's husband, looking awayfrom the piano and holding a drink, is gray and effaced in theright foreground. Misia, in yellow, is reduced in size relativeto the lamps on and behind the piano. Vuillard insteadconcentrated on the wealth of patterns (walls, tapestry, car­pet, piano shawl), giving an impression of suffusion anddiffusion all at once. The contrast of the giant lamp behindthe piano with the tiny picture on the wall to the left of Misialends form to the disordered visual perceptions-the fixa­tions and interruptions of attention-that accompany an in­tense musical experience. In abandoning a one-to-one corre­spondence between facture and the material texture of

~. ,

Chapitre IDEFINITIONS QENtRALE8, NOTE., PORTtl, eLi.

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280 ART Bl;Ll.ETI~ .Il·~E 211117 \'Ol.l'ME l.XXXIX "l'\IlIER 2

15 Edouard Vuillard, Misia at the Piano, 1899, oil on cardboard, 21% X 31lh in. (55 X 80 em). Private collection, New York(artwork © 2006 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / ADAGP, Paris)

ers, Still Life, though lacking the luxury of a wide temporalrange in which to accomplish this "constant digression anddeviation," can nevertheless put into playa similar dynamic ofdesire, frustration, and postponed (or thwarted) gratifica­tion. Leaving aside the question of whether the Symbolistlabel applies to Gauguin in 1881 (or ever), one can say thatthe surreptitious or even covert aspect of Flowers, Still Life haseverything to do with the Symbolist aesthetic of secrecy. It isby attempting to gain access to something denied them thatbeholders are drawn in.

Vilhelm Harnmershoi took that idea a step further in hisInterior with Spinet (Strandgade 30) of 1901 (Fig. 17). A starkpainting by comparison with Gauguin's, it achieves a climateof waiting that provokes unease. The woman standing withher back to us gives the impression that she might at anymoment seat herself at the spinet and begin to play. Duringthis interim of ambiguous length, she stands opposite the twopictures on the wall, which stare back at her and at us. Thescene is frozen in eternal expectation. A~ in works by seven­teenth-century Dutch genre painters such as Jan Vermeer,with whom Hammershoi shares certain affinities, Interior withSpinet seems to be luxuriating in a kind of temporal disten­sion, out of real time. In that respect it is distinct fromFantin-Latour's Around the Piano, which proposed a musicaltime already "playing itself out," as it were. There, accordingto the fiction of the painting, we were invited to participate in

the guise of listeners and thus submit to a temporal regimestructured by the music that Chabrier was already playing.The duration that Fantin sought was not intended to lastforever; it had natural limits. Hammershoi's expectant si­lence is indefinite. He seeks not to maximize duration but totranscend it entirely.

Music, Time, and MemoryThe paintings by Gauguin and Hamrnershoi (Figs. 16, 17),which bookend the period under study here, both proposemusic as something to be forever anticipated. This strategy ofdeferral speaks to, and in some ways compensates for, theever-present anxiety about music's instantaneous disappear­ance. The poet Alphonse de Lamartine, for example, hadwritten ruefully in 1860 that "this electric telegraph of theear, which will one day capture these fugitive inspirations ofthe Liszts and Paganinis, was not yet invented; these notesfixed themselves only as an impression in our souls when theartist [Liszt] improvised for hours on the salon piano."?"Because this "impression in our souls," or memory, was way­ward and unreliable, music's association with inevitable losspersisted throughout the nineteenth century. The technol­ogy that would allow recorded music to preserve what mem­ory could not was still in its infancy in the 1920s, when HenriBergson and Marcel Proust published essential texts on therelation between music, time, and memory.

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16 Paul Gauguin, Flowers, Still Life(Artist's Interior, Rue Carceb, 1881, oilon canvas, 51 \Is X 63% in. (130 X162 cm). National Gallery, Oslo (art­work in the public domain; photographby Erich Lessing, provided by ArtResource, NY)

PICTl!RI~G LISTENING IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CE"TlIRY 281

All of the works of art discussed here are more than simplecommemorations of irretrievable musical experience­though they are that. What Gauguin, Hammershoi, and otherartists discovered was that a painting, precisely because theexperience of looking at it had no prescribed duration, wasideally suited to offer its beholders an escape from ordinarytime. They recognized that time as experienced in percep­tion-in hearing music or looking at a picture-might ex­pand well beyond its usual limits. Indeed, they emphasizedthis aspect, setting up a dynamic of expectation in which aninfinitely extensible moment is answerable only to subjectiveexperience.

In addressing the relation of music and memory, bothBergson and Proust also recognized the role of music instructuring subjective experiences of time. In Matter and Mem­

ory, Bergson argued that our relation to things in the world,to "that which lasts [ce qui dure]," is one of perceived duration,individually experienced, and not "that impersonal and ho­mogeneous duration, the same for everything and everyone."He continued, "In reality, there is no single rhythm of dura­tion; one can imagine many different rhythms, which, someslower and some faster, would measure the degree of tensionor relaxation of our consciousness." Our habit of measuringobjective time is as ingrained as it is illusory; that is why we aresurprised that duration is an elastic concept.?"

