Our fascination with vampires goes back a long way, before they became the standard fare of Halloween costumes and campy melodrama. Several cultures across the globe have a folkloric tradition surrounding undead, human-like creatures who prey on human blood. In 19th-century Europe, the idea of vampirism gained popular currency as a metaphor for various kinds of insidious influence. At the same time, the cartoonish image of the vampire was brought to prominence in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. Since then, vampires have only gone from strength to strength.

Vampires in Folklore

There are versions of vampiric creatures in the folklore of cultures across all the continents. West Africa has the tree-dwelling Sasabonsam, which feeds on humans passing through forests; Madagascar has the ramanga, which specifically drinks the blood of nobles. The Aztecs believed in Cihuateteo, spirits of women who died in childbirth, who might steal the spirits of children. Many cultures across North, Central, and South America believe in the chupacabra, a vampiric cryptid that preys on livestock. The Mandrurgo, in the folklore of the Philippines, appears as a beautiful young woman by day, but sucks men’s blood by night.

In fact, blood-sucking demons feature in just about every ancient mythology: the fear they encapsulate is perennial, though the form they take shifts with time and place. But the version of the vampire which conquered the novel, starting in the 19th century, was a variation on Slavic folklore which began to spread early in the 18th century.

These vampires were undead people, the inspirited corpses of those who had lived evil lives or been buried in unconsecrated ground. They often appeared in their shrouds, their mouths dripping, their bodies ruddy and bloated from feasting on blood. One bite from them could turn healthy, living people into vampires, too. Most features of the folkloric vampire’s appearance relate to concerns about burying the dead safely, respectfully, and—crucially—for good. They reflect a culture’s fears about what might happen if the dead refuse to stay buried.

Vampires in Romanticism

Folklore concerning vampires in places such as Bulgaria and Romania mostly spread orally until the 18th century, when ethnographers began to record folk traditions in writing. One important, if sometimes under-acknowledged, strain of the Romantic movement in literature was its authors’ interest in folk traditions, excavating material for their tales from sources beyond those which had previously kept writers busy: Greco-Roman mythology and the Bible. These authors also benefited from the opportunity to travel more extensively than many of their forebears, encountering these stories firsthand and carrying them home.

Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), inspired by the poet’s travels in Portugal and encounters with ancient Islamic tales, includes a sinister vampiric spirit. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who traveled and shared ideas with Southey, wove vampirism into his poem Christabel (1816). The innocent title character is preyed upon by the mysterious Geraldine, who cannot pass certain thresholds and is averse to Christian prayer.

Lord Byron‘s The Giaour (1813), with a similar Orientalist slant to Southey’s Thalaba, describes vampires as those “rent” from their tombs, who haunt the place where they died and suck the blood of those left there. But Byron was to have an even more important role in bringing the vampire into popular culture—not as a poet, but as a character himself.

During the infamous gathering of Romantics at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in 1816, Byron’s physician John Polidori wrote a novella called The Vampyre. The storytelling contest that produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein also led to Polidori’s tale about a mysterious, charming aristocrat, Lord Ruthven, who corrupts everyone he encounters. Ruthven’s powers are indiscriminate: he will prey on any impressionable young woman or man, and will not stop until he has drained their blood.

Polidori’s story conspicuously blends elements of the Eastern European folk character with elements previously absent from any tales about vampires, such as the vampire’s high social status and charisma—elements which recall Byron himself. Whether this is because The Vampyre drew on Byron’s own, unfinished story from the Villa Diodati contest, or because Polidori envisioned Byron as (socially, at least) a kind of vampire, Polidori’s version of the vampire had a decisively transformative effect on subsequent depictions of the vampire.

Penny Dreadfuls and Sensation Fiction

In mid-19th-century Europe, novels and magazines took hold of the literary market thanks to new printing technologies—and vampires took part in this takeover. Readers were gaining a taste for sensational, Gothic horror, and penny dreadfuls (the name for novels serialized in cheap magazines) satisfied their appetites.

Varney the Vampire (1845-47) takes up the two strains of vampirism in Polidori’s novel: the literal vampire, who sucks blood to stay alive (or, more accurately, undead), and the metaphorical vampire, who drains their victim of their lifeblood in more figurative ways.

Varney is another aristocratic vampire. In taking a once-wealthy family as his victims, Varney prefigures Stoker’s Dracula, a destitute nobleman who craves a return to his former glory—a financial vampire. Varney is also the first fictional vampire to have an important iconographical feature: fangs.

Thrillers and sensation novels gave readers insight into the vampire’s motives, even transforming the malign figure of folklore into a sympathetic creature who is in thrall to their instincts. In Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), the protagonist, a mixed-race woman who has grown up in Jamaica, discovers with horror that her influence over others is fatal. The title unexpectedly turns our attention away from the blood of the victims to that of the vampire, blending the Gothic tradition with prevalent (and generally racist) late-19th-century ideas about miscegenation and degeneration.

The bestselling sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon similarly put a scientific spin on the vampire’s obsession with blood in Good Lady Ducayne (1896). Despite the sinister bat hovering in the illustration on the title page, this novel features a distinctly medical vampire, who drains her victims’ blood through a combination of chloroform and transfusion, after engaging their help in her experiment to prolong her life as long as possible. The novel eerily echoes the vampiric undertones that linger in medicine and beauty treatments today.

The Emergence of the Gothic

While the 19th century saw the vampire take on forms far beyond its folkloric incarnation, the most popular and enduring vampires in fiction from this time are the literal ones, who come forth from unquiet graves to suck the blood of innocent victims. Their refusal to stay dead, their dealings in darkness, their part-human monstrosity, and their inexplicably seductive hold over their victims made vampires a key feature of the Gothic genre.

By the second half of the century, Gothic novels as a form often featured a story within a story, or stories cobbled together out of various modes such as letters, newspaper fragments, and documents. This was particularly effective in stories about vampires, heightening the sense of the vampire as an elusive, uncontainable figure whom no amount of description or taxonomization, by whichever narratorial authority, can capture.

Carmilla (1872) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu uses this multi-layered narrative to enclose the firsthand testimony of a woman seduced by a female vampire inside a pseudoscientific casebook. Le Fanu wants the reader to imagine that this vampire might really have existed, while conveying at the same time the force of her seduction.

Carmilla is one of the most seductive vampires in literature. What was a latent homoeroticism in the relationship between Christabel and Gertrude in Coleridge’s Christabel becomes, here, overt. Carmilla openly caresses her victim and mounts her like a succubus, the mythological female demon who seduces men in their sleep. Only, unlike the succubus who drinks men’s bodily fluids to survive, Christabel sucks the blood of another woman.

Carmilla, along with earlier novels such as The Vampyre and Varney the Vampire, was an influence on the most famous vampire novel of all time, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In all of these stories, the vampire comes from an ancient, noble line, reflecting dual anxieties: inside the noble families, an anxiety about the purity of their bloodline, and outside them, an anxiety about their power over lower-born people. The vampire’s restricted movements and desire to infuse their bodies with the blood of others encode concerns about social mobility in a fast-changing world.

Dracula satisfies the reader’s desire to encounter a truly Gothic villain while connecting this villain to deeper contemporary concerns. Less overt than Carmilla with its homoerotic vampirism, Dracula nonetheless tapped into debates of the day about gender and sexuality, especially through its representations of Lucy Westenra, who falls prey to Dracula’s charms, and Mina Harker, a resourceful heroine who has attracted much feminist discussion. With Dracula, the vampire’s conquest of the novel was complete, and it soon began to transcend the pages of fiction.

Vampires in Art

By the early 20th century, the word ‘vampire’ was being shortened to ‘vamp’ to refer to alluring, but dangerous, women. Although the most prominent vampires in fiction thus far had been male, a trope surrounding female vampires emerged in visual culture, taking its cue from the seductive charms of Le Fanu’s Carmilla and the Brides of Dracula in Stoker’s novel.

Images of deadly vampiric women were also inspired by the 19th-century trope of the femme fatale. In Victorian Britain, changes in women’s legal status and repeated attempts to regulate the sex work industry brought about heightened fears of female sexuality. While unbridled female sexuality has been a perennial source of anxiety in cultures across the globe, it took center stage in mid- to late-19th-century art.

Félicien Rops frequently depicted insatiable devil-women in Gothic scenes blending sexual ecstasy with death, destruction, and the Black Mass. Rops creates a similar ambiguity to Stoker in the character of Lucy Westenra, as to how voluntarily these women have surrendered to vampiric lust.

Rops was inspired, as were many artists of the period, by the decadent movement and its early practitioner, the poet Charles Baudelaire. Les fleurs du mal (1857), Baudelaire’s notorious volume of poetry, included several poems about femmes fatales, and even one titled ‘The Metamorphoses of the Vampire.’ This poem, featuring a “putrescent thing, all faceless and exuding pus,” who drains the speaker of his “very marrow,” was censored from Les fleurs du mal after attracting the outraged attention of the French censors.

Along with five other censored poems, ‘The Metamorphoses of the Vampire’ was published in Belgium in 1866 in a volume titled Les épaves (‘scraps’ or ‘wreckage’), with a frontispiece by Rops depicting a skeleton emerging triumphantly from a wasteland.

Edvard Munch‘s 1895 painting Love and Pain has often been known by an alternative title (not used by the painter himself), Vampire. While ostensibly showing merely a woman kissing a man on his neck, her consuming embrace and flowing, flame-colored hair connote the kinds of dangerous sexuality that preoccupied so many contemporary artists.

Munch repeatedly returned to the image of the scarlet-haired seductress whose red vitality might, it seems, come from draining the blood of her lovers, culminating in the painting Vampire in the Forest (1924-25). He explicitly related this motif in his work to the changing social role of women with the advent of feminism: “it became the woman who seduces and entices and deceives the man […] In the transition period, the man became the weaker one.”

In Britain, too, artists responded to women’s emancipation by revamping the longstanding image of the female blood-sucker. Several Pre-Raphaelite artists dealt with women’s power in their work by representing demonic or magical female figures from myth and legend: witches, enchantresses, sirens, and vampires.

This reflected the Pre-Raphaelites’ interest in Romantic poetry. Painters took inspiration from Coleridge’s Christabel, Byron’s Giaour, and two poems by John Keats about seductive women. The first, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci,’ depicts a fairy-like woman who drains the spirit of every man she meets. In the second, ‘Lamia,’ the female character, like the vampire-like creatures in several world cultures, seeks to consume children.

Edward Burne-Jones painted several dangerous women, from mermaids and sirens to the Arthurian seductresses Morgan le Fay and Nimue. But it was his son, Philip Burne-Jones, who would paint a work titled The Vampire in 1897, inspired by a Rudyard Kipling poem of the same name.

Burne-Jones’s painting resembles one from a century earlier, Henry Fuseli‘s The Nightmare, in staging a bedroom scene of fearful seduction—only now the roles have been switched. The woman in Fuseli’s painting, preyed upon by an incubus, becomes the succubus of Burne-Jones’s. Kipling’s poem, along with Burne-Jones’s painting, inspired a 1913 silent film called The Vampire, marking the triumphant entrance of the vampire onto the big screen.

Vampires on Screen

Appropriately enough, vampires on screen have refused to die, in spite of attempts to vanquish them. In 1922, Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence, sued the makers of the groundbreaking horror film Nosferatu because of its similarity to Dracula. These are substantial: a young man is sent to Transylvania to meet a mysterious client, and scion of a distinguished old family, who is looking to purchase a home in England. Count Orlok—as he is renamed in Nosferatu—sleeps in a coffin, becomes ravenous at the sight of blood, and is intent on claiming the protagonist’s love interest as his own.

One key difference that F.W. Murnau’s film introduced into the genre is the vampire’s susceptibility to sunlight, which in Dracula is dangerous but not fatal. Moreover, Nosferatu set the tone for the visual representations of vampires that would delight audiences for the next century.

Although the court found in Florence Stoker’s favor and ordered all copies of Nosferatu to be destroyed, the film survived, and it was too late to stop the spread of Dracula adaptations. The novel has always been in the public domain in the United States due to a copyright error, leading to hundreds of Draculas in film and television.

Each incarnation of Dracula has brought a new angle to the vampire, though elements of the original folklore, Polidori’s Byron-inspired novella, and Stoker’s novel have remained intact throughout.

Béla Lugosi in 1931 and Christopher Lee in 1958 played Dracula as a suave aristocrat, often garbed in white tie beneath his bat-like cape, his brooding mouth hiding sharp fangs. Gary Oldman’s portrayal, in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), departed from the now-traditional costume and brought in elements of the steampunk aesthetic.

Film and television have explored the plot and characters of Dracula and the broader vampire myth from every possible angle. Vampires roam the dystopian streets of a post-virus New York in I Am Legend (2007); they pose as a wealthy couple in order to prey on a sleep doctor in The Hunger (1983); they navigate the pitfalls of eternal life in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013); they deal with racism and abuse in New Orleans in Interview with the Vampire (film version 1994, television version 2022 to present).

Other adaptations have taken the perspective of previously sidelined characters who are trying to defeat the vampire, such as the 2004 film Van Helsing and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). Vampires became a staple of young adult fare in books, later adapted for the screen, such as the Twilight series (2008-12) and The Vampire Diaries (2009-17).

