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Yong Feng See

Prof. Guthrie Ramsey

MUSC 035

6 December 2013

Listening to the Blues in Art:

Relationships Between Jazz Musicians and Artists in the Mid-20th Century

The introduction of jazz in the 20th century coincided with a great shift in the

visual arts. Beginning with Matisse’s brightly colored Fauvist paintings at the early

1900s, painters, sculptors and other artists did something revolutionary in the art world.

They started to break away from the previous conventions of representational art and

realism – art that depicted some aspect of reality, whether a person, event, or landscape –

and moved toward the abstract, creating compositions of pure color and shape, for

example in the lines and rectangles of Piet Mondrian’s art. Music, on the other hand, has

always been abstract, as attested to by the artist Wassily Kandinsky, who titled his

paintings “compositions” and “improvisations” to allude to his desire for pure abstraction

in his art (Figure 1). Most music does not strive to imitate natural sounds that are found in

the real world, and “serious music” is often purely instrumental even if it might evoke

certain feelings and moods (Walton 351). As jazz became the major new music form of

the modern era, many artists responded to the new ideas and perspectives it gave and

subsequently expressed them in their own art. These include the use of syncopation and

irregular rhythms, dissonant and complex harmonies, the reworking of popular tunes into

completely different compositions, the emphasis on improvisation and responding to the

music in real time, the image of the musician as an artistic genius, and a deep urge to

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experiment and push the boundaries of convention. This paper will attempt to examine

such relationships between jazz and abstract art in the United States, with a focus on the

mid 20th century, when jazz started to become recognized as a serious art form and the

New York School of artists were bringing their brand of abstract expressionism to the

global art spotlight. Although many comparisons have been made between the work of

specific artists and the music that inspired them, much more analysis can be done by

considering the social and cultural contexts of both artist and musician in order to

understand how each responded to the other. This paper will begin by looking at the

common formal elements between jazz and art to set the tools for comparison. Next, a

few different approaches of relating jazz and art are summarized and compared. Lastly, I

will attempt to combine these differing approaches and discover the implications of

considering jazz through its relationship with art.

BUILDING BLOCKS

The first fundamental difference between a piece of music and a painting or sculpture is

the dimension of time. Except perhaps for highly repetitive pieces, one can never grasp

the entirety of a piece of music in a shorter amount of time than its full played length. In

fact, the listener is not offered any choice on how they receive the music: there is a

defined beginning, middle and end and you cannot listen to it in any other way. On the

other hand, visual art hits the viewer instantly in a single glance, when the entire piece

fits inside their angle of view. The viewer might spend a few minutes moving closer to

inspect the details or walk around a three dimensional work to see how its appearance

changes across different angles, but the piece remains static in time. In addition, viewers

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can opt to follow a painting from left to right, top to bottom, close-up to its entirety, or

any other route they may prefer. This presents a challenge for artists who try and depict

time-based elements from music into their art.

The elements of a piece of music also are rather different from that of art. While

music is made up of melody, rhythm, harmony, timbre, form and texture, art is often

described using line, shape, space, color, tone, and texture. Some of these can lend

themselves more easily to equivalence; for example, timbres are often described as

bright, dark, warm or harsh, and the same adjectives can be applied to light and dark

tones in an artwork. Others might require some combination of multiple elements: the

lines, colors, shapes and textures in Pablo Picasso’s The Three Musicians (Figure 2) that

combine into a uniform whole could be an analog for the rich polyphonic texture in Jelly

Roll Morton’s music, in the sense that each picture element or melody line is distinct and

unique, yet can also be perceived together. Other elements of music such as harmony and

rhythm can loosely describe how the elements of art are arranged together in a piece of

work, as seen in Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (Figure 3). Here, the syncopated

rhythm of the swing music that Mondrian adored is referenced in the multiple squares

that align with each other in certain lines and are misaligned in others, making the

painting slightly jittery and dynamic. The even distribution of large shapes with smaller

ones, and the brighter blues and reds with the duller grey creates a balance that is

approximate but not completely symmetrical, referencing how jazz musicians moved

away from the standard stable chords of Western classical music to more dissonant tones.

Mondrian was a keen observer of jazz in relation to his goal to create a pure plastic art

that was completely non-representational, which he admired in jazz: “Jazz, above all,

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creates the bar's open rhythm. It annihilates…This frees rhythm from form and from so

much that is form without ever being recognized as such.” (Mondrian, 221).