Bergson returned to these themes in remarks published in1922. That was the year he met Albert Einstein at the meetingof the Societe Francaise de Philosophie, and his remarkscomment directly on Einstein's theory. In the chapter "Onthe Nature of Time," Bergson began by distinguishing twotypes of memory: "interior memory [memoire interieure] ," cor­responding to the changing experience of the continuouspresent, and "personal memory [memoire personnellei" a sep­arate repository. Bergson relied on music for the conceptual

17 Vilhelm Hammershoi, Interior with Spinet (Strandgade 30),1901, oil on canvas, 24% X 20% in. (63 X 52.5 cm).Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen, inv. no. WH18 (artwork in thepublic domain; photograph by Pernille Klemp)

material necessary to explain "mernoire interieure." In thefirst place, music is coincident with the continuity of timeitself" Without music we would have no idea of duration:Bergson hints that music ontologically precedes duration.

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282 ART IHiLLETI:"; .Jl'NE 2007 VOLUME LXXXIX ~liMl\ER 2

18 Frantisek Kupka, Piano Kevs / Lake,1909, oil on canvas, 31 YH X 28% in.(79 X 72 cm). National Gallery,Prague (artwork © 2006 Artists RightsSociety [ARS], New York / ADAGP,Paris; photograph by Erich Lessing,provided by Art Resource, NY)

Bergson returns to his musical example to illustrate thespecial feature of the "interior time [temps inthieur]" (distinctfrom the "time of things [temps des chases]," which we perceiveunfolding in the material world). If we listen to music witheyes shut, concentrating on it exclusively, we will discover that"temps interieur" is indivisible and immeasurable. Bergsonlater adds that whereas duration is rooted in subjective expe­rience, time is speculative: "Real duration is experienced; weestablish that time rolls forward.,,72 Clearly, the relation be­tween "temps interieur" and "temps des choses" is problem­atic. We may perceive simultaneity between a moment in ourinterior life and a moment in our physical experience of theworld. But only memory, or consciousness, permits us toconnect before and after; only memory can prevent temporaldisintegration into disparate, incoherent instants.?"

That is what Proust was speaking of when he wrote, "Anhour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents andsounds and projects and climates, and what we call reality isa certain connection between these immediate sensationsand the memories which envelop us simultaneously withthem....,,74 Memory, in giving coherence to the diverse,

unruly impressions gathered by our senses, is the only guar­antee of the unity of the self. This time, governed by memory,making unexpected links between present sensations and

others perhaps long past, offers a fullness that the visual artistcan suggest by an escape from real time. Thus, Proust wrote,we are able "to secure, to isolate, to immobilise ... a fragmentof time in the pure state.,,75 (Compare Bergson: "To perceivemeans to immobilize.r")

Khnopffs Listening to Schumann illustrates the sheer capa­ciousness of Bergson's "temps interieur," experienced witheyes closed, so to speak. Individual listeners, once sprung freefrom social protocols and other externals, gained their inde­pendence from objective measures of time. Extreme subjec­tivity was both the condition and the result of this ballooningof time without respect for ordinary limits. As Rodenbachwrote in the penultimate section of Le voyagedans lesyeux, tenyears after Khnopffs painting:

Past and future in a single fresco-Phenomenon of the dream where all was made one!

Space? without limits. And time? annulled.Because for these dreams long as a century, there isBut one minute elapsed by the real clock.To dream is to foretell one's own eternity.77

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19 Kupka, Amorpha, Fugue in TiooColors, 1912, oil on canvas, 122% X

86% in. (311 X 220 em). NationalGallery, Prague (artwork © 2006Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/ADAGP, Paris; photograph by ErichLessing, provided by Art Resource,NY)

I'ICTLRI!'\G LISTENIN(; 1:-.1 THE LATE :-.1INETEENTII CE!'\TL'RY 283

Toward AbstractionTo some degree, portrayals of music listening are bound to acertain fin de siecle moment marked by Symbolist pictorialconcerns and veneration of music, social habits of listening,and other specific cultural contexts. Yet music also provideda model for thinking about fundamental and enduring ques­tions concerning the temporal experience of looking. Pro­longed attention to a picture, behaviorally modeled in scenesof listening, allowed (it was thought) a richer and deeperexperience of art, as well as a refuge from objective measuresof time. Paintings of music listening, despite being structuredin theory by a musical-temporal regime, were nonnarrative inthe extreme. They afforded maximum freedom to the be­holder to loosen the bonds of Bergson's "temps des choses"and luxuriate in an expansive "temps interieur."