Thanks to the popularity of the goth subculture since the 1980s, with bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure adopting costumes inspired by Lugosi’s and Lee’s vampires, and the band Bauhaus even releasing a song titled ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead,’ the image of the vampire seems destined to live forever.

When debating whether Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was a secret dissident or a full-blood Socialist Realist, it is important to consider the milieu that people in oppressive regimes lived through because we do not share their lived experiences.

Arts in the Socialist Realist Shadow

While most artists like sculptors, painters, and writers had clear “guidelines” from the Russian government, musicians were left to their own devices to figure out the rules. It should be noted that many artists also defied the totalitarian government and had many of their works outright banned. For example, the writer Mikhail Bulgakov knew Stalin personally, but also had many of his works banned.

The rules, called Socialist Realism, were rather simple but draconian and anyone who stepped out of line was denounced or declared an enemy of the state. When portraying life in Soviet Russia, the arts had four core values: (i) art should apply to workers, and be relatable and understandable, (ii) the arts need to represent everyday life, (iii) representations should be realistic (so nothing abstract or unidentifiable), and (iv) art should support the aims of the State and the Party and not undermine it. Maxim Gorky, a favorite of Joseph Stalin, laid down the rules at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. The arts became Stalin’s propaganda machine and made life extremely difficult for artists.

Yet, how does a composer present these idealized ideals in their music? The short answer is to avoid formalism. But what is formalism according to the Communist Party? The main catchwords that defined formalism included atonal and twelve-tone music (pioneered in Arnold Schoenberg’s works), dissonance, and cacophony (associated with Igor Stravinsky, e.g., The Rite of Spring). Music focusing on the formal elements of music rather than the subject was deemed formalist. Most of the musical trends in Western music during the first half of the 20th century were contrary to the ideals of Socialist Realism (Tompkins, 2013). Yet, almost 300 years ago, Imperial Russia underwent a radical change under Peter the Great, who westernized the country and made it a great European state.

Soviet realism can be summarized in the following vague prescript from the Composer’s Union:

“The main attention of the Soviet composer must be directed towards the victorious progressive principles of reality, towards all that is heroic, bright, and beautiful. This distinguishes the spiritual world of Soviet man and must be embodied in musical images full of beauty and strength. Socialist Realism demands an implacable struggle against folk-negating modernistic directions that are typical of the decay of contemporary bourgeois art, against subservience and servility towards modern bourgeois culture…” (Steinpress and Yamplonski, 1966).

It was under these vague instructions that composers such as Dmitry Shostakovich and others had to toe the line and bend their music to the official idioms of Socialist Realism.

It is as if the Nazi and Communist Parties copied each other’s cultural policies towards the arts. In Germany, avant-garde music was degenerate and deplorable. While the Communist Party did not have a single “soundtrack” to epitomize their musical tradition, the Nazis appropriated Richard Wagner’s music as the soundtrack to their fascist German nationalist campaign. Yet, the Communist Party in Russia went a step further and censored all their artists across the board and abused their art to further the Party’s propaganda mission.

Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Op. 29 (1934)

Few works in the modern history of Western music have brought so much controversy, (negative) political attention and scrutiny, and bad press to a single composer as Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. 

Despite the storms that would erupt around Shostakovich after the performance of the opera, his life was happy. Until the government began abusing him as a tool and a bad example when the Socialist Realist decrees placed all artists in a near-constant state of fear and jeopardy.

Shostakovich collaborated with Alexander Preis to produce the libretto (read the plot and program notes here). They took inspiration from Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella, set in Tsarist Russia. Katerina Izmailova is the titular character who is trapped in a loveless marriage to an older merchant in the countryside. Her life is filled with brutality and repression—women are regarded as the property of men. She engages in adultery and murder to escape her fate, but it is suggested that she commits suicide at the end of the opera when she is marched to a prison camp for her crimes.

Through the orchestra, the composer gives each character a unique voice while also serving as a commentator and narrator throughout the performance. While Katerina’s music is lyrical and melodic her father-in-law is portrayed by abrupt, melody-lacking music. For her husband, Zinovy, Shostakovich uses a wispy alto flute, and her lover, the womanizing Sergei, saccharine music accompanies his singing.

The first major use of the orchestra is during Katerina and Sergei’s first sexual encounter—a can-can is accompanied by suggestive trombone slides simulating the act. This “pornophony”  is perhaps the most lurid and graphic depiction of a sexual act in the history of music and probably landed Shostakovich in more trouble than he could ever imagine. Here, Richard Wagner’s ideas about the orchestra possessing the ability to speak (Sprachvermögen in German) shine through. Another instance is the Priest’s “liturgical chant” that is devoid of humility and spirituality: a poke at his insincerity as a spiritual leader.

Perhaps it was the opera’s thinly veiled messages of crime, passion, repression, and poking fun at the government that broke the camel’s back. The Party adored using Shostakovich’s opera as an example of “bad” music which should be avoided to keep music in line with the prescriptions of Soviet Realism.

Symphony No 5 in D Minor, Op. 47 (1937)

After Stalin left the life-threatening and ill-fated performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936, Shostakovich was on his radar. Lady Macbeth could have ended his career and his life, thus he had to make sure he abided by the Party’s rules regarding Socialist Realism. Additionally, the scathing review in Pravda (the official newspaper of the Communist Party) did not do Dimitri Shostakovich any favors either. His life was hanging in a balance tethered to Stalin’s whims. The Great Purge between 1936 and 1938 was a real threat to anyone who defied Stalin and Shostakovich was no exception.

Yet, the composer did not compose an ode or sycophantic cantata praising the Communist Party and their leader. With his Fifth Symphony, he offered the Party an “apology,” channeling the likes of Ludwig van Beethoven and Gustav Mahler, especially in the first two movements and the triumphant last movement. The premiere in November 1937 in Leningrad (today St. Petersburg) was a roaring success.

Dimitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 is multiple things at once, with as many interpretations as possible. Some think it is a veiled message of giving the finger to Stalin, while others read and hear deep sorrow and finally redemption in its last movement. There is also a train of thought that it is an autobiographical work that personifies Shostakovich’s personal life and how he triumphed over hardship. Of course, there is also a line of thought that suggests the symphony is a satirical portrait of Stalin—exuberance and adulation parading as a hollow shell.

Yet all the qualities that fit into a Socialist Realist composition are present: the musical language is direct, the melodies are well-shaped and memorable, and the positive fanfare in the fourth movement releases all the doubt and tension felt throughout the previous movements. However, the work is suitably complex and serious. After all, it is subtitled “a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism.” 

In the first two movements, the spirit of Beethoven and especially Mahler looms ever-present. The first movement (at 00:25) offers a magnificent interplay of despair and a call to arms. In the two aforementioned symphonic masters’ style, Shostakovich builds a narrative arc that erupts into a powerful conclusion when the recapitulation occurs. The outcome of the struggle is ambiguous and set aside when the jocular second movement enters.

Like many of Beethoven and his contemporaries’ scherzos, Shostakovich offers a stark contrast to the seriousness of the first movement. The second movement marked Allegretto (at 17:25) sounds like a forced “happy dance” where the tired workers are forced to sound happy and grateful for the opportunity to contribute to society. But there is an ironic sadness woven into the musical fabric, possibly symbolizing the overlords who are there to make sure the workers are “happy” with their lot.

In the third movement (at 23:28) Shostakovich eschews the brass section in favor of introspective string writing filled with a range of emotions. It seems as if the hero has lost all hope and is praying for death to release him from his struggles. Melancholic melodies in the flute and oboe add to the tragic feeling hanging over this movement.

Finally, in the fourth movement (at 38:15) the brass section is back in full force with the timpani pounding away. However, the hero is not completely safe from the world’s onslaughts. Yet. The music becomes frenzied and almost cacophonous, but Shostakovich does not dare enter that realm. With a Mahlerian twist the key signature shifts from D minor to D major to have the hero emerge (at 48:56) triumphantly. Yet, it sounds (and feels) like an ironic and pyrrhic victory.

Despite adhering to the classical tradition while sprinkled with avant-garde elements, Shostakovich took huge liberties and chances in this symphony. He won over the Communist Party and showed that he was “rehabilitated” according to their standards again. Nevertheless, there are moments filled with Western formalist tendencies such as dissonance, modernism, and biting, ironic sarcasm throughout the work.

This symphony’s power lies in its rich emotional language and carefully crafted structure. Given its historical context, the symphony transcends place and time. The symphony evokes powerful emotions in the listener while it showcases the human spirit’s will to survive.

Song of the Forests, Op. 81 (1949)

In the Song of the Forests, a different side of Shostakovich emerges: a composer who is toeing the line to please the Party. The work was composed during the summer of 1949 to celebrate the reforestation of the Russian steppes after World War II carved a destructive path across the country. This was part of Stalin’s “Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature.” This was also the world’s first state-sanctioned plan against human-induced climate change. At its core, Stalin’s plan was conservative. Restoring“an imagined prehistoric state, but soon a group of radical scientists advancing untested silvicultural theories managed to take control” (Brain, 2010), and subsequently it derailed after Stalin died in 1953.

The text, by Yevgeny Dolmatovsky, praises Stalin as the “Great Gardener” feeding into Stalin’s many accomplishments and his personality cult. After Stalin’s passing, those references were erased from the text. Of course, the Party loved the work and awarded the Stalin Prize to Dmitri Shostakovich in 1950 for his patriotic effort.

The oratorio is divided into seven movements:

• When the War Was Over (0:41)
• The Call Rings Throughout the Land: Let Us Dress Our Land in Forests (07:03)
• Memory of the Past (10:14)
• The Pioneers Plant the Forests (19:43)
• The Fighters of Stalingrad Forge Onward (22:18)
• A Walk into the Future (25:53)
• Glory (34:02)

When comparing this oratorio to Shostakovich’s other compositions, it may seem overly simplistic and Party-pleasing. However, the circumstances and context of the time are important.

In 1948, the government denounced Dmitri Shostakovich along with other composers (again) as formalists who undermined the government’s Socialist Realist policies. Playing by the rules was the name of the game—but those rules were arbitrary and applied at a whim. One day, the government would praise an artist, but the next day you could be denounced. The rules were never applied fairly or with consistency.

String Quartet No. 8, Op. 110 (1960)

Among Shostakovich’s output, few works have so many extra- and inter-musical interpretations as the Eighth String Quartet. Some believe it is purely autobiographical. Others say it is a dedication to the victims of fascism worldwide: it is inscribed, “In memory of victims of fascism and war,” after all… Solomon Volkov in his book, Testimony, filled with purported “recollections” by Dmitry Shostakovich himself claims the work is not about fascism. It is the composer’s struggles against the totalitarian Stalinist government, parading as a masked personal critique to avoid official retribution from the government (again).

The version below is from Boris Barshai’s arrangement of the quartet as a chamber symphony. It is cast in four movements as opposed to the original quartet’s five movements.

The first movement opens with Shostakovich’s musical signature D-(eS)-C-H, written in the German style: D-E-flat (S)-C-B (H) k—the same system Johann Sebastian Bach used to write his name B-A-C-H.

Overall, the mood is elegiac and depressing. The DSCH theme was used previously and notably in his Tenth Symphony in E minor, Op. 93. Other themes include one from his Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Op. 10—the work that brought him national prominence and a descending theme in the first violin referring to his Fifth Symphony in D minor, Op. 47. The latter work “redeemed” him in 1937 following the denunciation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

As austere as the first movement is, the second movement, marked Allegro molto, is like a live wire lashing about with stressful and anguished energy. It is a Blitzkrieg attack, shattering the mood with variations on the DSCH theme by using varying note lengths.

The sudden shift at 06:05 after the violoncello’s struggling upward surge can be heard in his Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67’s last movement. Albeit with more clarity and at a less frenzied tempo.

In the middle movement, we find a typical Shostakovichian compositional technique: tonal ambiguity. The ghoulish waltz pits G minor and G major tonalities against one another. While the principal melody features a B-natural (typical of a G major scale), the viola plays an accompaniment featuring a B-flat, which is found in a G minor scale. Overall, it creates a feeling of unease because you can never pinpoint the exact key signature.

At 11:25, Shostakovich quotes the march-like theme from his Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major, Op. 107 he composed the previous year.

The penultimate movement is perhaps the most pessimistic of the entire work. It opens with the first violin’s drone carrying over from the previous movement and a rapid, banging three-note motif in the rest of the strings.

It is an easy trap to assign extra-musical meanings to the drone-and-banging theme—some suggest the violin’s drone represents a distant aircraft while the bangs are gun or cannon shots. Considering that Shostakovich composed the work in Dresden, which was heavily bombed by the Allied Forces, the likeness could easily be inferred. Others suggest it is the Secret Police knocking on doors rounding up dissidents who failed to meet the Communist Party’s rules and are being carted off to prison camps.

Further to the above, between the three-note “knocks,” Shostakovich quotes four notes from the medieval Catholic requiem mass’ Dies Irae (Day of Wrath). The composer also quotes two Russian works, namely the revolutionary song Languishing in Prison and a funeral anthem, Tormented by the Weight of Bondage, You Glorify Death with Honor. Talk about pessimistic…

An aria from his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, is played by the cello in the upper range too before the knock motif is heard a final time.

