Romare Bearden (1911–1988), Empress of the Blues, 1974, acrylic and pencil on paper and printed paper on paperboard, 36 × 48 inches, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase in part through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.
Music and the visual arts have shared an intimate relationship since the Romantic period. The early Romantic ideal of a synthesis of the arts had precedents in the pictorial music of the Renaissance and Baroque and in eighteenth-century tone painting. It found particular expression in figures whose talents crossed artistic disciplines, among them Carl Maria von Weber, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and Frédéric Chopin, and later Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Klee, and John Cage. Even the vocabulary of music, with terms such as coloratura, timbre, and tone color, suggests a close connection between sound and image.
Several twentieth-century artists felt a strong affinity with jazz, one of the century’s defining musical forms, while jazz musicians found inspiration in the visual arts. Jackson Pollock made his drip paintings to the accompaniment of hot swing records. The late saxophonist Ornette Coleman, in turn, recognized analogies between his music and Pollock’s painting technique and used a painting by the artist on the cover of his album Free Jazz.
In 1915, the Chicago Daily Tribune published an article about the improvised dance music that had developed from African American traditions in the southern United States. Its account presented jazz as an intoxicating force that could overwhelm listeners’ ordinary restraint. The article contained one of the earliest known printed uses of jazz as a musical term. The music’s subsequent rise was extraordinary. By the early 1920s, when F. Scott Fitzgerald began writing of the “Jazz Age,” it had become a defining cultural phenomenon. News of jazz reached Europe shortly after the First World War. From the major cities, the music spread rapidly across the continent, filling dance halls and variety theatres.
Josephine Baker’s performances in La Revue nègre in Paris, followed by appearances in Brussels and Berlin, helped popularize jazz in Europe. Bare-breasted, with cropped hair and a banana skirt, she danced the Charleston to hot jazz. Among the bohemians, bourgeois audiences, intellectuals, and young people who embraced the music, Baker gave jazz an image of sensuality and bodily freedom. The French painter and commercial artist Paul Colin designed posters, stage sets, and costumes for her Paris revue in 1925. Two years later, he produced one of the most substantial artistic responses to her European reception in his portfolio Le Tumulte noir. Its 44 lithographs depict dancing couples and musicians alongside the performer celebrated as the “Black Venus.” Kees van Dongen and Raoul Dufy also depicted Baker dancing, while one of Matisse’s largest mural compositions has been associated with her. Le Corbusier adored her, and Adolf Loos designed a house for her. Her image continued to occupy later artists. Kara Walker’s work on paper Consume shows a small boy sucking on the banana skirt of a Black dancer.
Through Baker, jazz acquired early associations in Europe with sexual freedom and political liberation. Its opposition to racial discrimination also connected its European reception with struggles in its country of origin. Such associations could carry serious consequences. The artist K. R. H. Sonderborg, a member of the Swing Youth, was imprisoned by the Gestapo at Fuhlsbüttel from November 1941 to March 1942. In Düsseldorf in 1938, the brochure accompanying Hans Severus Ziegler’s exhibition Degenerate Music bore a racist caricature of a Black jazz saxophonist with exaggerated lips. Duke Ellington described jazz as a “barometer of liberty.” The music seemed to preserve the promise of an American political liberalism that had otherwise been lost. This commitment to freedom may also have contributed to George Grosz’s enthusiasm for jazz. In his lithograph Jazzband (1928), it finds a visual equivalent in loose, gently curving lines.
Otto Dix, himself an enthusiastic swing dancer, included a jazz band and dancers in the central panel of his triptych Metropolis. Piet Mondrian, another avid jazz dancer, heard in boogie-woogie’s “destruction of melody” a musical parallel to his own “destruction of the natural appearance.” Max Beckmann, meanwhile, made the saxophone the principal subject of a still life and portrayed himself holding the instrument.
After the Second World War, jazz and abstraction became emblematic artistic expressions of the free West. The American government sent jazz bands abroad as cultural ambassadors, enlisting their performances in its promotion of democracy. Pollock regarded jazz and Abstract Expressionism as the only original art forms the United States had produced. Norman Lewis gave the elusive relationship between jazz and abstraction visual form in his oil painting Jazz Musicians (1948). Like Mondrian, Frank Stella, the Swiss artist Verena Loewensberg, and Blinky Palermo found correspondences between jazz and geometric abstraction.
Walter Stöhrer became an early admirer of the free jazz of the 1960s, finding an artistic equivalent in the unrestrained brushwork of his near-abstract paintings. Karel Appel portrayed the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie as a fiery head, while James Rosenquist depicted the guitarist Bo Diddley in a remarkably soft Pop Art idiom. In 2009, Konrad Klapheck painted a Black jazz saxophonist in the pictorial language of his magical realism. Albert Oehlen expressed his admiration for musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane in a brilliant series of ink drawings.