Of course, to link every single element in a piece of music to an element in jazz

and see them as equivalents would be a huge oversimplification. Comparing these

elements can help draw approximate relations and allow us to categorize art and music

into various styles and then compare the ideas, theories and concepts that they embody,

but an objective one-to-one relation is not possible, and would be highly inconsistent due

to a lack of clear ways to measure things like the sense of space in a piece of music, or

the melody that a sculpture invokes.

SEEING JAZZ: MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES

In order to form a complete picture of these artist-musician relationships, it is useful to

conduct a review of existing approaches to the topic. The first part of this section focuses

on modernism and abstract expressionism as indicative of a new art that represented the

spirit of America and of jazz, while the second turns to issues of race and culture, in

terms of how various artists chose to represent them, as well as how they affected power

structures within the art and music worlds. This distinction does not mean to classify each

artist’s work as distinctly “black” or not; rather, the artists were chosen to suggest

different answers to the two major questions of my thesis: How does abstraction in art

mirror the aesthetic qualities of jazz and what does it signify? How does art inspired by

jazz address issues of race and history, and how do they affect it in turn?

An Abstract Art. Alfred Appel Jr., an English scholar whose book Jazz Modernism won

the 2003 American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Deems

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Taylor Award for outstanding coverage of music, is perhaps a good indication of the

perspective of the current music profession. He uses the term “jazz modernism” to refer

to musicians who have drawn inspiration from the vernacular and transformed it into

something new, while still remaining accessible to the mainstream. Threading multiple

stories and artworks, songs and photos, he aims to establish their place of these musicians

within the canon of modernism in the arts (Appel 7-14). Appel’s selection of jazz

musicians starts with Louis Armstrong and ends with Charlie Parker, whom he considers

to be the end point of accessibility in jazz. His comparisons with other individuals in the

modernist arts largely feature Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, Alexander

Calder, Constantin Brancusi and James Joyce – most of whom are European and none of

which are African American. This is problematic especially in his treatment of race,

where he argues that jazz should be thought of as multicultural instead of race-based,

citing examples of how the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke was “the first major white soloist to

develop independent of black sources…[and] influenced countless black musicians,

especially the tenor saxophonist Lester Young and the subsequent ‘cool school’ of jazz,

black and white” (48). Even if one were to ignore the contentious nature of this

statement, Appel’s subsequent comparison of the sculptor Brancusi’s “internalization” of

primitivism in his art with Charlie Parker’s quotes of the New Orleans composition

“High Society” in his “Koko” (1945) lacks consideration of how a white artist quoting

from an African source is very much different from having a black musician quoting

from earlier black music (49 - 52). The fact that no black artist is referenced in the

context of this argument makes it hollow, and is a warning that any comparison solely

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based on aesthetic theory and European aesthetic conventions will fail to give an accurate

picture.

Donna Cassidy, a professor of Art History at the University of Southern Maine,

similarly examines the relationship between jazz and American modernist painters to

distill their commonalities in defining an American art (Cassidy 4-5). She describes how

jazz is associated with both the primitive as well as the new machine age, due to its revolt

against convention and the destruction of World War I (76-77). While European artists

flocked to America to depict the modern city, of which jazz was a symbol of, the

intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance were claiming it as one of the few truly American

cultural products and the fertile ground from which a new American art would spring

from. J.A. Rogers described in an article in the New Negro: “jazz has absorbed the

national spirit, that tremendous spirit of go, the nervousness, lack of conventionality and

boisterous good-nature characteristic of the American, white or black” (qtd. in Cassidy

80). Cassidy presents the paintings of the American artists Arthur Dove (1880-1956) and

Stuart Davis (1892-1964) as examples of this new kind of art. Dove’s “Improvision [sic]”

(Figure 4) echoes Kandinsky, but Dove explicitly refers to jazz through reducing

movement to a line of one dimension, like a sound wave. Through this, Dove aimed to

capture the spirit of America – in his own words, “inventiveness, restlessness, speed,

change” – without making any symbolic references to its buildings or machines; that is,

expressing through abstract means alone like the jazz musicians he admired (qtd. in

Cassidy 90). On the other hand, Stuart Davis started his career with paintings of black

musicians in the Realist tradition, but later on removed these references, depicting jazz in

its “sanitized and commodified” form (104). This raises the question of whether

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abstraction in art prevents issues of race and culture from surfacing due to the lack of

visual association. Although Davis’ “Swing Landscape” (Figure 5) successfully captures

the pure driving forward momentum of swing and the freedom he thought it represented,

it is an interpretation that might be more suited to the concert hall world of George

Gershwin where he presented his reworked versions of jazz separate from their contexts,

rather than the Harlem bars and clubs of jazz’s origin.