In the final movement, the DSCH theme is introduced again fugally—each instrument takes up the theme after the previous one introduces it. With the final movement, Shostakovich recaptures the themes heard throughout the piece and brings them together as a final, powerful musical statement.

Was Shostakovich a Socialist Realist or Secret Dissenter?

These four varying works explore Dimitri Shostakovich’s output. We started with the work that put his life and career in danger—Lady Macbeth of the Mtesensk District. A work that deeply dissatisfied Joseph Stalin.

In his Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich offers an “apology” to the Communist Party, but underneath the veneer of officialdom, he still manages to defy the rules of Socialist Realism while flying under Stalin’s radar. It is also a deeply autobiographical work that has stood the test of time for nearly 80 years as one of the staples in the Western world’s symphonic canon.

To bring balance to the equation, Song of the Forests is an “official” composition by the composer where all the prescriptions of Socialist Realism glorify Stalin’s plans to reforest the Russian Steppes.

In the Eighth String Quartet, composed seven years after Stalin’s death, Shostakovich is introspective, brooding, and self-quoting numerous of his works in one of his most autobiographical works.

In my opinion, Shostakovich was neither a secret dissenter nor a Socialist Realist. He was a champion who forged his own path during dark and troubled times and left a rich legacy behind—despite the hardships he had to endure.

Kahnweiler thoroughly explores the theory behind the representational conflicts between Picasso and Braque during the early years of the Cubist movement. However, Kahnweiler’s history should primarily be seen as his personal perspective, even though it overlaps with the concerns of the two artists. It is as much a story of Kahnweiler’s Cubism as it is of Picasso’s and Braque’s, if not more. This article will explore The Rise of Cubism in this context and point out where Kahnweiler and his artists agree and where they differ.

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler on Cubism

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979) was one of the most influential voices in the sphere of avant-garde art in the early decades of the 20th century. He was the art dealer and personal confidant of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the originators of Cubist painting, and as such, his thoughts on this “new painting” are invaluable. There are many approaches to the study of Cubism, with different methods and concerns. Kahnweiler’s theoretical understanding of the Cubist project, however, must be attended to as a testimony to the problems which Picasso and Braque were wrestling with, given the close cooperation of the three men. Nonetheless, Kahnweiler’s account must not be made synonymous with the authentic and personal aims of Braque and Picasso, as he imports certain concerns of his own into his narrative.

In 1912, four years after Braque’s Houses at l’Estaque and five years after Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, Kahnweiler published The Rise of Cubism. This book, among others by the same author, formed the generally accepted canonical story of the development of Cubism. Yet it is a partisan story of Cubism, as Kahnweiler naturally emphasized the work of his two protégés at the expense of the so-called Salon Cubists, who diverged in their aims. Kahnweiler’s book is essential for an understanding of his “studio Cubists.”

This article will look at some of the theoretical underpinnings of Kahnweiler’s understanding of Cubism. He was in a unique position as a first-hand witness to the early development of the movement. But, despite there being an overlap in themes and concerns in his account and the scant accounts of Picasso and Braque, there are differences. Most importantly, Kahnweiler seeks to impose his own reading of 18th-century German idealism on the Cubist project. His epistemology (theory of knowledge) is borrowed from Immanuel Kant’s thought, and there is no evidence that Braque thought in this way, while it is even less likely that Kant was an influence on Picasso’s work.

The Task

Kahnweiler writes that Cubism does not differ in its means from representational art in general. He remarks that the method and the task are the same: the transposition of the three-dimensional world onto the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. In this, even traditional painting—but especially Cubist art—is akin to “geometrical drawing.”

Because Cubism bears the geometrical principle as integral to its formalism, Kahnweiler seems to be implying not only the illusoriness of traditional representation but also its deceit. Traditional painting, he says, has characterized its images as self-contained, exhaustive, and complete. But, because it is “merely visual” as an art, and excludes what he maintains as the tactility of Cubism, traditional painting is inherently flawed and partial in two senses. Firstly, it is incomplete, and secondly, it permits only one perspective on the physical world, rooted in its single-viewpoint derived simulacra or untrue “semblances.”

Opening Form

According to Kahnweiler, it was Picasso who first “pierced” the “closed form” of traditional illusionistic representation in painting and paved the way for Cubism. This “closed form” is held to neglect the essential characteristics of the object itself. It does so in its use of “chiaroscuro,” or, as Kahnweiler terms it, “objectivated light.” By this, he seems to mean that traditional illusionism paints light as it falls on the object, without any insight into the object itself. Cubism, on the other hand, liberates form and color from the object as it is in itself. Traditional painting, therefore, misses the point and goal of representation and is “illusory” for the reason that it portrays merely the inessential surfaces of things.

Authenticity, not Distortion

Many accounts of Cubism refer to its distortion of form or of the physical object. This is a false perception according to Kahnweiler. He accords this attribute instead to traditional painting. By virtue of its verisimilitude, or naturalist depiction of the world, he seems to imply that the distortion involved in traditional painting is conceptual and perceptual.

Kahnweiler argues that the real object is in both the Cubist “rhythm of forms” and the spectator’s memory, perhaps in a relation of synthesis. In this, he makes Cubism, for all its seeming austerity of pictorial form and rarefied theory, a social and discursive art. This “new painting” is opposed by implication to traditional painting’s seeming pictorial dictation, its closed expression, and its unchangeable perspective (in both senses).

Far from asserting a Cubist distortion of form or an exclusive concern with form, Kahnweiler writes that Braque and Picasso are representing objects rather than planes, cylinders, etc. He notes Braque’s “undistorted real objects” as a “stimulus which carries with it memory images.” This is a further comment on the participation of the attuned spectator: “These images construct the finished object in the mind.” The completion of the object is, therefore, ideational as well as perceptual, reliant on the observer’s imagination as well as his/her store of memory images.

Kahnweiler says that there can be no distortion in Cubism’s rhythmic coordination and its aesthetic unity. With its analysis of form (the object in its constituent parts) comes “assimilation” and the reconstruction of the object in its visual and tactile entirety. This principle is embodied in Picasso’s and Braque’s depiction of the object in the round and from multiple viewpoints in a simultaneous cohesion.

Objective Unity

The Cubist concern with unity, as Kahnweiler terms it, is also a concern of traditional single-point painting. However, he writes that the traditional style and Cubism diverge in terms of how to achieve it. The opposition he establishes here is between the “closed form” of tradition with its illusory pretensions and Cubist unity: that of the representation of the essential wholeness of the object.

This new unity is achieved in a double manner and in two “spheres.” The double manner is in the analysis of the objective form and the synthesis of the resultant parts in the revelation of the fullness of the object. This double process takes place in both the sphere of the artistic process (perceiving and representing the object) and in the mind of the spectator. The spectator perceives the representation in an act which Kahnweiler calls “objective perception.” It is possible that he means this in a double way too: to refer to the perception of the representation of the object as it is, and to a clear and impartial perception that is free of both artistic dictation and the projection of preconceptions.

Kant’s Metaphysics or the Aesthetic?

Kahnweiler’s use of the terms “analytic” and “synthetic,” which he also applies to two supposed stages of the development of Cubism, provides a clue as to the derivation of his theoretical apparatus. Indeed, he explicitly quotes his inspiration in The Rise of Cubism. The 18th-century German transcendental idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant’s theory of perception wants to “put together the various conceptions and comprehend their variety in one perception.” This quotation seems a neat summation of the operations of Cubist representation.

The geometric shape, straight lines, and regular curves are “deeply rooted in man” (sic), according to Kahnweiler. He states in Kantian language that geometric shapes “are the necessary condition for all objective perception.” He characterized Cubist abstraction of form as quite opposed to a distortion, as a humanist return to an original and universal archetype “deeply rooted in man.”

Kahnweiler goes on to say that it is not only “objective perception” that is dependent on this in-built capacity: “[o]ur a priori knowledge of these forms is the necessary condition without which there would be no seeing, no world of objects.” This is all part of Kantian idealist philosophy, which maintains that time and space themselves have no external existence and are rooted in the human faculties. But it is here perhaps that Kahnweiler veers away from the sense that Georges Braque made of his Cubism. Braque wrote of a translation of the worldly fact into “the pictorial fact” that would be a sort of analogue or parallel to that world of physical objects. In this, he could be argued to prioritise the physical world as knowable, but pre-existent to and independent of human consciousness.

For Braque, Cubism—or at least his Cubism—is more responsive to artistic means and the world than self-referencing the a priori (original, before experience) longing for geometric form. In this way, he differs from Kahnweiler’s contention that geometric form is the structure upon which we build the “products of our imagination.” These products, he says, are made of the “stimuli on the retina and memory images.” For Braque, the pictorial means in response to the world comes first, and this informs the artistic manipulation of form into the essential appearance.

Braque also opines that “[t]he subject is not the object; it is the new unity, the lyricism which stems entirely from the means employed.” In this, there is a seeming claim for artistic autonomy in terms of finding solutions to the task of true representation. Yet, in terms of the “stimuli of the retina,” Braque does not lose sight of the physical object either in his explications or in his painting. So, Braque slightly disagrees with Kahnweiler. The former attributes the formal appearance of Cubism to the resolution of representational problems, while the latter attributes it to the innate propensity to “underlying basic forms.” These forms for Kahnweiler are a “skeletal frame” beneath the “final visual result of the painting.” 

Kahnweiler’s Cubism: In Conclusion

In all, Kahnweiler’s account of Cubism is both authentic and not completely trustworthy. The Rise of Cubism is a genuine narrative based on personal relationships with the two prime artists of early Cubism. Because of this, he had an intimate knowledge of the aesthetic and representational problems that the two pioneers were wrestling with, and no doubt he related much of the artists’ thoughts. It is also an authentic account of the efforts he himself mounted for the publicization of the work of Picasso and Braque, which were hugely successful in terms of subsequent views on the history of the movement.

It is indisputable that the two men were Cubism’s originators, but Kahnweiler’s history makes little sense when studying the slightly later school of the Salon Cubists. For example, his later division of two periods of the early movement into “analytic” and “synthetic” is entirely based on the course of Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubism, and he rarely refers to contemporary or subsequent innovations within that school.

The Rise of Cubism and Kahnweiler’s later histories are largely exercises in the promotion of the importance of his two protégés. But his attempt to foist 18th-century German transcendental idealism on early Cubism as its prime mover is, despite its similarities, a concern of his own.

Bibliography

Harrison and Wood (eds), Art in Theory: 1900-2000.

Initially a commercial artist and an illustrator for newspapers and magazines, John Sloan became part of the Ashcan School and one of New York’s greatest painters. He was fascinated by the city’s hustle and bustle, the alluring vignettes of life found on every city street. He painted prostitutes, drunks, street urchins, laborers, and European immigrants, all with an evenhanded and realistic touch. He didn’t sentimentalize urban poverty or suffering but instead chose to faithfully and fairly render life and leisure in the city.

John Sloan Biography

Sloan was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, in 1871 and moved to Philadelphia when he was only a few years old. He taught himself how to etch when he was a young man and then chose to attend drawing classes at the Spring Garden Institute. His first work was as a freelance commercial artist, joining the art department of the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1892 and the Philadelphia Press in 1895. In the meantime, he was also one of the artists who formed the Charcoal Club, seeking to escape the confines, and tuition, of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was inspired by Robert Henri, one of the most important art teachers of the day, and began painting portraits and the city of Philadelphia in the 1890s.

In 1904, Sloan and his wife, Dolly, whom he’d married in 1901, moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. There, he joined like-minded painters in “The Eight” exhibition at Macbeth Gallery, which inaugurated the formation of the Ashcan School. He was also drawing for The Masses, a radical publication, and organized the Exhibition of Independent Artists in 1910. The Whitney Museum notes that in New York, “he harnessed the skills he had learned from newspaper work—the ability to memorize characteristic details and sketch quickly on the street—to paint impressionistic images of squalid tenements, streets and storefronts, parks, restaurants, and bustling crowds.”

Sloan participated in the famous Armory Show of 1913 (contributing two oils and five etchings), taught at the Arts Student League, and was president of the Society of Independent Artists. His style was emphatically realistic; he once said, “I am a realist…I am more interested in the noble commonplace of nature than in the curious: believing that form and color are tools of the artist’s imagination in re-creating life.” Later in life, he began spending summers in New Mexico and admired Native American art and Mexican muralists. He died of cancer in 1951.

Ashcan Art

The Ashcan School of Art was so named because of its focus on the grittiness of urban life at the expense of moralizing content and aesthetic appeal. The term’s originator was Art Young, who contributed to the socialist publication The Masses along with many of the painters who would make up “The Eight” (Sloan, Robert Henri, George Luks, Arthur B. Davies, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, and Everett Shinn; later Glenn Coleman and George Bellows would be considered core parts of the School).

The “ashcan” moniker was not meant to be flattering. Young complained of Henri’s followers in general that they “want to run pictures of ash cans and girls hitching up their skirts in Horatio Street…For my part, I do not want to be connected with a publication that does not try to point out the way out of a sordid materialistic world.” Young disliked the depiction of the homeless, prostitutes, orphans, and working men on their own terms, without heavy-handed sympathy. It seemed like the Ashcan artists were alright painting the world as it was, without trying to change it.