Pictures of listening proved to be a rich source of potentialfor avant-garde art. They centered on a supreme quality ofexperience that inspired Frantisek Kupka, Wassily Kandinsky,and others to mobilize basic pictorial forms in the service ofspiritual aims. The move toward abstraction encompassed asearch for a new kind of spiritual communication with thebeholder, to which music was admirably suited. In Kupka'stheoretical essay Creation in the Plastic Arts, completed in 1913and published in Prague ten years later, he dreamed of a"telepathic" communication between artist and beholder,without the need for a material work of art. 7H Fugues byJohann Sebastian Bach (which Kupka heard played on thepiano while he was writing the essay) helped lead him to the

idea of pure painting, separate from nature, not seeking totell a story or illustrate ideas. Following Bach's musical exam­ple, Kupka saw how he might use the raw materials of his art,forms and colors, to represent cosmic forces.i" At the sametime, this kind of painting would make possible the artist'ssolitary encounter with the beholder, similar to the compos­er's with the listener.

Pioneers of twentieth-century abstraction, Kandinsky andKupka took many of their cues from music, even though theywere explicitly not seeking formal or structural equivalenceswith it in their art. Their experiments built on the methods ofthe earlier generation. Kupka's introduction of piano keysinto a landscape in his 1909 Piano Keys/Lake (Fig. 18), forinstance, enacts temporal strategies that Fantin, Khnopff,Vuillard, and other artists had used to engage the beholder.Kupka proposes a musical chord resonating through time, anelement that invites a very Bergsonian analysis.i'" the pictureitself becomes an event that happens to the beholder.

The limitations of the identification between actual be­holders and portrayed listeners were already becoming clearbefore the advent of nonrepresentational painting causedlisteners to disappear. There was a point of diminishingreturns, a point past which a painting would inevitably lose itshold on a viewer. Recall Alfred de Lostalot's comparison ofWagner's Tristan und Isolde to a magnificently ornamentedOriental carpet that one is expected to contemplate for fourhours straight. In Lostalot's estimation this hypothetical car­pet, no matter how marvelous and varied its patterns, could

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284 ART BULLETIN .JLJ~E 2007 VOLUME LXXXIX ~UMl\ER 2

not interest its beholders past a certain time limit. The prob­lem intensified with the open-endedness of the later paint­ings discussed here, where music itself was too "structured"for the desired experience. In the much-sought-after dilationof time there lurked a risk of stasis and eventually boredom,placing visual art once again at a disadvantage in the paragonecontest with music.

With Kupka's generation, though, came a shift towardmovement and dynamism, contrary to the languor and vague­ness for which Symbolism is often reproached. Kupka's Amor­pha, Fugue in 1'7.1)0 Colors, exhibited at the Salon d'Autornne of1912, is considered the first expression of the relation be­tween music and painting in abstract art (Fig. 19) .H1 As inPiano Keys/Lake, the composition features contrasting fixedand dynamic forms. In Amorpha, however, Kupka leaves be­hind the figurative references-the boat, the willow branchesdipping into the water-that had allowed the painting ofthree years earlier to be read as an otherwise classic landscapeinto which music had unexpectedly intruded. Against a pairof overlapping white disks in the background, a complex,looping quasi-helical design arcs from the lower left cornerup into the canvas's upper right section. Shapes recur in redand blue, and in different sizes, suggesting analogies with thesubject-answer structure and contrapuntal voices of a musicalfugue.

Kupka admired in Bach the pure outlines that led thelistener to a spiritual state of mind, and he believed that thecontemplation of pure pictorial structures could likewiseelicit in the beholder a new form of consciousness. His aimswere very much shaped by the Theosophical belief that vibra­tions can be transmitted from one individual to another as"thought-forms": music, like thoughts or feelings, can be"seen" by those who have this special faculty of perception.f"Art, meanwhile, despite its material aspect, can dissolve "intopure spiritual energy in which vibrations of sound or colourcan create corresponding vibrations in the soul. "S3 In the caseof music, such vibrations ensured constant renewal-in con­trast to earlier melancholic notions of music as always on theverge of disappearing.

With Kupka's belief in psychic communication throughpure painted forms, the transformation of a viewer into alistener was no longer dependent on a specific paintingsubject or genre. In theory, this vastly increased the numberof paintings that could exert musical effects on their behold­ers. The irony is that the formal analogies between paintingand music, which in the nineteenth century had had virtuallyall the meaning squeezed out of them through overuse,became the fuel for innovation and renewal. In the hands ofKupka and others these correspondences, long since dead­ened by cliche, were redeployed and reanimated to enrichthe individual experience of art.

Anne Leonard is Mellon Curator at the Smart Museum of Art,University of Chicago. She earned her PhD in the history of art atHarvard University, with a focus on nineteenth-century Franceand Belgium. Her research interests include the representation ofaesthetic experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries[Smart Museum of Art, Unioersits of Chicago, Chicago, Ill.60637, aleonard@uchicago.edu).