The New York School of the 1940s and 1950s took abstract art to yet another

level, creating pieces that had no background or foreground and where paint was applied

all over the canvas in a seemingly random manner, forgoing any attempt to emphasize

one part of the painting over another, or to create a sense of three-dimensionality. The

artists of the New York School turned to both Native Americans and Africans for

inspiration, and Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was influenced by both the Hopi and

Navajo Native American tribes in his drip paintings (Rampley 85-86). From them he

formed a commitment to improvisation and spontaneity that is best exemplified in his

“action paintings,” created by dripping paint in sweeping motions onto a canvas placed

on the ground (Figure 6). He described his working process as a semi-automatic state of

mind where the subconscious took over: “When I am in my painting, I am not aware of

what I’m doing…I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc.,

because the painting has a life of its own” (qtd. in Frank 68). Here the artist becomes

performer, and the process of creating the artwork itself is more important than the

painting that becomes a mere record of the deep interaction between artist and the

subconscious inspiration he harnesses. Ornette Coleman, one of the originators of free

jazz, identified his push to release jazz of all musical conventions with this statement, and

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used Pollock’s painting “The White Light” on his album “Free Jazz,” while also adapting

the abstract style in one of his own paintings for another album (Figure 7). At the same

time, not all abstract expressionists completely embraced this letting go of control. Jazz

and art historian Mona Hadler writes in her paper “Jazz and the New York School” that

jazz straddled the extremes of primitivism in its connection to the subliminal and

ancestral, and its association with the city and modernity as Stuart Davis represented. She

brings in Jimmy Ernst (1920-1984), son of the surrealist Max Ernst, into the discussion

by describing how his concept of “jazz as architecture” refuted the “primitivist myth” and

acknowledged the careful arrangement that supported the improvised solos of jazz artists

(Hadler 254-255). Ernst’s painting “White Space” (Figure 8) is an example of this, where

the lines are organized into two large blocks and one central shape, yet overlapping lines

permeate each of these spaces as well as the background. Miles Davis describes this

mixture of structure and improvisation in his autobiography when talking about how he

arranged his music: “That’s why I didn’t write it all out, not because I didn’t know what I

wanted; I knew that what I wanted would come out of a process and not some

prearranged shit. This session was about improvisation, and that’s what makes jazz so

fabulous” (Davis 300).

As the first major art movement to originate outside of Europe, abstract

expressionism was promoted as the new American art form. Simultaneously, the rise of

bebop and its pioneers’ intense and serious approach to their performances began to make

music critics take notice of jazz and treat it as an art form in its own right. This took on a

more sinister tone during the Cold War, where both jazz and art were wielded as cultural

tools to promote the American brand of democracy. The Museum of Modern Art’s

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international program, started in the 1940s and funded by the Central Intelligence

Agency, had an overtly political program that brought exhibitions of contemporary

abstract expressionist art to international audiences (Cockcroft 126-7). These efforts

aimed to to demonstrate America’s superiority and culture of free speech and expression

over the close-minded and outdated “socialist realism” of the Communist bloc (129).

Jazz’s potential to also serve as a tool of propaganda was not overlooked. To show that

the United States was a land of equality and to silence attacks of racial segregation, jazz

artists like Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong were brought aboard by the State

Department to play to international audiences (Peretti 114). This recognition of jazz and

abstract expressionism solidified their statuses as the symbols of a new free and modern

America.

From the abstract symbolism of Arthur Dove and Stuart Davis to Jackson Pollock

and Jimmy Ernst’s abstract expressionism, jazz served a major role in inspiring and

advancing their work as well as helping to describe a new American spirit defined by

movement, modernity and freedom. However, as a music with roots in the history of

slavery and the African origins of black Americans, another important aspect of jazz was

its relationship with race, something that many other artists attempted to incorporate in

their art.