But it wasn’t just the down-and-out that the Ashcan artists took for their subjects; rather, they were painting life in New York City at the turn of the century with all its complexity, change, and opportunity. There were scenes in restaurants and bars; of immigrant women and street peddlers; of dancers, revelers, boxers, and circus performers; of people sitting on roofs and stoops; of children playing and swimming, women gossiping and working, and men smoking and drinking. The city itself was a character, as the skyscrapers, subways, elevated railways, riverfront parks and piers, rooftops, and crowded avenues formed the backdrop for its denizens.

Sloan’s own interpretation of New York City is brought to life in these six works of art.

1. Election Night, 1907

The scene depicted here, which Sloan witnessed, is a public celebration in Herald Square where people gathered to find out the results of local, state, and federal elections, which were projected on the side of the New York Herald building at Sixth and Broadway. The mood is raucous and exhilarating. People are throwing confetti, blowing tin horns, and tickling each other with “ticklers,” one of which the woman in red at the center of the canvas is holding. Everyone is in motion, jostling against each other and laughing. Under the gleam of the streetlamps, windows of the El, and lights from the buildings, the scene is more like a New Year’s Eve celebration than a political gathering.

Art historians Robert W. Snyder and Rebecca Zurier find this painting notable for its depiction of new uses of public spaces in the city. The subjects of the painting “breach all rules of correct decorum on city streets” and, referencing an article in Harper’s Weekly from 1908 that sniffed at the unseemliness of the behavior on Broadway on election night, said, “[the painting] reveals another truth that most urban images concealed: in a city, especially during special moments of celebration, one can expect to be jostled and not mind it.”

2. Hairdresser’s Window, 1907

Sloan painted this scene more or less as he actually saw it, explaining in his diary that he had been walking to Henri’s studio and saw a woman in a window with bleached blonde hair, also bleaching the hair of her client as others on the street below watched. This scene exemplifies Sloan’s comment that, “In between illustration jobs I roamed the streets, finding human incidents to etch and paint.”

The scene features the hairdresser and client as Sloan wrote of them in the diary, totally oblivious to the curiosity they are engendering below, which is represented by a woman’s rather aghast expression and the fixed stares of several men. The window is surrounded by signs and advertisements, but the hairdresser actually doing her work is the most effective advertisement of them all. Susan Fillin-Yeh has argued persuasively that Sloan’s positionality in this painting makes little rational sense, as he is sort of hovering above the crowd; she notes that perspective, in general, is never really fixed or stable and that Sloan’s “slapdash and robust yet carefully observed constructions only appear to be uninflected scenes of daily life.” Sloan is actually illuminating as much about the nature of painting as the nature of life in a modern metropolis.

3. Chinese Restaurant, 1909

Sloan believed that “you must…paint the things that you know.” For him, that was his city and its quotidian spaces, like restaurants. Chinese Restaurant derived from a memory he had of a restaurant in which a female patron had a red feather atop her hat; he wrote in his diary, “I saw a strikingly gotten up girl with dashing red feathers in her hat playing with the restaurant’s fat cat. It would be a good thing to paint. I may make a go at it.” He revisited the restaurant to refresh his memory, and it was “just in time, for tomorrow, they move to the corner below (29th St.).”

The scene features two sets of dining companions: the aforementioned woman with the red feather and a man in the foreground, and two men slightly behind them. The woman laughingly reaches forward to give the eager cat a bit of her food while her companion slurps his noodles from a porcelain bowl. A Chinese restaurant was not a typical subject of fine art, especially as the interior of this place is both dingy and rather lurid, but Sloan’s embrace of “what he knew” made for a compelling image of how real New Yorkers lived (and ate).

4. Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair, 1912

New York City skyscrapers rose to new vertical heights in the early 20th century, and along with them, the horizontal space of the rooftops became more important for urban dwellers. In 1929, the New York Times wrote of discovering “a city above the city” and how people no longer ignored their rooftops, that “[the] varied uses of roofs in a crowded city pile up to an amazing total.” On rooftops, apartment dwellers could string up their laundry, sleep under the stars to escape the stifling interior heat, sneak away for an amorous interlude, or, in Sloan’s 1912 painting, gather with friends and dry their hair.

The three women in this painting are conversing amiably and drying their hair in the fresh air. Laundry hangs nearby, suggesting, along with the simple coarseness of their dress, that they will need to return to their work soon. Sloan called the women in this painting “humble roof-top players” and brought back scenes of three women on rooftops engaged in conversation in 1913’s Roof Gossips and 1944/50’s Roof Chats. He also painted other rooftop scenes, which included subjects like raising pigeons, sunbathing, admiring the sunset, and stealing someone else’s laundry.

5. McSorley’s Bar, 1912

McSorley’s Old Ale House, established in 1854, is New York’s oldest continually operated saloon. Initially only open to men (it would remain this way until 1970!), it was a watering hole par excellence. John McSorley, an immigrant from Ireland who arrived in New York in 1851, opened his bar at 15 East 7th Street and referred to it as “The Old House at Home.” His son, William J. McSorley, took over its management in 1911 after his father’s death. For a brief period of time, the bar sold hard alcohol but ultimately decided to stick with just ale. During Prohibition, it sold “near beer” and remained open.

John Sloan painted the bar five times: “I have never gone slumming to get subject matter. I was in McSorley’s ale house about ten times in my life and painted five pictures of the place.” This version, exhibited at the Armory Show but remaining unsold, shows five patrons engaged in conversation and imbibing pints of beer. The mood is relaxed and convivial, the setting homey and familiar with its eclectic array of tchotchkes and small paintings.

6. Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street, 1928

As Sloan painted into the decade that would be known as “The Roaring Twenties,” his art seemed less ashcan and more jazz club. In this piece, Sloan pays equal attention to the built landscape—the Elevated, Jefferson Market Courthouse in the background, storefront, and streetlamps—as he does to the people enjoying it.

In this painting, it is mostly women out for a night on the town, which is an indication of just how much was changing for “The New Woman” of the early 20th century. These women weren’t rich, but they were dressed well, wearing the new flapper style of shorter dresses, bobbed hair, small hats, high heels, and stockings. Some of them may be enjoying a flirtation with two young men in a car; one woman seems unable to tear herself away. A group of six others is all arm-in-arm, laughing and crossing the street, probably on their way to their next speakeasy or dance. It is a classic scene of New York nightlife, able to be replicated in nearly any era with just a few tweaks to clothing and architecture.

Bibliography

Fillen-Yeh, S. (2007). Images as Imaginary Documents: John Sloan’s Sidewalks and Thresholds. In Heather Campbell Coyle & Joyce F. Schiller (Eds.), John Sloan’s New York. Delaware Art Museum.

Sloan, H. Farr. (1978). John Sloan New York Etchings (1905-1949). Dover Publications, Inc.

Snyder, R. W. and Zurier, R. (1995). Picturing the City. In Snyder et al., Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Thomas, Adam M. (2019). From the Rooftops: John Sloan and the Art of a New Urban Space. Pennsylvania State University Press.

Tottis, J. (2007). Bars, Cafes, and Parks: The Ashcan’s Joie de Vivre. In Tottis et al., Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists’ Brush with Leisure, 1895-1925. Merrell Publishers Limited.

Paris, 1836. Dilettantish ladies and gentlemen of the upper classes mix with the poets and artists who, now more than ever, constitute the city’s true nobility: a meritocracy, founded on a veneration for art’s spiritual importance. The lights are low; the conversation turns on revolution, freedom, democracy: this is the height of Romanticism. It is the optimal setting for a meeting which will forever marry the music and literature of this era, an auspicious meeting (or was it?) between the composer Frédéric Chopin and the author George Sand.

Who Were Chopin and Sand?

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this meeting in a Paris salon in 1836 comprised two men. George Sand, aged 32 and already the author of a dozen novels, had taken her pen name from a former lover and co-author, Jules Sandeau. She also abbreviated her first name, removing the final ‘s’ that ordinarily ends the name Georges in French, constructing a pseudonym which successfully confounded her audience and her peers.

Over the course of a prolific writing career, Sand (born Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin) came to be regarded as an equal by contemporaries such as Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Gustave Flaubert. The latter addressed her as “Chère Maître,” blending the feminine word for ‘dear’ with the masculine word for ‘master.’ Hugo once commented:

“George Sand cannot determine whether she is male or female. I entertain a high regard for all my colleagues, but it is not my place to decide whether she is my sister or my brother.”

This was in part because Sand had obtained police permission (as was necessary in early 19th-century Paris) to wear men’s clothing. Ostensibly, such permits were for occupational purposes, or for horse-riding, but Sand used her dress (and habit of cigar smoking) to move uninhibited among men’s circles.

Then there was her writing, begun after a scandalous separation from her duke husband and a string of public affairs, including poets, politicians, and possibly an actress. With their frankness about relationships between men and women, Sand’s novels shocked and delighted people as much as her behavior did, and encouraged public uncertainty around her gender presentation.

This explains Chopin‘s notorious slight on meeting Sand that night in 1836: “What an unattractive person la Sand is. Is she really a woman?” Not the most auspicious start, but it is unlikely Chopin had ever met anyone quite like Sand.

The pianist, aged 26, had moved to Paris five years earlier, fleeing political unrest in his native Poland. As an émigré who retained a strong connection to his homeland, he was reluctant to shake up society in the way that Sand, a passionate socialist, was doing.

By most accounts (and he left very little about himself in his own words), Chopin was intensely private, shunning the showy world of virtuoso performances (then a very popular spectacle thanks to his friend Franz Liszt) and carefully selecting students for his piano teaching from the best Parisian families.

It was thanks to Liszt that Chopin and Sand met, although it would take a little while for Chopin to be grateful for this. Liszt was engaged in a Romantic liaison of his own, with another author who had left her high-born husband: Countess Marie d’Agoult. When d’Agoult invited various artistic friends to her salon one evening in 1836, Liszt invited Chopin, but they didn’t hit it off. That would take another couple of years.

Turmoil: Winter in Majorca

According to one possibly apocryphal story, Sand tried to wear down the reluctant Chopin at one soirée following their initial meeting by robing herself in a silk dress of red and white, the colors of the Polish flag. It was a demonstration of her fierce support for revolutionary uprising, for ordinary people claiming their freedoms, as many interpreted the outbreaks of civil unrest in both Poland and France at this time.

The sentiment may or may not have appealed to Chopin; the extent of his support for a free Poland remains the subject of critical debate. When their relationship ended, Sand got rid of nearly all their letters, so it is difficult to get close to the real Chopin or imagine how the two conversed.

Writing in 1838 to another Polish émigré and close friend of Chopin, Count Wojciech Grzymała, Sand wrote that she had, with surprise, realized the strength of her feelings for Chopin. She was prepared to throw over any other potential suitors if he would just ask. Soon he did, and in the winter of 1838, they set off together to escape the wagging tongues of Paris, making for the Spanish island of Majorca.

It was intended to benefit them both. Chopin sought the warmer southern climate to soothe his periodic bouts of ill health (later to develop into tuberculosis). Sand hoped to discover in the Majorcans a group of people primed to rise up and claim their independence.

Our source for the trip is Sand, who wrote up the experience as a travelogue published in 1841 (A Winter in Majorca). The island was not quite what she hoped. It was November, cold and wet. The locals were hostile to the unmarried, bohemian couple, who had pitched up with Sand’s two children. Struggling to find adequate food or lodgings, the four ended up staying in a damp disused monastery in the village of Valldemossa.

Curiously, Chopin is only a shadowy figure in Winter in Majorca, referred to not by name but as “the sick man.” Sand is tight-lipped on a topic which has since garnered a lot of interest from Chopin scholars: his composition, during their stay, of his Preludes, Op. 28.

This collection of 24 preludes was modeled on J.S. Bach‘s Well-Tempered Clavier, which contained preludes and fugues written in every key (12 major and 12 minor). Chopin omitted the fugues and concentrated on the prelude as a complete work in its own right, revealing an interest in fragmentation and smaller forms which was characteristic of Romantic piano music. We know that Chopin took a copy of Bach‘s collection to Majorca, though it is difficult to tell which of his own pieces he finished there, and which had already been completed back in Paris.

Although Chopin underwent quite a saga in getting his preferred make of piano (a Pleyel) shipped to Majorca so that he could compose, he must eventually have found the environment stimulating enough to compose these celebrated pieces, including the ‘Raindrop’ Prelude. This title came not from Chopin (who never gave titles to his works beyond simple descriptions of their form, such as Ballade or Waltz), but from Sand.

Later, in her autobiography, she wrote about inventing the title on a rainy day during their sojourn in Majorca:

“When I called [Chopin’s] attention to those drops of water which were actually falling upon the roof, he denied having heard them. He was even vexed at what I translated by the term, imitative harmony. He protested with all his might, and he was right, against the puerility of these imitations for the ear. His genius was full of mysterious harmonies of nature.” (Huneker 2004, chapter 7)

Were any of Chopin’s Preludes really inspired by, or even written in, Majorca? Was he as constantly ill as Sand suggests? Can music, like poetry, imitate nature? This most Romantic of getaways leaves open these questions and many more.