NotesThis article derives from my dissertation, completed in 2003 under thedirection of Henri Zerner. In addition to those mentioned in the dissertationacknowledgments, I am grateful to Martha Ward for her shrewd advice andencouragement and to Marc Gotlieb, the two anonymous readers for The ArtBulletin, and Lory Frankel for their helpful suggestions.

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

1. Michael Fried, AbsorJJtion and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in theAge oj Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

2. James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: Uni­versity of California Press, 1995).

3. Peter Gay, "The Art of Listening," in HlP Naked Heart (New York: W. W.Norton, 1995), Il-35.

4. To this day, temporal aspects of the essentially spatial art continue toinspire debate and reflection. See, for example, Antoinette Roesler­Friedenthal and Johannes Nathan, eds., The Enduring Instant: Time andthe Spectator in the Visual Arts (Berlin: Gebriider Mann. 20(3).

5. The classic text is Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Musir, trans.Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989): see alsoJohn Neubauer, HlP Emancipation 0/ Music [rom IJmguage: Departure[romMimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1986).

6. See Alain Corbin, "The Secret of the Individual," in A History 0/PrivateUp, vol. 4, From the Fires oj Rniolution to the Great War, trans. ArthurGoldhammer, ed. Michelle Perrot (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press ofHarvard University Press, 1990).

7. See Johnson, Listening in Paris, 38.

8. The men assembled form the circle of Petit Bayreuth. of which An­toine Lascoux (third from the right) was the leader and host. At thesegatherings, Edmond Maitre (seated opposite Chabrier) and AdolpheJullien (far left) would play four-hand transcriptions of Wagner's musicarranged by Camille Benoit (standing at the music rack).

9. Adolphe Jullien, "Deux tableaux de Fantin-Latour," Gazelle des Bnnix­Arts (january-june 19(7): 202: "[Djes avant son apparition, ce tableau[etait] cornmunement designe sous ce titre alors quelque peu mena­cant: Les Wagnhistes" ([F] rom before its appearance, this painting[was] commonly designated by this rather menacing title: HlP WaR­nnites).

10. Andre Fontainas, Mes souvenirs du symbolism,' (1928; reprint, Brussels:Labor, 1991),63: "Souventje rentrais accornpagne de Paul Valery, et,ouvrant la partition sacree, au piano, nous nous appliquions ensemble.egalement depourvus de toute pratique instrumentale, a debrouilleravec nos doigts gourds et hesitants, les causes subtiles de nos emotionsles plus recentes."

11. See, for example, Adolphe jullien, Fantin-Latour, sa vie et ses amities(Paris: L. Laveur, 1909), 161-62: and Gustave Kahn, Fantin-Lntour(Paris: F. Rieder, 1926), 49. See also Michele Barbe, "Fantin-Larour et1'1 musique" (doctorat d'Etat, Lille III, 1992), vol. 2, bk. 1, 194-97.

12. The article was first published in the Revue Europeenne, April 1, 1861; itappears as "Richard Wagner et Tannhauser a Paris," in Charles Baude­laire, Oeuvres completes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), vol.2, 779-815. It is also the subject of a book-length study by MargaretMiner, Resonant Gaps: Between Baudelaire and Wagner (Athens, Ga.: Uni­versi ty of Georgia Press, 1995).

13. Baudelaire, "Wagner et Tannhiiuser a Paris," 784-85: "delivre des liens dela pesarueur. . . . Alors je concus pleinement l'Idee d'une arne se mou­vant dans un milieu lumineux, d'une extase [aite de IIolnpte et de ronnais­sance, et planant au-dessus et bien loin du monde nature!" (emphasisin the original).

14. Charles Baudelaire to Richard Wagner, February 17, 1860, in Correspon­dance, vol. I, janvier 1832-fi'IIrier 1860, ed. Claude Pichois and JeanZiegler (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 673: "de me laisser penetrer, envahir,volupte vraiment sensuelle, et qui ressemble it celie de monter dansl'air ou de rouler sur la mer."

15. Theodor Adorno, "Uber einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Ma­lerei" (1965), written in honor of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, in Gesam­melie Srhrilten, vol. 16, Musikalisrhe Schriften; vol. 3, ed. Rolf Tiedemann(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978),628: "Die Bilder dunken die gelungen­sten, in denen das absolut Gleichzeitige wie ein Zeitverlauf erscheint,der den Atem anhalt."

16. Carl Maria von Weber, La vie d'un musicien et aut res ecrits, trans. Luci­enne Cerardin, ed. Gerard Conde (Paris: Jean-Claude Lanes, 1986),31.