Black Origins. A major figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas (1898-1979)

sought to create art that would truly represent black society, and drew from both

American and African sources in addition to his own background, seeing the African

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American identity as a mixture of both. In a letter to Langston Hughes, he described the

urgent need to

plunge…into the very depths of the soul of our people, and drag forth material

crude, rough, neglected. Then let’s sing it, dance it, write it, paint it. Let’s do the

impossible. Let’s create something transcendentally material, mystically

objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic. (qtd. in Lock and Murray 5)

There is a slight note of primitivism in this bold statement, but above all it shows a strong

desire to create something universal that could be acknowledged as Art, but that also

reached back to depict the experiences of the black people. This was a difficult goal to

reach for painting as the former goal is related to the abstract while the latter to realism,

but perhaps Douglas was reaching for the same sort of acclaim that black jazz soloists

had gained. The music of the Dixieland bands and their future evolutions had universal

appeal, yet also strongly quoted from black history, tracing back to the tropes of the ring

shout (Floyd 50-52). Looking back to the history of African Americans, Douglas

reconstructed the past in his art in order to develop a new identity for African Americans,

as seen in “Aspects of Negro Life: Song of the Towers” (Figure 9). The painting is full of

symbolism: while the left and right figures represent the setbacks and opportunities of

black people respectively, the middle figure who stands proudly with a saxophone seems

to usher in a new age through his startlingly new form of music. Unlike the European and

white American artists mentioned previously, Douglas was deeply embedded into the

African American music scene and saw black jazz soloists, who achieved much success

through their music, as the forerunners for a new age of black Americans who could

achieve the American Dream (Cassidy 134-143). Douglas’ art is similar to that of Davis

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and Dove in that it calls for freedom; however, it explicitly calls for the freedom and

empowerment of the African American people, making his statement a more powerful

and political one.

Moving forward in time, we arrive at the age of bebop and the abstract

expressionist art of Norman Lewis (1909-1979). As mentioned earlier, this group of

artists was highly influential in the American art canon, but along with the canon is a

highly “gendered and racialized mythology of white American masculinity” (Wood 95).

Despite being part of meetings, shows and exhibitions organized by Willem de Kooning,

Franz Kline, Clifford Still, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, as thus being highly

involved in the genesis of the movement, Lewis has never received the same kind of

recognition that these other artists did. A possible reason is that the highly physical

process involved in abstract expressionism art and its initial incomprehensibility to the

public made an artist’s success highly dependent on who he was, and thus Lewis was

subjected to racial prejudices within the world of gallery owners and wealthy art buyers.

Lewis had turned from social realism to abstraction in order to resist categorization as a

solely “African” or “Negro” artist, and believed that his art should firstly be universal

(Cassidy 154). Still his paintings carried hints of his earlier work. The vertical lines and

black shapes in his painting “Twilight Sounds” (Figure 10) faintly bring to mind his other

paintings that are variations of a theme of a standing group of black musicians. However,

Lewis’ propensity to quote from other European artists as well as his frequently changing

style also made him unpopular among critics, who looked for originality and a clear

seperation from Europe in this new American art. The scholar Sara Wood argues that

Lewis was in fact emulating the bebop artists, who while challenging the familiarity of

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their audiences, also constantly manipulated and changed references from standard

melodies, where “each true jazz moment…[is] a link in the chain of tradition” (Ralph

Ellison qtd. in Wood 114). Just as how bebop transcended “race music” and cast away

the conventions of their black roots, he achieved the same for “black” or “African” art,

disassociating it from a strict racial categorization (Ramsey 73). Despite his claims to

remove politics from his work, Lewis’ paintings in face succeed on both accounts – he

created a unique form of abstract art that also referenced black history and culture.

Romare Bearden (1911-1988), an artist whose collages are frequently compared

to jazz and also wrote the jazz classic "Sea Breeze", drew his inspiration from life. Living

next to the Apollo Theatre in the jazz center that was Harlem, he absorbed all the music

of the blues into his life and his art. He was particularly interested in the music of Earl

Hines, listening carefully to how Hines made “the pauses between the notes…as

expressive as the sounds” (qtd. in Harris-Kelley 251). Perhaps this influenced how

Bearden played close attention to the positive and negative spaces in his work as he

added layer after layer in an improvisational manner to form a complex piece where

multiple colors and textures direct the eye all around the frame. In “The Train” (Figure

11), Bearden’s juxtaposition of newspaper photos, strips of printed textures of wood

paneling and broad strokes of color creates a raw, unpolished look that echoes the way

bebop musicians pushed the sound of their instruments to reach more contrasts in tone

and timbre, while the uneven condition of the collage recalls how they created highly

variable rhythms and intricate, dissonant harmonies. Unlike artists who moved toward the

abstract, Bearden kept his art firmly tied to reality, saying that he wanted to “establish a

world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its

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own logic” (qtd. in Cassidy 155). Bearden’s efforts have left a lasting impact, especially

in his support of the Civil Rights Movement and in the vein of other social activist

musicians like Charles Mingus and Max Roach. According to Lee Stephens Glazer, he

“alluded to art-historical images in his collages of black life, thereby defining the history

of art as a ‘visual system that could accommodate and affirm African American identity”

(155).