Tranquility: Summers at Nohant

Most biographers, even the least sympathetic to Sand, credit the relationship with helping Chopin to write his best compositions. James Huneker, who generally demonized Sand for her numerous affairs and accused her of draining artistic geniuses of their talent like a vampire, admitted:

“Chopin had some one to look after him—he needed it—and in the society of this brilliant Frenchwoman he throve amazingly: his best work may be traced to Nohant and Majorca.” (Huneker 2004, chapter 2)

Nohant was Sand’s country house, inherited from her grandmother, where she and Chopin spent every summer from 1839 to 1846. Guests joining them included Liszt, Balzac, Flaubert, the renowned soprano Pauline Viardot, and the painter Eugène Delacroix, who (like many Romantics) was deeply inspired by music, and who began an unfinished double portrait in 1838 showing Chopin at the piano and Sand at his side, rapt in listening to his music.

We know that Nohant gave Chopin a tranquil base, away from the hustle and bustle of Paris, to compose pieces such as his ‘Heroic’ Polonaise. But what did Sand gain? Did Chopin supply her with ideas, as she furnished Romantic fantasies surrounding his compositions?

In 1838, Sand wrote a closet drama (a play written for private reading, not the stage), which suggests that conversations with Chopin (and perhaps Liszt, a voracious autodidact and writer himself) influenced her thought. The Seven Strings of the Lyre is Sand’s reworking of the Faust legend, in which the scientist Faust is tempted by Mephistopheles, a servant of the Devil, to forsake his soul in the pursuit of knowledge.

Sand’s version is even more Romantic than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s famous play. Faust is replaced with Albertus, who suffers the characteristic ennui of the Romantic hero. As Mephistopheles tries to win his soul, Albertus is helped by the angelic Helen and her lyre, whose seven strings represent different virtues of human nature. The lyre becomes instrumental, literally, in transmitting harmonious music representative of human goodness.

Recent readers of the play, although interested in Sand’s ideas about the spiritual power of music, have been disappointed that this version of Faust by such a radical proto-feminist as Sand seems to preserve Goethe’s one-dimensional, heavily idealized portrayal of womanhood. But given that the play was written during, and inspired by, her relationship with a musician, it’s tempting to read Chopin as an inspiration for the lyre-wielding Helen.

Romanticism’s Odd Couple

Chopin and Sand have always been swathed in gender ambiguity. Sand was the cross-dressing cigar smoker who defied expectations to claim her place in a literary pantheon dominated by men. Chopin, many contemporary sources note, was as picky about his clothing as any high-society woman. He wrote almost solely for the piano, which in early 19th-century Paris was played by women in their droves. His pieces were heard as light, airy, delicate, not quite feminine but androgynous, like an angel or a sprite.

Recent speculation has centered on Chopin’s letters to his schoolfriend Tytus Woyciechowski, which address him in passionate language and refer to kissing. While it’s important to remember that understandings of sexuality are constructed differently across places and times, and these expressions of love may not have correlated to a modern, Western view of homosexual identity, this speculation about Chopin’s identity does offer a different slant on his relationship with Sand. Think back to his early comment casting aspersions on her femininity: perhaps he was drawn to her cross-dressing, not repelled by it.

Another way of seeing the relationship, fueled by Sand’s comments as the years went on, is in terms of a mother and child. Although she was only six years older, she came to view Chopin as her third child, especially during his periods of illness when she took on a caregiving role.

Although the two lived together in Paris and Nohant, they gradually ceased to have a physical relationship, if they had ever had one. This question is also swathed in ambiguity, not least because many subsequent commentators (conscious of Sand’s reputation and eager to rescue Chopin from scandal as he grew, posthumously, into a revered icon of the classical canon) represented the relationship as “a pure and cordial friendship” (Hadow 2012, p. 128). Was her “little angel,” “beloved little corpse,” a lover in the same sense as the ones before him?

What Drove Chopin and Sand Apart?

You might think that airing dirty laundry in a novel is a good reason for a break-up. When Sand published Lucrezia Floriani in 1846, mutual friends of the author and of Chopin were taken aback by the close similarity between the real-life couple and the fictional Lucrezia and Prince Karol. Lucrezia is older, a retired actress, with children from a previous relationship; Prince Karol is sickly, reclusive, and jealous of Lucrezia’s interactions with other men.

Is this a portrait of Sand and Chopin’s relationship? She later insisted that, although her writing achieved its trademark realism by drawing on her life, she had the artist’s skill of transforming her material into art through her imagination. If this seems a flimsy excuse, what about the fact that Chopin, apparently, listened to Sand recite passages of the novel and did not object once?

Romanticism is known for blending life and art. These artists prided themselves on creating works that could truly claim to give insight into the human soul. Whose souls did they know best? Their own, and those around them. The roman à clef, or novel with a key, in which characters correspond to real people in the author’s life, was rife in this period.

While the Romantics had the same debates as we do about the ethics of displaying our private lives, they prized verisimilitude, or faithfulness, in art. If Chopin did recognize himself in Lucrezia Floriani, perhaps he chose to ignore this and pay more attention to the truth of the feelings Sand was representing.

A more prosaic cause of the breakdown between Chopin and Sand was the composer’s relationships with the author’s children as they grew into adults. Maurice, the son, was resentful of Chopin, while Solange, the daughter, doted on him (there has been speculation about their relationship). In 1847, Chopin took Solange’s side in a dispute between Sand and her daughter and son-in-law, sculptor Auguste Clésinger. Sand and Chopin separated, seeing each other only once more: a chance meeting, when neither spoke.

When Chopin died of tuberculosis in 1849, Solange was among the mourners at his deathbed. Clésinger sculpted the monument of a weeping woman (Euterpe, the classical muse of music) on Chopin’s tomb in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery. Sand kept away.

To her detractors, Sand’s absence is further proof that she was to blame for Chopin’s death. Many 19th-century accounts, in the absence of widespread knowledge about tuberculosis, represent the composer as dying of heartbreak. But from a modern perspective, we might speculate that Sand stayed away because it was too painful, or out of a desire not to cause more harm.

Sand and Chopin remain one of Romanticism’s quintessential pairings, precisely because of the unlikeliness and tempestuousness of the affair. They leave more questions unanswered than answered, suspending us in an essentially Romantic striving after impossible knowledge.

They united music and literature in a melting pot of fascinating mutual influence. Like all the great Romantics, they testify to the important results that come from the overlapping of art, genius, and love.

Sources

Hadow, W. H. (2012). Studies in modern music, second series: Frederick Chopin, Antonin Dvořák, Johannes Brahms. Project Gutenberg edition.

Huneker, James (2004). Chopin: the Man and his Music. Project Gutenberg edition.

For an artist hailing from late 13th-century Siena, Duccio di Buoninsegna left an impressive written record behind. Although he was an apprentice artist under the tutelage, it is thought, of Guido da Siena and perhaps too, the great Cimabue, the records left behind do not always refer to his artistic career. A litany of fines from city authorities tells of a rebellious character, unafraid to challenge authority. It was this determination to follow his own path that led Duccio to challenge the status quo within Byzantine and early Italian art.

From Byzantine Blue & Gold: Duccio Emerges

In the 12th century, Siena became a republic. Widely known for its wool trade, Siena’s pivotal position for some of the busiest trade routes in Western Europe and beyond, into the Byzantine Empire, meant it flourished both politically and economically. In line with its commercial success, the city-state was home to an artistic revolution.

Much like the medieval Gothic French and the icon-led Byzantine, art in Siena in the late 12th and early 13th centuries reflected the evolution of Europe as a whole. Countries and states were forming, and visual culture was a key identifier for those living through the turmoil. In amongst this metamorphosis, what we now call Italian art was beginning to take shape. Duccio was at the forefront of these changes.

Duccio’s earliest works were commissions for ledger covers, recorded as being painted in 1278 when he was 23 years old. However, he quickly moved on to more illustrious work. His paintings were recognizably influenced by early Christian art. He continued to paint the Madonna and Child throughout his career, but his style evolved. From the ultramarine and gold of the Byzantine and the stiffness of the painted icon, Duccio began to develop a style marked by a softness and emotional realism never seen before in art.

1. The Crevole Madonna

One of Duccio’s first attributed paintings, The Crevole Madonna, is believed to have been commissioned for the church of San Pietro e Paolo of Montepesci before being moved to the hermitage of Montespecchio. The monks of Montespecchio must have seen the Madonna as a talisman, as in the 17th century she accompanied them to their new home, the church of Santa Cecilia in Crevole.

Painted in 1283, she is emblematic of the art of the icon, the prime motif of Byzantine art. The Virgin is depicted wearing her customary ultramarine robe, with Duccio reflecting Eastern influences through the gold delineation of the draped fabric. Her face is expressionless, though Duccio has attempted to create a certain naturalism in her skin. By later artistic standards, the Christ Child is out of proportion and appears older than one would expect. This aging of the Child was a standard device for conveying Christ’s wisdom.

The painting’s background is entirely gold. With no landscape or interior, the focus is entirely on the Madonna and Child. It is a devotional piece, not intended, as paintings would be in later centuries, for decoration. In effect, Duccio has painted a Byzantine icon with a touch of Sienese flair, a style that he would develop further and that would become synonymous with early Italian art.

2. The Rucellai Madonna

The year after he finished painting the Crevole Madonna, Duccio was commissioned by the Laudesi confraternity to paint a Madonna and Child with angels to adorn their chapel in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. The finished work occupied several sites within the church before finally being installed in the Rucellai family chapel in 1591, where it remained until 1937.

The fact that a Florentine confraternity commissioned a painting by a Sienese artist was significant in early 13th-century Siena. The city-states of Florence and Siena were arch-rivals in every sense. Florence was already developing a reputation as a center for European banking, a role that Siena strongly challenged. The two city-states were also rivals in the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict, with the discord resulting in Siena’s victory at the Battle of Montaperti in 1260.

In contrast with the Crevole Madonna, the Laudesi painting was monumental in size. The earlier work measured only 35 by 24 inches. The Laudesi’s commission was intended to impress. At approximately 14 feet 9 inches by 9 feet 6 inches, the Rucellai Madonna was a significant devotional painting. The contract for the work survives and confirms that the Laudesi demanded the best for their new chapel. It specifies that Duccio should not work on any other commissions until their Madonna is finished. The artist was also expected to pay for the costly gold and ultramarine himself, although the Laudesi reserved the right to refuse the painting if they weren’t happy with the result.

Compared with the Crevole Madonna, the later work showed significant developments in Duccio’s style. The sharp gold lines of the first work are gone, making way for a softly draping robe for the Virgin. Although the background remains essentially gold, the painting’s overall effect is that of a gentler, more maternal Madonna. With the Rucellai Madonna, we begin to see the beginnings of the Italian painting style to come. The advent of naturalism is clear, even though the shimmer of Byzantine style still glitters.

3. Rose Window at Duomo of Siena: A Material Change

At over 16 feet in diameter, it seems impossible that visitors to the Duomo in Siena could overlook the rose window high above, casting shards of colored light upon them. The Duomo’s very structure features works by masters such as Donatello’s statue of Saint John the Baptist, Pisani’s pulpit, and Michelangelo’s four saints adorning the Piccolomini altar. These elements alone are enough to distract from the stonework’s already striking monochrome striping.

In 1288, Duccio was commissioned to provide drawings for the window. This, in itself, has been proven to be a bold and unusual move by the Commune of Siena. Stained glass was rare in this part of Europe; it was more common in northern European churches. It seems that the magnificence of the Duomo’s architecture commanded an oculus of corresponding dimensions of style and presence.

Duccio’s design depicts landmark points in the life of the Virgin, likely influenced by Duccio’s assumed Master, Cimabue’s wall paintings in the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi. Although the Marian tradition was at its height in the Middle Ages, Cimabue’s influence on Duccio is inescapable.

Whatever the reasons for its commission, this grand glass artwork, one of the oldest in the cathedral, remains one of the least known of Duccio’s masterpieces. The original is now housed in the Duomo museum, at eye level so that visitors can appreciate its complexity and luminous beauty. A copy, mounted in the original space, now floods the church with color.

For centuries, following his cartoons for the rose window, the most popular of devotional images, the Virgin and Child, was central to Duccio’s art. With what has become known as the Stoclet Madonna, Duccio moved from the monumental Rucellai Madonna and the Duomo’s rose window to a single panel of 11 by 8 inches.

4. The Stoclet Madonna – A Masterpiece of Private Devotion

Although the Stoclet Madonna cannot be precisely dated, it is believed to have been painted following Duccio’s completion of Siena’s rose window but before his celebrated masterpiece, Maestà. Duccio has returned to the Madonna with this diminutive panel, not thought to belong to a larger cycle. This Madonna, though, shows an incredible stylistic development by the artist when compared with the angular delineation of the Crevole Madonna, painted approximately a decade earlier. Gone are the graphic gold lines accentuating the Virgin’s robes. In their place, the fabric flows, a feature emphasized by the way Christ gently moves his Mother’s veil aside. There is softness and humanity in the Virgin’s gaze as she looks upon her Child, not the flat, emotionless stare of the Byzantine-influenced Crevole Madonna.