17. This is the conclusion to Alfred de Lostalot, "Revue musicale," Gazettedes Beaux-Arts, 2nd ser., 31 (March 1, 1885): 270: "La texture de[Tristan] est, il est vrai, dune variete et dune richesse merveilleuses; il

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semble qu'on ait so us les yeux un de ces tapis d'Orient all la flare et lafaune d'un monde imaginaire se melent en arabesques troublantes ctdont les chaudes colorations produisent une sorte cl'ivresse des sens.Mais quai! Est-i1 au monde un 'amateur' qui soutiendrait sans faiblir lacontemplation dun tapis, pendant quatre heures consecutives?"

18. Camille Mauclair, La religion de la musiqur (1909; reprint, Paris: Fisch­bacher, 1928), 3: "rideau d'images divinement rransparenres."

19. Andre Michel, "Le Salon de 1885," Gazette des Beaux-Arts. 2nd ser., ,~I

(June I, 1885): 496: "Rien ne distrait l'artention."

20. For a typical exposition of this view, see Douglas Druick and MichelHoog, Fantin-Launu, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa,1983, 28.

21. Charles Tardieu, review of Around the Piano, IndelJendance Belr;e, May 3,1885, in the Fantin-Latour dossier d'nrtiste, Bibliotheque-Musee del'Opera, Paris: "Auteur du piano, la premiere chose ,\ faire est decou­ter, surtout quand le piano est tenu par l'auteur dEspana et de Gwen­doline": "nous regardent plus attentivernent quils u'ecouteru. Peut-ctresavent-ils la partition par coeur, Tristan au Parsifal, M. Chabrier lui­merne semble distrait. ... Le spectateur est ,\ ce point frappe del'aspect de la realite de la scene quil se prend pour un invite. C'est luiqui derange M. Chabrier; c'est it lui que sourit M. Adolphe Julien [.\if"];encore quelques instants, et les beautes de la partition aidant. il serawagnerien C0I111ne vous et moi."

22. In addition to Tardieu (ibid.), who concluded that the portrait was toofragmented, other negative critics include Camille Le Senne in LeMmestret, May 17, 1885, 188; and Jacques-Emile Blanche, Jo.".I.Iai.I et por­traits (Paris: Les Bibliophiles Fantaisistes, Dorbon-aine, 1912),23-24.

23. The other foreground listeners in the painting have been identified asAlbert Lilius, teacher and school inspector, later professor at the Uni­versity of Helsinki; Ernst Lindelof, mathematician at the same univer­sity; and Vaino Blornstedt, painter. 1 thank Helena Komulainen andBengt Selin at the Ateneum, Helsinki, for providing information onThe Concert.

24. Mauclair, La religion de la musique. 11: "La peinture actuelle ne nousoffre aucun physionomiste capable de nous raconter incisivement ledrame que la symphonic cree sur les visages. Dans les tableaux peunombreux qui groupent des etres autour dun piano, Ia musique resteinsoupconnee."

25. Odilon Redon, A soi-mhne (Paris:J Corti, 1961), 157: "nulle couleur nepeut traduire Ie monde musical qui est uniquernent et seulernent in­terne et sans nul appui dans la nature reelle."

26. An account of the incident is given in Julie Maner, [oumnl (1893-1899):Sa jeunesse parmi Ui.\ peintres impressionni.\te.\ et 11'.\ hlilllll"·.\ de lettn·.\ (Paris:C. Klincksieck, 1979), 72.

27. For a study of the genre, see Charlotte Nalle Eyerman, "The Composi­tion of Femininity: The Significance of the 'Woman at the Piano' Motifin Nineteenth-Century French Culture from Daumier to Renoir" (PhDdiss., University of California at Berkeley, 1997).

28. Niccolo Paganini, quoted in Lydia Goehr, n,,· Que.\/ jiJr J'oice: On Mll.\ic,Poli/in, and the Umi/.\ of Philo.\olJhy (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1998), 154.

29. Theodor Adorno, In Semdz of Wa,I,'71lor, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Lon­don: NLB, 1981), 85ff.

30. Paul Souriau, La suggestion dan.\ ['art (Paris, 1893), 177 n. I: "A coupsur, elle n'est admissible qu'au theihre. Au concert, It's auditeurs nesauraient que faire de leurs yeux dans les minutes de desoeuvrementde l'audition musicale."

31. J-A.-D. 1ngres, cahier IX, fol. 24, in Henry Lapame, 1.1'.\ de.Him de.f. A. O.Ingres du Mwee lUi Montauban (Paris:J E. Bulloz, 19(1), quoted in Su­san 1.. Siegfried, "Ingress Reading-the Undoing of Narrative," Alt His­tory 23, no. 5 (December 2000): 675.

32. Emile Verhaeren, "Exposition du Cercle Artistique," IJl Revue ModemI',May 1883, reprinted in Verhaeren, Eaits sur ['art (1881-1892), ed. PaulAron (Brussels: Labor, 1997), 89: "un motif iuoubliable."