One final topic to examine within the issue of race in art and jazz is the design of

the covers that adorn every jazz record sold. Being the images that listeners most closely

identified with their respective records, they play a big role in defining the perception of

jazz, especially since most jazz music lacks lyrics. Most record cover designers were

white, an exception being Jacob Lawrence who designed King Oliver’s “Back O’ Town”

album (Figure 12). The fact shows the immense barriers that black artists faced in

receiving design work, given the very close similarities they share with their musician

counterparts, as discussed earlier in this paper. Jon Panish suggests that this incongruity

is due to the mostly white music executives pushing their view of the jazz musician as

individual innovator in order to sell albums, as opposed to blacks, who look at contexts of

community and society (qtd. in Dougherty 51). In addition, most black artists wanted to

use their art to depict problems of race and ethnicity, and thus were termed “outsider art”

and excluded from the commercial arena of the record album. One of the more prominent

black graphic designers was Richard Jennings (Figure 13), whose Dali-influenced

surrealism allowed him to express some of the discontent and alienation that blacks felt

but not in a form that was too explicit for industry executives. Later in the 60s and 70s,

album covers would include more African motifs to reference the Civil Rights and Black

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Power movement, such as Miles Davis’ “Live/Evil” cover (Figure 14). The change in

cover designs over the decades reflect the initial restrictions that black artists faced in

their artistic expression, which were eventually lowered as black musicians gained higher

status and the Civil Rights movement overturned existing race relations.

Conclusion: A Panoramic View

Our analysis thus far has traced the dense multitude of connections between jazz

musicians and artists in the mid 20th century, as they developed and influenced each other

stylistically, but also in their ambitions and goals to tackle the challenge of representing

the African American experience in a way that was not overtly “African” but also not

completely abstract and devoid of context. These connections are formed not only from

physical interactions, but also through the mediums of art and music, where ideas that

cannot be fully expressed in words can propagate. The diagram that is attached at the

back of this paper and includes the figures referenced in my writing hopes to make these

connections more clear through the lines and placement of artworks in proximity to the

names of musicians and jazz styles, but of course fails to give a complete picture –

drawing all the connections within the musicians and artists would have made the lines

grow into an incomprehensible web.

Ultimately, though, music and art are still different mediums with different uses

and purposes. In the discussion of race we saw how the more abstract qualities of music,

as well as its role as entertainment and provider of enjoyment allowed it to gain immense

popularity among whites and blacks. On the other hand, the desire of black artists to

represent their social conditions and histories, even in the abstract art of Norman Lewis,

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diminished their success due to its easy categorization as “race” or “African” art. We

must also consider that the art and music worlds cater to vastly different groups of

people: the music of Charlie Parker was accessible to anyone who entered a bar in

Harlem or 52nd Street, while the art of Norman Lewis was viewed in galleries by a

predominantly white and upper class clientele looking to purchase pieces of high culture.

In addition, while the success of a musician is determined by his or her ability to sell

concerts and albums, the success of an artist largely depends on the highly subjective

judgments and prejudices of a select group of art critics, preventing art that shares the

same attributes as jazz to receive even a small fraction of its popularity. The same mass

entertainment value of music can be a handicap though: since music is inherently

abstract, as we established earlier, it can easily be relocated to suit different contexts

independent of the original artists’ visions. For example, the widespread use of jazz, in all

kinds of commercial places like restaurants and shops has transformed it into a

commodity and a marker of “high” culture, while erasing what Mezz Mezzrow called the

“agony of the split, hacked-up personality,” and the challenges that pioneering musicians

such as Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis faced when creating their music (qtd. in Peretti

112). Perhaps, this is where the value of these artworks rooted in jazz and the blues lie: to

remind listeners of the connections between the beauty of the music and the earthy soil of

raw emotions, feelings, conflicts, histories and biographies that they grew from.