A feature easily missed in this work is the painted parapet in the foreground. This device is evidence of Duccio’s growing interest in and skill at depicting spatial depth in his work. If ever Duccio’s reputation as an innovator in Italian painting was in doubt, this tiny panel with its inches-deep parapet has the power to silence the cynics. Duccio’s often overlooked advances were the forerunners of Brunelleschi and Alberti’s theories of perspective in art.

5. Maesta: Duccio’s Masterpiece

“On the day on which it was carried to the Duomo, the shops were locked up and the Bishop ordered a great and devout company of priests and brothers with a solemn procession, accompanied by the Signori of the Nine and all the officials of the Commune, and all the populace and all the most worthy were in order next to the said panel with lights lit in their hands, and then behind were women and children with much devotion; and they accompanied it right to the Duomo making procession around the Campo, as was the custom, sounding all the bells in glory out of devotion for such a noble panel as was this.”

These are the words of an anonymous eyewitness on the day that Duccio’s finest masterpiece, Maestà, arrived at the Duomo in Siena. This was a big day for Duccio and his majestic polyptych. It was the first altarpiece to have paintings on both sides: the front for the benefit of the congregation and the rear for the private devotions of the clergy. The front panels depict the Madonna and Child along with a voluminous array of saints and angels. The front predella details the childhood of Christ, beginning with the Annunciation scene.

The reverse of this enormous altarpiece consisted of 43 small panel paintings of the life of Christ and the life of the Virgin. A further set of paintings showing individual saints is situated on the Gothic-style arches at the top of the piece. The sheer number of elements in the Maestà dictated that its overall dimensions were impressive. At over 6 feet 7 inches high and almost 16 feet 5 inches wide, it dominated the altar of the Duomo.

Duccio’s trademark Italo-Byzantine style, with its traditional gold and ultramarine color scheme, was evolving. The Maestà shows how the artist was further developing the naturalistic, realistic style he had introduced in earlier works. The fabric of the clothes depicted and the facial expressions on his cast of characters are softer and exquisitely detailed, even in the smaller rear predella panels, unseen by most people. Duccio grasped the importance and status of the altarpiece in Siena’s Duomo, and his work reflects his deep respect for the location and subject matter.

Duccio: A Master in the Shadow of His Pupils

Few artists’ reputations or works last forever, and it is a matter of some import that so many of Duccio’s more impressive artworks survive to this day. Individual panels, such as the Rucellai and Crevole Madonnas, have remained mainly unscathed over the centuries. Maestà, however, suffered the indignity of dismemberment in 1771, having remained in its original home, Siena’s Duomo, since 1311. With the altarpiece sawn up, irreparably damaged, and elements of it sold off around the world, it is a miracle that so much of it remained. In the mid-20th century, a major reconstruction and restoration took place, giving us the work we see today in the Duomo Museum in Siena.

Duccio’s masterpiece and indeed all of his extant works illustrate the scale of his influence on Italian Renaissance painting in later centuries. His alleged pupil, Giotto, may have risen to greater fame than his master, but he stands on the shoulders of Duccio. Perhaps Duccio’s secret was to have been born in the right place; at the crossroads of Western and Eastern trade, Siena. Influences from Byzantium flooded into the city in addition to the more local styles of Florence and France’s Gothic. We may never fully appreciate the extent to which his progressive attitudes towards naturalism and realism in painting influenced Italian art. Duccio di Buoninsegna is quite possibly the most extraordinary artistic genius that you never heard of.

The mysterious painter Giorgio de Chirico constructed his own nonexistent cities in the middle of nowhere based on his childhood memories, dreams, and experiences. His paintings were intriguing and slightly disturbing, with sunlit squares and deserted streets evoking strange anxiety and terror. He was one of the founding fathers of Italian modernism yet hated modern art with passion, looking for inspiration in the works of the Old Masters. Read on to familiarize yourself with the most important works by Giorgio de Chirico.

1. The Child’s Brain: The Influential Work of Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico was born in 1888 in Greece into a family of Italians of Greek origins. His parents were hereditary nobility, and the artist proudly admitted that his father, Sicilian baron Evariste de Chirico, was the only sibling in his family who expressed the desire to work in his life. De Chirico’s father passed away when the artist was only seventeen, but he remained a lasting and recognizable figure in his mature works. According to de Chirico’s memoirs and the recollections of family friends, the future artist admired his father, yet their relationship was never as close as he wished it to be. He craved affection, which his father, an educated and intelligent man raised in an upper-class environment, was unable to express.

The Child’s Brain lingers between a childhood memory and a Freudian nightmare. The father is present yet passive, with his eyes closed. His nude torso and the position of a book on a table in front of him suggest possible sexual connotations of the scene, possibly accidentally witnessed by the artist in his early years. Like many artists of his time, de Chirico read Sigmund Freud and reflected upon his theories of childhood and sexuality.

Apart from the significance of the father figure to the artist, the painting had a remarkable life of its own. Soon after its completion, the future leader of the Surrealists, Andre Breton, saw it from the bus window and was so impressed that he jumped off at the next stop to buy it immediately. Despite de Chirico’s later scorn for modern art, Breton’s encounter with his work helped establish Surrealism as we know it.

2. Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure)

Trains and railway stations were among the most popular motifs used by de Chirico in his works. Like the paternal figure with a recognizable mustache, they occurred from the artist’s family history. His father was a railroad engineer who worked on railway construction in Greece. His projects were meant to reorganize and reconstruct the vast and empty spaces of Thessaly province. In a similar manner, Giorgio de Chirico reorganized his imaginary spaces. To him, engineering was the method of perceiving and studying deep space. Apart from the philosophical perspective, drafts and instruments from his father’s desk have certainly affected de Chirico’s technical skill and inclination.

A railway station represents a liminal space—the point of transition and transformation. Unlike other spaces occupied by humans, stations, and airports are designed not to be inhabited or interacted with in any productive manner but only to be left behind for a more promising, desirable, or important location. This status grants liminal spaces an uncanny feeling of impermanence and blurred identity. De Chirico reinforces these feelings by leaving these spaces empty. Designed to contain moving and transforming human beings, empty railway stations evoke anxiety and identity crises caused by the inability to define one’s state of existence.

3. The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street

Unlike most other paintings by de Chirico, The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street contains a surprisingly dynamic and lively element: a small dark figure of a little girl running with her hoop. Some art experts believe that de Chirico borrowed the figure from another iconic pointillist painting by Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Most likely, de Chirico recognized the hallucinatory qualities of Seurat’s technique. Images created by thousands of small primary-colored dots seemed to move on their own, nauseating the viewer.

However, de Chirico’s running girl could not for sure be categorized as a living being. In the contrasting deserted cityscape, the figure seemed to be nothing but a deceptive shadow, luring the unsuspecting viewer into a trap. The shadow moves from one dark corner to another, as if afraid to be captured and dissolved by light. The menacing presence of something yet unsees is intensified by another silhouette. An immobile tall figure hides behind the corner, casting a dark shadow on a sunlit piazza.

Yet, despite allegedly borrowing the figure from one of the most significant paintings in the history of Modern art, de Chirico despised modernism with his entire heart. He even called it one of the two most disastrous aspects of contemporary civilization, rivaled only by Nazist ideology. In his art and studies, de Chirico relied mostly on the works of the Italian Old Masters and their centuries-long traditions. In his later years, he even attempted to destroy most of his early paintings, which were much more experimental than those of his mature period. He even confronted art historians and rejected the attribution of some paintings. Fortunately, Giorgio de Chirico did not succeed, with enough of his old works still preserved in museums and private collections.

De Chirico’s scorn for modern art was personal. His early works, presented at the time when Cubism and early abstraction dominated the scene, were often dismissed as ‘decorative’ by pro-avant-garde critics. Over the years, he distanced himself from the rest of the Modernists, constructing the myth of the misunderstood and isolated painter.

Ironically, despite this intense hatred, it was de Chirico who played the decisive role in forming one of the two most important movements in the history of Italian modernism—the Metaphysical painting. The second crucial movement was Futurism, which soon cross-contaminated with de Chirico’s theory. One of the most influential futurists of his era, Carlo Carra, briefly worked with de Chirico in 1917 before moving to more archaic forms of painting inspired by Giotto.

4.  The Disquieting Muses

This Metaphysical painting focused on representing the unseen and unreal while using familiar objects and classical architecture. There were no fantastic creatures, strange forms, or fairytale actions involved. The surreal effect of deceit was created by elements that would not raise any suspicion in any other setting. Deserted spaces and contrasting light question the purpose and appropriateness of these objects and blur the line between the animate and the inanimate. The mannequins, depicted in one of the many versions of the famous Disquieting Muses painting, evoke terror because of the blurred distinction between life and death. The painting later inspired the famous poet Sylvia Plath to write a poem with the same name.

Relying on Italian architecture and memories of his Greek childhood, de Chirico found another inspiration in German philosophy. The keys to his oeuvre can be found in the writings of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. In his writings, Nietzsche often suggested a hidden meaning behind everyday objects, an unseen life underneath the existing reality. Apart from sharing ideas, the philosopher and the artist had one more thing in common: both found physical reflections of their concepts in the Italian city of Turin. There, Nietzsche spent his final years calling it the only suitable place for him. Giorgio de Chirico found his dramatic contrast of light and shadow created by the arches and covered walkways of Turin.

5. Giorgio de Chirico’s Self-Portrait

Self-portrature was particularly important for de Chirico, especially in his 1920s period. Then, he started to doubt his previous artistic beliefs and connections and began further distancing himself from other artists. This self-portrait remains a perfect illustration of the company in which de Chirico wanted to see himself: the angle and pose of his portrait were copied directly from sixteenth-century paintings. Next to it is a painted sculptural bust of the artist in profile—an homage to the art of Classical Antiquity.

At that time, de Chirico adopted not only compositional but also technical methods of the old masters. Apart from his usual oil paint, he began to use tempera—an egg-based medium widely employed by painters before the 1500s. Tempera dried quickly and did not allow for mixing colors, so artists had to paint gradients with small strokes of unmixed colors. Starting from the 1920s and until his death in 1978, Giorgio de Chirico saw his mission in reviving the principles of traditional techniques and iconography. Still, his early period of work remains his most famous and influential.

Gesamtkunstwerk is an ancient Greek concept with a 19th-century German name, which boomed across Europe and beyond in the early 20th century. The Gesamtkunstwerk is indelibly associated with the German opera composer Richard Wagner, although he did not invent the term and only used it a few times. By the time modernism hit its peak, artists of all kinds were fascinated by the Gesamtkunstwerk, a total synthesis of all art forms into one unified work.

Who Invented the Gesamtkunstwerk?

The term Gesamtkunstwerk came into use long after the first examples appeared, some 2,000 years, in fact. It is thought to have first appeared in print in 1827 in a philosophical treatise by Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff titled Aesthetics, or Doctrine of Worldview and Art. This was at the height of the Romantic period when artists and philosophers were reconceptualizing the arts in their relationship to the self, divinity, and the universe.

Many Romantics turned to Ancient Greece as a model for the arts and their place in the world. When the composer Richard Wagner took up the term Gesamtkunstwerk in 1849, he had his eye on Greek tragedy as the apex of artistic achievement.

Why Greek tragedy? The works of dramatists such as Aeschylus and Sophocles were (as many translators render the “Gesamt” part of the German compound word) ‘total.’ They involved poetry, music, and dance. They were also presented in amphitheaters, which brought audiences together in a ritualistic celebration of the arts, not conceived of separately but experienced simultaneously.

Trahndorff had invoked the Gesamtkunstwerk, with its connotation of a unified, exalted experience, to argue for the importance of aesthetics as a conduit to faith in an increasingly rational world. For Wagner, this Ancient Greek ideal needed reviving because, over the centuries, the arts had been separated and—even worse—subjected to commercialism.

The Romantic period saw several figures strive to bring the arts together, whether in theory or practice. Philosophers such as the Schlegel brothers, Ludwig Tieck, and Novalis used ‘poetry’ as a blanket term for the spirit animating all art. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s opera Undine (1816), which vividly brought to life a Romantic folk tale, was praised by fellow composer Carl Maria von Weber in terms which would later sound very much like the Gesamtkunstwerk: “an art work complete in itself, in which partial contributions of the related and collaborating arts blend together, disappear, and, in disappearing, somehow form a new world.”

Richard Wagner’s Theory of Gesamtkunstwerk

Richard Wagner used the term Gesamtkunstwerk in two essays published in 1849, Art and Revolution and The Art-Work of the Future. The concept was not the only subject covered by these verbose essays, but it was one that became inextricably associated with the composer.

In the first essay, Wagner celebrates ancient Greece as the last period in human history when art was a free and authentic expression of the race which made it (the idea of art as expressive of a race is another of Wagner’s best-known theories and one which endeared him to the Nazis).

Wagner argues that in ancient Greece, people had unfettered access to beauty, and all of their senses were thrilled in ceremonies that fused the arts of Dance, Tone, and Poetry, as he calls them. Now, in the 19th century, art is in a state of “civilized barbarianism.” It serves industry, commercialism, and greed—things he saw embodied, as it happened, in the contemporary opera world.