33. Emile Verhaeren, Quelques notes .HIr I'ol'uvre dl' Fenland KhnojJJ/ (Brussels:Madame Veuve Monnom, 1887), reprinted in Verhaeren, I~rrits sur I'ar/(/881-1892), 261: "Etait-il necessaire de montrer ce coin de piano etcette nlain de pianiste agauche? N'allrait-on c0l11pris sans ceta? Lepeintre n'a-t-il cede qu'it une preoccupation de japonisme piltoresque?En tout cas, I'atmosphere de la toile etait assez musicale pour se passerde ce detail et Ie laisser deviner."

34. See Pliny's Natural History 35.73, in HII' Dder Pliny's Chal)/I'I'I' 011 the His­tory of Art, trans. K.Jex-B1ake (Chicago: Ares, 1970), 117.

35. Jennifer Montagu, "Interpretations of Timanthes's SIlI1'ijiu' of IIJhigenia,"in Sight and Insilfht, ed.John Onians (London: Phaidon, 1994),306.

36. Verhaeren, Quelques notes sur ['ol'uvre de Fel'l1alld KhnojJJf, 261: "Ce n'estque depuis peu d'annees que la musique s,ecoute ainsi-non pas avec

PICTI'RI1\t: LISTE1\IN(; IN THE LATE Nt1\ETEE1\TH CENTI'RY 285

plaisir: avec meditation. L'cffet de l'art, de notre art, est une influencede vague attirancc vcrs un ideal triste et grave."

37. See Francine-Claire Legrand, "Fernand Khnopff-Perfect Symbolist,"AI){)llo85 (April 1967): 284.

38. For the French renewal of interest in Schopenhauer, see Shehira Doss­Davezec, "Schopenhauer according to the Symbolists: The Philosophi­cal Roots of Late Nineteenth-Century French Aesthetic Theory," inSchopenhauer, Philosoph», and the Arts, ed. Dale jacquerte (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1996),249; and Alexandre Baillot, Influ­ence de la IJhilosojJhie de Srhopenhauer en France, 1860-1900 (Paris, 1927).

39. Theodule Ribot, I.a philosophie de Schopenhauer, 2nd ed, (Paris, 1885),112-13. Schopenhauers remarks on music are found in The World 11.\

Will and Idea, vol, I, bk. 3, sec. 52.

40. Theodule Ribot, La jJ.\ychologie des sentiments, 8th ed. (Paris: F. Alean,1911),106.

41. Lionel Dauriac, F\SIli sur l'espri: musical (Paris: F. Alcan, 1904),218.

42. See, for example, Olivier Schefer, Poesie de l'infini: Nooalis 1'/ la questionesthrtique (Brussels: La Lettre Volee, 2(01),47, on Friedrich Schelling'sidea that, like nature, poetry is a creative force, not a created object.

43. Novalis, Miscellaneous Notations, no. 125, quoted in A. Leslie Willson,ed., German Romantic Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1982),68.

44. Friedrich Schlegel, Selerled Aphorisms from the I.yceum (1797), no. 112, inWillson, German Romantic Criticism, 119-20.

45. The classic text is Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: RomanticTheory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press,1953), see esp. the chapter "Changing Metaphors of Mind."

46. Paul Smith, Srurn! and the Auant-Garde (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1997), 90.

47. Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire uniuersel du XIXI' siecUi (1866-79; re­print, Geneva: Slatkine, 1982), s.v, eoouuion: "Action d,evoquer, de faireapparaitre par des sortileges."

48. Theophile Gautier, quoted in Alfred Binet, "Le probleme de I'auditioncoloree," Rroue tles Deux Mondes, October I, 1892,612: "Les notes vi­braient avec tant de puissance qu'elles mentraient dans la poitrinecomme des fleches lumineuses: bientot l'air joue me parut sortir demoi-merne: mes doigts s'agitaient sur un clavier absent; les sons en jail­lissaient bleus et rouges...."

49. Camille Mauclair, "Le Symbolisme en France," in Cart en silence (Paris:P. Ollendorf, 1901), 195: "ces grands bains de sonorites diffuses, aux­quels onus nous trouvames convies, avec nne frequence inconnue jadis,nous ont disposes it deverser dans la symphonie I'expansion de forcesnervetlses que no liS refermions en nous-mellles."

50. Teodor de Wyzewa, "La musique descriptive," Rroue Wagnirienne 1, no.3 (April 8, 1885): 74: "Elle doit traduire, par la melodie symphonique,nos sentiments et nos emotions, parce que ni Ie roman, ni la poesie,mais la musique seule peut exprimer cet arriere fond emotionnel situI',pa!iois, so us nos idees."