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Works Cited

Appel, Alfred. Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Print.

Cassidy, Donna. Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art,

1910-1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1997. Print.

Cockcroft, Eva. “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War.” Pollock and After:

The Critical Debate. Franscina, Francis, Ed. Harper & Row (1985). Print.

Davis, Miles, and Quincy Troupe. Miles, the Autobiography. New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1989. Print.

Dougherty, Carissa Kowalski. "The Coloring of Jazz: Race and Record Cover Design in

American Jazz, 1950 to 1970." Design Issues 23.1 (2007): 47-60. Print.

Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. "Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music

Inquiry." Black Music Research Journal Supplement: Best of BMRJ 22 (2002):

49-70. Print.

Frank, Elizabeth, and Jackson Pollock. Jackson Pollock. München: Bucher, 1984. Print.

Folley-Cooper, Marquette, Deborah Macanic, Janice McNeil, and Elizabeth Goldson.

Nicholson. Seeing Jazz: Artists and Writers on Jazz. San Francisco: Chronicle in

Association with Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, 1997.

Print.

Gioia, Ted. The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. New York:

Oxford UP, 1988. Print.

Hadler, Mona. "Jazz and the New York School." Representing Jazz. Durham: Duke UP,

1995. 247-59. Print.

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Harris-Kelly, Diedra. “Revisiting Romare Bearden’s Art of Improvisation.” Uptown

Conversations: The New Jazz Studies. Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards &

Farah Jasmine Griffin, Ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Print.

Kraut, Robert. "Why Does Jazz Matter to Aesthetic Theory?" Journal of Aesthetics and

Art Criticism 63.1 (2005): 3-15. Print.

Lock, Graham, and David Murray. "Introduction." The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues

Influences in African American Visual Art. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 1-48.

Print.

Mondrian, Piet. “Jazz and the Neo-Plastic.” In The New Art - The New Life: The

Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987. Print.

Peretti, Burton W. Jazz in American Culture. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1997. Print.

Ramsey, Guthrie P. The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the

Challenge of Bebop. Berkeley: University of California, 2013. Print.

Rampley, M. "Identity and Difference: Jackson Pollock and the Ideology of the Drip."

Oxford Art Journal 19.2 (1996): 83-94. Print.

Walton, Kendall L. "What Is Abstract about the Art of Music?" The Journal of Aesthetics

and Art Criticism 46.3 (1988): 351-64. Print.

Wood, Sara. "‘Pure Eye Music’: Norman Lewis, Abstract Expressionism, and Bebop."

The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art. Ed.

Graham Lock and David Murray. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 95-119. Print.

DIXIELAND

Jacob Lawrence (12)

Jelly Roll Morton King Oliver

Benny Goodman

Glenn Miller

Jackson Pollock (6)Franz Kline

Piet Mondrian (3)

Arthur Dove (9)

Stuart Davis (5)

Norman Lewis (10)

Charlie Parker

John Coltrane

Charles MingusMax Roach

Dave Brubeck

Dizzy Gillespie

Thelononius Monk

Duke Ellington

Louis Armstrong

FREEJAZZ

HARDBOP

HARLEM RENAISSANCE

COOLJAZZ

Eric Dolphy

Miles Davis

Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman (7)

Aaron Douglas (6)Wassily Kandinsky (1)

Richard Jennings (13)

Abdul Mati Klarwein (14)

Salvador Dali

Pablo Picasso (2)

listened to

listened todanced to

SURREALISM

NEO-PLASTICISM

EXPRESSIONISM

ABSTRACTEXPRESSIONISM

Artist (Figure #)

Musician

LEGEND

STYLE (ART)

STYLE (JAZZ)Title (Year)

BEBOPBEBOP

SWING

Swing Landscape (1938)

Title unknown

The Great Masturbator (1929)

Aspects of Negro Life: Song of the Towers (1934)

Life-Evil (1971)

Out There (1960)

The Empty Foxhole (1967)

Free Jazz (1961)

Time in Outer Space (1962)

Three Musicians (1921)

Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1943)

Twilight Sounds (1947)

Jazz Musicians (1948)

Composition VII (1913)

Improvision (1927)

Back O’ Town (1928)

Jimmy Ernst (8)

White Space (1951)

Number 1 (1949)

Romare Bearden (11)

The Train (1974)

Listening to the Blues in Art