In The Art-Work of the Future, Wagner looked ahead to a kind of art that would revive the Greek principle of unity. In the artwork of the future, there would be no second-rate lyrics accompanying great music just for the sake of it. There would be no grand tragedies whose impact was negated by being staged in shoddy or stuffy theaters. Every aspect of the experience of art would be considered, and each element would complement the other.

It mattered little that Wagner only used the word Gesamtkunstwerk a handful of times in these essays and then not at all afterward, seemingly growing ambivalent toward it (Ross 2020, p. 13). In the second half of the 19th century, as he slowly became known, then notorious, then ubiquitous, he seemed to be enacting the Gesamtkunstwerk again and again.

When Wagner published the 1849 essays, he was beginning to taste success with works such as The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser, but still struggling to get his operas staged. It was only later that he wrote the works that made his name, each one taking him closer to achieving the Gesamtkunstwerk: Tristan and Isolde (1865), the Ring cycle (premiered in full 1876), and Parsifal (1882).

The latter two music dramas (a term usually used instead of ‘opera’ for Wagner’s productions) were premiered at a location that might also be considered one of Wagner’s great Gesamtkunstwerken: the Bayreuth Festival theater.

This purpose-built venue was dedicated, like a consecrated religious building, to the sole performance of Wagner’s works. For many years, it was forbidden to perform Parsifal outside Bayreuth. This is because the building itself, with its egalitarian fan-shaped seating, invisible orchestra pit, and double proscenium, was built in conjunction with Wagner’s works, designed to fully immerse audiences in every facet of the experience.

The Gesamtkunstwerk in the 19th Century

Although Wagner had used the term Gesamtkunstwerk only a few times, it became representative of his work and ideas, as Wagnerism—a craze for all things relating to the composer’s music dramas, their characters, settings, plots, and forms—spread in the second half of the 19th century. As Wagnerism blossomed, the meaning of its central concepts expanded, with each of its proponents finding something new in it.

In architecture, the Gesamtkunstwerk influenced a movement toward making every aspect of a building beautiful. Art Nouveau designers in Belgium and France looked to Wagner’s comprehensive vision to inspire their efforts to make entire cities aesthetically pleasing. Expert artists from all fields—sculpture, metalwork, stained glass, carpentry, textiles, lighting—collaborated in these efforts.

The Arts and Crafts movement in Britain operated on the same principle. The maxim “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” attributed to William Morris, captures the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk: everyday life can be geared towards an experience of all the arts blended together in harmony.

Aestheticism, a related movement whose spokespeople included Oscar Wilde, similarly promoted the role of art in everyday life and the vital importance of satisfying our aesthetic needs by living in beautiful surroundings and engaging with all of the arts.

Disciples of Aestheticism in the 1870s and 1880s were profoundly influenced by French artists of the previous few decades, many of them fervent Wagnerians who meditated on the possibilities of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Perhaps most influential was the poet Charles Baudelaire, whose experience of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 1861 produced exactly the kind of multi-sensory immersion, overwhelming to the point of exhaustion, that the composer had hoped to achieve.

According to Baudelaire’s essay about this experience, Wagner’s music revealed to him that “true music evokes analogous ideas in different brains,” reflecting the “complex and indivisible totality” of the world (Ross 2020, p. 81). By “true music,” Baudelaire means an experience in which all the arts are synthesized or correspond. The latter was a key term in Baudelaire’s own work, which repeatedly plays on synesthesia, or the correspondence of sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch (see his poem ‘Correspondances’ in Les Fleurs du mal).

Several 19th-century movements, whether in poetry, painting, or music, took up the idea that one art might imitate another and thereby move closer to the total experience Wagner had written about. Symbolist poetry, painting, and theater aimed toward an essential aesthetic experience in which the limitations of one artistic form or another were unimportant.

From the Impressionists to the Parnassians to the Aesthetes, many artists tried to achieve musical effects. The art critic and theorist Walter Pater proposed: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” Pater’s idea was not explicitly Wagnerian (although he nodded to a shared basis in German aesthetics by terming this aspiration Anders-streben, or “other-striving”). Still, the Gesamtkunstwerk had by now exceeded its most famous theorist, filtering into all areas of intellectual and artistic culture.

Modernist Literature and the Gesamtkunstwerk

By the first half of the 20th century, examples of Gesamtkunstwerk were being identified across the arts, not only the operatic or theatrical stage where it had begun. Like Wagnerism, modernism took many forms and is difficult to define, but correspondence between the arts was a key feature.

In literature, writers took inspiration from the visual arts and music to create arresting novels, poetry, and plays that reconfigured the experience of language itself: figures like W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce with his monumental Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf in her stream-of-consciousness novel. Woolf’s The Waves, or Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (which continues to baffle readers), created rhythmic effects, moving language beyond its ordinary usage of simply communicating meaning.

The Gesamtkunstwerk Throughout the 20th Century

Examples of the modernist Gesamtkunstwerk on stage were similarly baffling and shocking to audiences. Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring famously caused a sensation on its premiere in 1913, usually attributed to the new and unusual sound of its music. But the ballet was equally noteworthy for its correspondence of the arts, with meticulous care over the costuming, choreography, and stage design.

Companies such as Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and individual composers, playwrights, and impresarios promoted collaboration between artists of all kinds to ensure that every aspect of the theatrical experience was artistically perfect.

Wilde even hoped to infuse theaters with a variety of scents during performances of his controversial production, Salome (1893), corresponding to emotions in the play—an aspiration harking back to Greek plays. However, logistical limitations prevented him from achieving his plan.

Another Ballets Russes production brought together innovative artists in all forms. Parade (1917) was written by Jean Cocteau, set to music by Erik Satie, and featured costumes and sets designed by Pablo Picasso. Although it confused many spectators and, therefore, did not quite achieve the Gesamtkunstwerk aim of taking its audience to a higher sphere, Parade was conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk. Indeed, it was a production in which all the arts worked together, unfettered by their formal differences, striving to attain unity and transforming elements of ordinary life into art—using everyday settings and making music with ‘found’ objects such as a typewriter and milk bottles.

Parade led to the coining of the term Surrealism. An early 20th-century movement, Surrealism, along with near-contemporary movements such as Bauhaus and Dada, drew on the Gesamtkunstwerk in its commitment to blending art forms and seeking to make life itself an artistic experience. Walter Gropius‘s 1919 Bauhaus manifesto echoed Wagner’s language 70 years previously, lamenting how “the arts exist in isolation” and calling for “the new structure of the future,” requiring the “conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen” (Ross 2020, p. 460).

Although Dada’s anti-art stance might seem to make it the polar opposite of Wagner’s glorification of the perfected aesthetic experience in the Gesamtkunstwerk, the movement did not entirely discard the concept. Dada artists like Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray treated all kinds of objects as material for art. They emphasized the continuous, performative nature of artistic experience, leading to encounters with art that simultaneously played on all the senses.

The Gesamtkunstwerk Now

Critic Alex Ross writes that the definition of the Gesamtkunstwerk mutated in the 20th century beyond what Wagner (or, for that matter, its original creator, Trahndorff) had meant because the term became a way of projecting 20th-century ideas (generated by 20th-century technologies) back onto 19th-century origins.

By the early 1900s, artists could look to the burgeoning world of the cinema as the epitome of the Gesamtkunstwerk: sound and vision synthesized in an experience so overawing that early audiences—so the story goes—fled in fear when the screen showed a train approaching.

Cinema was recognized early on as a medium in which what Wagner called the sister arts could exist in harmony. Music is so ubiquitous in a film that we find it noteworthy if it deliberately omits it and plays with silence instead. Film composers work with directors and writers to ensure that the music corresponds with the images, assisting with the narrative, and deepening our understanding of a character’s psychology (many film scores use Wagner’s technique of the leitmotif, in which a musical phrase is paired with a particular character or idea), and playing on our very emotions.

But the modern Gesamtkunstwerk is not limited to the cinema. Artists in all media continue to explore how one art can imitate another to expand the boundaries of art, make life itself an aesthetic experience, and stage sacralized ceremonies in which the audience hopes to achieve some kind of transcendence.

The vast scale of concerts in the pop and rock music worlds is a good example. Audiences can now expect a sensory onslaught, not just hearing music but witnessing curated choreography, costuming, and cinematic visuals on screens behind the artist. These artists may not always be conscious of it, but their high-concept tours are perpetuating and expanding the possibilities of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

Bibliography

Ross, A. (2020). Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. 4th Estate.

When referring to alternative music, the connotation changes depending on the context, as this article sets out to explain. For example, most rock music from the 1990s and 2000s is described as “alternative” nowadays, but this differs vastly from the original connotation attached to alternative music. Pinning down a single, authoritative definition of alternative music is nearly impossible. This article will explore alternative music through various bands that were instrumental in its rise and fall, as well as the aftermath of the “great alternative music schism” when Nirvana “sold out” and went commercial.

Defining the “Alternative” in Alternative Music

So, let us begin with a general definition: alternative music is a catch-all, umbrella term for music that rose from the post-punk movement in the mid-1980s. It extends to terms like “new music” and “post-modern.” There is an underground status attached to alternative music—artists favored working with independent record labels rather than commercial, mainstream labels. There is also a do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos that rose to prominence and found a footing in the punk movement, combined with the desire to stay underground and shun commercialism and commercial success.

Artistic authenticity is also at the heart of alternative music—an ideal alternative music espoused before a split occurred when Nirvana reached commercial success with their album Nevermind. Nirvana’s breakthrough into and onto commercial radio stations established alternative (rock) music as a commodity that could be commercialized.

The line becomes blurred when we compare the American idea of alternative to that of the British across the pond. In British English, alternative music is the preferred term, but confusion arises because the lines become blurred. After all, hip-hop and electronic music are included in the British idea of alternative music. In the USA, “alternative rock” is the preferred term. Shall we make matters slightly more confusing? In the UK, “indie” (stemming from independent) is sometimes used when referring to alternative rock… but in general, indie refers to artists who sign with independent record labels.

In the US, “underground” music refers to little-known artists who sometimes sign with independent labels, music you only find through word-of-mouth. For this article, alternative music, alternative rock, and underground music will refer to alternative rock in the American sense of the word.

Alternative Rock: A Decade-by-Decade Overview

Before Nirvana’s commercial breakthrough in the early 1990s, alternative rock was known by a variety of terms. In the United States, “college rock” was often used in the 1980s because of its link with college radio stations appealing to the tastes of college students. Across the pond, “indie” was used. Sometimes, “indie rock” is used to refer to alternative rock from the 1980s. But scholars rather reserve the term for independent artists who upheld the underground ideologies associated with its punk roots while remaining underground.

In the United States, alternative rock had its genesis in the late 1960s. Bands like Iggy and the Stooges, MC5, Silver Apples, and Velvet Underground set the stage for the movement. Each offered a distinct sound that broke away from the mainstream mold. While the term would only emerge nearly two decades later, the foundations were in place.

Through artists like Andy Warhol and his Factory, bands like Velvet Underground had the financial backing they needed to pursue their art to their heart’s content.

1960s: Proto-Punk

Proto-punk was never a cohesive movement and the term is applied retrospectively today. Punk emerged around 1975/6 but the proto-punk bands all seem unrelated when you compare their sound palettes. However, some elements tie these bands together—these bands are fully aware of their outsider status and love thumbing their nose. There is the conscious challenge of mainstream rock conventions and the utopianism the hippies sought out. Overall, the proto-punk sound was stripped-down, unpolished, and sometimes even primitive. However, these artists were venting, and it was deeply personal. They sought to expose society’s grimy underbelly and often chose taboo subjects and shone a spotlight on them.

What made these bands “alternative” when compared to their contemporaries? Well, someone had to pick up the torch from the Beat Generation. The aftermath of World War II was still present in society, and conservativism was the name of the game. Now imagine a band of writers and their followers talking openly about homosexuality, sexual liberation, and women’s rights. The arts were shifting out of the claws of modernism into the pluralism of postmodernism.

The Velvet Underground (and Nico) (Active: 1964-1973)

The Velvet Underground was revolutionary in a few ways: they borrowed elements from rock ‘n’ roll, the avant-garde scene (e.g. collaborating with John Cage and La Monte Young), and wrote lyrics that did not shy away from being sexually explicit or hinting at sexual acts (e.g., Venus in Furs). Alternative guitar tunings leading to drones are another feature from their early days. Combining their music with lyrics reminiscent of post-beat realism set them apart from their contemporaries.

The Stooges (Active: 1967–1971, 1972–1974, and Reunited 2003–2016)

While the Velvet Underground were the intellectual outsiders, the Stooges went in the opposite direction.

“The Stooges revealed the underside of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, showing all the grime beneath the myth. … Taking their cue from the over-amplified pounding of British blues, the primal raunch of American garage rock, and the psychedelic rock (as well as the audience-baiting) of the Doors, the Stooges were raw, immediate, and vulgar. Iggy Pop became notorious for performing smeared in blood or peanut butter and diving into the audience.” (Stephen Thomas Erlewine, 2005).

The band had a devoted core audience, but Iggy Pop’s on-stage antics and the band’s shock tactics did not sit well with the broader audience. Nevertheless, a talent scout from Elektra Records signed them in Detroit when they went to see MC5 in concert.