51. See Leonardo, A Trflltise on Painting, pt. I, chaps. 29-32, in Leonardo daVinci:, Paragonl': A Critical Intl'lpretation with a New Edition of the Text inthe Codex Urbilla.\, by ClaireJ Farago (Leiden: E.J Brill, 1992).

52. See Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, Del(l(:roix: The Music o/Painting, exh. cat.,Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen, 2000, 32.

53. Alfred Bruneau, "Musique," La Revue IndejJendante 12 (July 1889): 147­48: "Les sons n'ont, par eux-memes, aucune signification absolue etdirecte.... La musique est essentiellement un mystere, un vai{ue, uneimpression, puisqu'elle est invisible et impalpable,"

54. Philippe Junod has sketched several distinct types of intersection be­tween art and music during the nineteenth century, none of which in­volves strife or antagonism. The one that comes closest, "Succession,"depends on a Hegelian teleology in which the arts follow a chronologi­cal sequence culminating in music, "the logical and necessary outcomeof the evolution of the ans." Junod, "The New Paragone," in The ArtsJo."ntwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Marsha 1..Morton and Peter 1.. Schmunk (New York: Garland, 2000), 27.

55. Paul Valery, foreword to La I"Onnais,lan(e de La Dee.\se, by Lucien Fabre(Paris, 1920), xii-xiii: "Ie Symbolisme se resume tres simplement dansI'intention commune it plusieurs familles de poetes (d'ailleurs enne­mies, entre elles), de 'reprendre it la musique, leur bien'''; translationadapted from Wallace Fowlie, Mallarme (London: Dennis Dobson,1%3), 208.

56. Eugene Delacroix, entry of October 16, 1857, in The journal of I~ur;eneDelaeroix, trans. Walter Pach (New York: Crown, 1948), 600.

57. A. G. Lehmann, HII' Symboli.\t Ae.\thetic in hance, 1885-1895, 2nd ed.(Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), 152. Mallarme's pithier remark to Degasthat poetry is made of words, not ideas, is more often quoted.

58. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, quoted in Nicholas Cook, MU.lic, Imar;-

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ination, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 162. This transla­tion is slightly different from the one in Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures onFine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). vol. 2,937.

59. Arthur Schopenhauer, 77w World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. HaldaneandJ. Kemp (1896; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1977). vol. 1,336(bk. 3, sec. 52).

60. Stanley Cavell has taken up this idea in "Music Discomposed," in MustWe Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­sity Press, 1976). 180-212. See, for example, 191, where he raises thepossibility that "works of art are objects of the sort that can only beknown in sensing."

61. Valery, foreword to La connaissance de la Deesse, xi-xii: "Une epoque vintpour la poesie, oil elle se sentit palir et defaillir devant les energies etles ressources de I'orchestre.... Jamais, peut-etre, la confiance que lespoetes placent dans leur genie particulier, ... leur possession irnmerno­riale de la lyre, et ce premier rang qu'ils se flattent d'occuper dans lahierarchic des serviteurs de I'univers, n 'ont panl si precisement men­aces. lis sortaient accables de concerts."

62. Teodor de Wyzewa, "Notes sur la musique wagnerienne et les oeuvresmusicales francaises en 1885-1886," Revue Wagnerienne 2, no. 6 (July 8,1886): 184: "Traduire l'emotion par des mots precis etait evidemmentimpossible: c'etait decomposer l'cmotion, donc la detruire." Felix Men­delssohn-Bartholdv's oft-quoted remark that music is too precise forwords comes from a letter to Marc-Andre Souchay, October 5, 1842.

63. Teodor de Wyzewa, "Une critique," La Revue Independante I (November1886): 63: "Les couleurs et les lignes ont, par une lente associationavec des objets emouvants, acquis elles-memes un pouvoir de produiredirectement l'ernotion. Elles sont devenues les notes dune musiquenouvelle."

64. Octave Mirbeau, "Le Salon," pI. 3, La Frana, May 16, 1886, reprintedin Combats esthrtiques, vol. I, 1877-1892 (Paris: Nouvelles EditionsSeguier, 1993). 270-71: "[amais une peinture ne m'a donne une sensa­tion, en quelque sorte, plus musicale. Je serais evidernrnent tres ernbar­rasse s'il me fallait expliquer nettement cette idee; mais en regardantce portrait, il me semble que j'eniends un chant doux et grave de tnolon­celle. C'est que I'art est un mystere: il coule dans les ames une emotionsacree, terrible ou tendre, qu'on subit delicieusernent sans qu'on lapuisse raisonner" (emphasis in the original). In this passage Mirbeau isspeaking of Fantin-Latour's Portrait de M. L M. (M. Leon Maitre,brother of Edmond Maitre, who appears in Around the Piano).

65. Edmund Gurney, "What Is an Emotion?" Mind 9, no. 35 (July 1884):426. Ribot cites this passage in La psychologie des sentiments, 107 n. I.Gurney acknowledges, however, that it is with live performance "that Ialmost exclusively associate the cutaneous tingling and hair-stirring."

66. La Gazette, March 13, 1897, quoted in Roland Van del' Hoeven, "De lamusique des spheres aux coulisses de lOpera," in Splendeurs de l'Idral:Rops, KhM!1f; Deloille, et leur temps, exh. cat., Musee de I'Art Wallon,Liege (Ghent: Snoeck-Ducaju en Zoon, 1997),261: "le chant etI'orchestre supprimes, Ie musicien u'aura plus a s'inquieter deI'executabilite de son oeuvre, I'impossible ne I'arretera plus, commeaujourd'hui, II imaginera s'il en a besoin, des violons avingt cordes,des hautbois longs de trois metres, des trompettes a crever les murs etdes voix dune etendue dernesurement ideale.... tous les spectateursauront, chacun, la grande partition sous les yeux et la, dans ce silencereligieux, ils gouteront des jouissances ineffables dans leur communiondirecte et intime avec Ie genie du musicien."

67. The idiosyncrasy of Vuillard's view attaches not even to a particularindividual-himself, for example-but to a unique (that is, unrepeat­able) sensory experience. As in the case Jonathan Crary has made forPaul Cezanne's work of the early 1890s, gone is "any assumption ofperceptual constancy"; the paintings are not transcriptions of the world

as it appears to the artist but attempts to represent the instahility ofperception itself. Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, andModern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). 287ff. See also thecomments by John Elderfield in his essay "Seeing Bonnard" in Bonnanl,by Sarah Whitfield, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London (New York: HarryN. Abrams, 1998),33-52.

68. This connection is pointed out in Lydia Goehr, "Schopenhauer andthe Musicians: An Inquiry into the Sounds of Silence and the Limits ofPhilosophizing about Music," in Jacquette, Schopenhauer, Philosoph», andthe Arts, 205; she quotes Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will andRepresentation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), vol. I, 260.See also Goehr, The Quest/or lioice, 21-22.

69. Alphonse de Lamartine, Cours [amilier de Iitternture: Un entretien par mois(Paris, 1860), vol. 10, 182: "ce telegraphe elecrrique de l'oreiIle quifixera un jour ces fugitivites de I'inspiration des Listz [sir] ou des Paga­nini, ri'etait pas encore invente: ces notes ne se fixaient qu'a l'etatd'impression dans nos ames, quand l'artiste [Liszt] improvisait pendantdes heures sur Ie piano du salon."

70. Henri Bergson, Matiere et memoire: Essai sur la relation du corps (I l'estnit(1911; reprint, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1939), 232-33:"cette duree impersonnelle et homogene, la merne pour tout et pourtous"; "En realite, il n'y a pas un rythme unique de la duree: on pelllimaginer bien des rythmes differents, qui, plus lents ou plus rapides,mesureraient Ie degre de tension ou de relachernent des consciences."

71. Henri Bergson, "De la nature du temps," chap. 3 in Durt« et simulta­nriu: Ii pro!JOs de la throrie dEinstein (Paris: Presses Universitaires deFrance, 1992). 41-42.

72. Ibid., 62: "La duree reelle est qnvuvpe; nous constatons que Ie temps sederoule" (emphasis in the original).

73. Ibid., 42, 46. That was the threat looming implicitly over the progres­sive measurement of time according to smaller and smaller units. Whatheld them all together?

74. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieffand Terence Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1981), vol. 3,924.

75. Ibid., 905.

76. Bergson, Matiere et memoire, 233: "Percevoir signifie immobiliser."

77. Georges Rodenbach, Le voyage dans les yellx (Paris, 1893), 19: "Le passe,l'avenir en une seule fresque- / Phenomene du reve ou tout s'unifia'/ L'espace? il s'illimite. Et Ie temps? il s'abroge. / Car pour de telssonges longs comme un siecle, il y a / Le laps dune minute ,\ la reellehorloge. / Rever, c'est se prevoir en son eternite."

78. See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, "Kupka, les rayons X et Ie monde desondes electromagnetiques," in Frantisek KU!J/{a 1871-1957, ou l'inuenuond'une abstraction, exh. cat., Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris(Paris: Amis du Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1989),51.The notion would not have seemed quixotic to Kupka, who had been amedium.

79. Meda Mladek, "L'acheminement de Kupka vel'S une realite nouvelle,"in Frnntisek KU!J!la 187/-1957,46-48.

80. See, for example, Virginia Spate, Orphism: 77,e Evolution of Non:figurativePainting in Paris 1910-/914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 140:"Kupka was thus expressing the mind's experience of the interdepen­dence of different states of consciousness, when it is aware not only ofits own continuity but of the infinite complexity of memories, feelings,and thoughts contained in the single moment."

81. Ibid., 35.

82. Ibid., 130-31, 158.

83. Ibid., 35.

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