Sometimes infamy also leads to opportunities. In 1973, the band released their album Raw Power. David Bowie stepped in to save the band and produced the album, but there were various technical problems and the result was a strange, thin sound. Although Stooges purists blame Bowie for the sound, it laid the foundation for the punk revolution. With the thin audio and fierce attack on the ear, punk was one step closer to becoming a reality two years later.

MC5 (Active: 1963-1973, Reunion Tours in 1992 and 2022)

MC5, or Motor City 5, where Detroit is also known as Motor City, are contemporaries of the Stooges. MC5 played a significant role in the development of punk rock. Their music was loud and intense, and their politics, revolutionary. They believed in the unholy trinity of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll with their performances taking an energetic and defiant stab at the hippies’ counter-culture ideals of love and peace. Despite their short-lived and controversial existence, MC5 paved the way for numerous music genres like hard rock, punk, and other heavy kinds of music.

Silver Apples (Active: 1967-1970, 1995)

The Silver Apples are the most enigmatic and otherworldly of the alternative music scene’s ancestors. Their music adopted a wide range of pulsing rhythms, synthesizer-generated melodies, and drones and hums. Their minimalist and electronic approach to music never achieved commercial success but inspired generations of musicians after them.

1970s: Punk Enters the Scene

Politically, the 1970s was the age of Thatcherism, the Watergate Scandal, the defeat in Vietnam, and the Anti-Apartheid Movement. The common person became disillusioned with their politicians, economic crises abounded, and there was a growing spirit of discontent among the youth worldwide. The time was ripe for movements like punk to emerge and give a voice to the disenfranchised masses.

New York Dolls (Active: 1972-1976)

During the early 1970s, a bona fide punk rock scene was emerging in New York City. One of the pioneering, yet short-lived bands of the era was the New York Dolls. The band was the brainchild of Malcolm MacLaren, a London clothier. Their amateurish approach to performing, combined with a glam look, laid the foundations for punk and glam rock.

Often, they would perform in high heels, spandex, sports make-up, and lipstick—perhaps the antithesis of the punk movement’s favor of a rough street look—but a look that set them apart. Although the band only released two albums, they are considered the pioneers of the punk rock movement.

The Ramones (Active: 1974-1996)

The Ramones played simple music (a maximum of four chords in a song), and fast (most songs last around two-and-a-half minutes) with a raw edge and energetic fun. They appealed to audiences because they only performed their material and because of their amateurish musical abilities. The Ramones did not have the musical training to learn other people’s music, so they had a make-do attitude which appealed to punkers. They did not follow the narcissistic tendencies of singer/songwriters and other types of confessional music like other rock bands. In 1976, while touring in England, the Ramones helped to establish the British punk scene.

Sex Pistols (Active: 1975–1978, Brief Revivals: 1996, 2002-2003, 2007-2008, and 2024–Present)

Of all the bands thus far, the Sex Pistols may be the most controversial and short-lived band, but their impact still echoes today. Some call the band a farce and marketing gimmick by Malcolm MacLaren (who briefly managed the New York Dolls between 1972 and 1976) who used them to promote his London clothing store, Sex, which sold leather, and S&M fashions. Thus, the name “Sex Pistols” was used to advertise MacLaren’s store and served his nihilistic ideas.

Their anti-authority stance combined with their defiant spirit appealed to the discontent young people across the UK felt: the hypocrisy within the British establishment, unemployment was around one million people, and the inflation rate of 18 percent in 1975. Combine this with school leavers who had dim prospects, and many went on welfare (“the dole”). The overall mood in the UK was boredom, cynicism, and despair.

One month after performing at London’s 100 Club at the Punk Rock Festival, organized by Malcolm MacLaren, they signed their first record deal with EMI in October 1976. They received an advance of £50,000 and released Anarchy in the UK. It seemed like the band was on a path of destruction and controversy from the start. Consider this interview on nationwide television on the state-owned BBC program Today:

John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten): You dirty bastard.

Grundy (host): Go on, again.

Lydon: You dirty f**ker!

Grundy: What a clever boy. 

Lydon: You f**king rotter! 

(Watch the full interview here.)

The furor that followed catapulted the Sex Pistols to national notoriety. But, in January 1977, EMI struck the band off their artist roster, and they lost their advance. In March 1977, A&M Records signed the band for £50,000, and a week later they also fired the band. Firing the Sex Pistols cost the record company a further £25,000 as a buyout fee. Virgin Records signed the band in May, and they released their first single, God Save The Queen. Furthermore, the single coincided (unintendedly) with Queen Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee. Although the BBC refused to play the song on any of its public stations and many stores refused to sell the record, it quickly became the number-one hit in the UK, selling over 200,000 copies.

Some say the Sex Pistols were one man’s rebellious act to promote his endeavors, others think they were a complete farce. There is another camp that regards them as a breath of fresh air in the music industry. Whichever camp you belong to, the Sex Pistols had a lasting impact on the future of alternative and mainstream rock for decades to come.

1980s: Golden Age of Alternative

The 1980s was a time of fast change around the world. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic occurred, and the Chornobyl disaster happened. At the same time, various subcultures emerged: the goths, skinheads, and punks, to name a few. In the US, the political landscape was still conservative and Republican—fertile ground for the alternative music scene to follow its mind and go in the opposite direction.

On the music front, the slump of the 1970s came to an end. The introduction of the compact disc (CD), MTV, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller LP helped the music industry to recover and move along with the times. Alternative music was more than just music, it was about taking control over what you listened to and thumbing your nose at the big, commercial corporations who dictated the public’s tastes.

Alternative bands preferred a DIY approach with a garage band mindset, and they incorporated various elements from folk rock, hard rock, psychedelic music, and of course, punk. Important alternative bands from this time included R.E.M., The Pixies, The Feelies, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Replacements, The Violent Femmes, and Sonic Youth.

R.E.M. (Active: 1980-2011)

R.E.M. was formed in Atlanta, Georgia in 1980 and was first known as Twisted Kites. Their debut album was Murmur (1983) and they were hailed as “America’s Hippest Band.” The president of I.R.S. Records signed the band after hearing them perform in New Orleans in 1983. With Murmur they shot to stardom and won Rolling Stone magazine’s Band of the Year, Best New Artist, and Album of the Year awards.

Free Radio Europe became a staple on college radio stations and, combined with their extensive touring in a beat-up van, helped establish a cult-like, although underground, following. As one of the alternative scene’s first bands to reach superstardom, R.E.M. helped to push the genre into the limelight.

Camper Van Beethoven (Active: 1983-1990 and 1999-Present)

Camper Van Beethoven merges ska, folk, punk, and world music. The band’s instant trademarks are violin (played by Jonathan Segel) and their laid-back California style. Camper van Beethoven was formed in Redlands, California in 1983. Their influence on the alternative music scene is undeniable and still resounding today.

Sonic Youth (Active: 1984-1997, 2010-2017)

With their alternate tunings, feedback, and combination of hardcore punk, the aesthetic of New York’s downtown music scene found in the works of Philip Glass, Glenn Branca, and Steve Reich’s Sonic Youth redefined the sonic landscape. Their influence would ripple far beyond their timeframe and elements can even be heard in the 1990s grunge bands like Nirvana.

Their albums EVOL (1986) and Sister (1987) were released on SST, and Daydream Nation, which was released in 1988 on the Enigma label, became important sonic and alternative music artifacts. They achieved some of their alternative tunings—inspired by Glenn Branca—by not only changing the way the guitar strings are tuned but also by jamming screwdrivers and drumsticks between the strings and fretboard.

As time passed, their music took on a more pop-friendly sound, which furthered their reputation among listeners outside the alternative scene. In 1990, they signed with major label Geffen and released ten albums with the label.

1990: The “Great Alternative Music Schism” and Fragmentation

The 1990s signaled the march towards the 21st century and technological developments that would shape the face of the world. Some events shocked the world, like the trial of O.J. Simpson and the passing of Princess Diana. South Africa elected its first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela, and the first babies of Gen Z were born.

Musically, a new type of music emerged, especially in Seattle, namely “grunge.” Nirvana and Pearl Jam pivoted the alternative music scene into the spotlight. Yet, alternative music has become a catch-all term that ranges from experimental music to more accessible pop-rock. Female artists like Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos made significant contributions to the scene and paved the way for later female artists like Avril Lavigne and Billie Eilish.

Towards the new millennium, the alternative genre became fragmented, and subgenres and the term “indie rock” emerged as the replacing descriptor when referring to alternative rock describing the diverse and independent artists expressing themselves through music.

Nirvana (Active: 1987-1994)

Nirvana sent a clear call that the 1980s were over with their album Nevermind. For Generation X, it is the album that encapsulates their being, and Kurt Cobain became their generation’s version of John Lennon of Beatles’ fame.

Nevermind greatly differed from their first and independent album, Bleach (1989). Their debut album followed the punk rock ethos of staying underground, yet it sold 35,000 copies. But the grunge foundations were laid. Nirvana and other grunge musicians followed the punk ethos in music and attitude, many songs use a slow tempo combined with simple chord progressions, start-stop dynamics where a soft passage is suddenly followed by a loud one (like Baroque music’s terraced dynamics), and with lyrics favoring dark themes and delivered in a lamenting tone.

However, when Nirvana signed with Geffen Records and Nevermind hit the shelves many alternative fans believed that Nirvana became sellouts—they abandoned their authenticity and independence. Others felt that the band abandoned their ethical values and turned their backs on the alternative scene’s values of not chasing money and fame. Kurt Cobain sometimes joked about the band becoming sellouts, but also defended their position of pursuing mainstream success.

Alanis Morisette (Active: 1987-Present)

Alanis Morisette is especially known for emotive and candid lyrics combined with her distinctive sound which blends pop and rock influence. Her album, Jagged Little Pill catapulted her to fame in the American market in 1995.

It was unheard of for a female singer to offer her perspective on the themes of heartache and love, especially in the hit single, You Oughta Know. Many of her songs were censored on radio broadcasts due to the explicit references and language. With her evocative mezzo-soprano voice and expressive songwriting, she paved the way for numerous female artists and gave women a voice to express their feelings.

Hans Bellmer was a lesser-known member of the Surrealists who focused on dollmaking and photography. Bellmer’s unsettling, deformed dolls emerged partially as a reaction to the standards of Aryan beauty and health promoted by the Third Reich. However, soon, the dolls turned into a lifelong project that both supported and tormented Bellmer for decades. Read on to learn more about Hans Bellmer, the forgotten dollmaker.

1. Hans Bellmer: Expression Through Opposition

Hans Bellmer, born in 1902 into a rather prosperous middle-class family from present-day Germany, could have enjoyed a comfortable life as an engineer or a civil servant. Instead, from his early years, the dominating force in his life was his opposition to his violent, aggressive, and despotic father. After finding a job in a coal mine (upon his father’s insistence), Hans was soon fired and almost imprisoned for spreading left-wing ideas among other workers. His studies of engineering in Berlin, again forced upon him, were equally unsuccessful—less than a year after enrolling, Bellmer quit and immersed himself into art, exhibiting with German Dadaists and Surrealists. Still, Bellmer was not as impractical as he seemed: soon, he opened a successful advertising agency, designing posters and creating illustrations for major German companies.

It all changed after the Nazis came to power. In 1933, Bellmer shut his agency for good, unwilling to contribute to this government’s wellbeing in any form. Needless to say, his eternal nemesis, the Bellmer family patriarch, turned out to be an ardent Nazi supporter. Around that time, Hans Bellmer started to conceive his lifelong project that would make him one of the most influential artists of his time and a pariah in his country. Horrified by the Nazi propaganda about the perfect Aryan body and ideal beauty, Bellmer invented an opposition to it.

He modeled his ideal from the figure of an adolescent girl in a transitional state between girlhood and womanhood, falling outside of strict categories of age and societal expectations. Some believe the imaginary figure was a product of Bellmer’s obsession with his teenage cousin Ursula—a forbidden relationship that could never be fulfilled. Ursula was either unaware of her role or fully content with it: a few years later, she, a Sorbonne student, brought Hans’ photographs to Andre Breton, introducing him to the Surrealists.

Bellmer’s first doll was a half-assembled carcass with deliberately unfinished body parts. A few years earlier, while visiting one of Berlin’s museums with his Dadaist friends, he found the technique for assembling movable dolls. There, he found articulated wooden dolls from the 16th century, with ball joints allowing for movement and fixation of limbs and torso.

2. Bellmer’s Projects Maturing

Bellmer’s first projects were financed and otherwise supported by his mother and brother, unbeknownst to his oppressive father. Franz, an accomplished engineer, even took part in building them. He designed movable eyes and rotating miniature panoramas inside the dolls’ abdomens. Pressing on one of the doll’s nipples, the viewer would see six scenes demonstrating lace handkerchiefs, tiny boats, or sweets. However, Bellmer soon abandoned the panoramas project to focus on more complex and erotic photographic arrangements of his dolls.

Part of Bellmer’s inspiration came from a short story by Ernst Hoffmann called The Sandman. There, a man falls in love with an automaton, a moving doll he mistakes for a real woman. Realizing his mistake, the romantic hero loses his mind and commits suicide. Similar dramatic tension and fear reveal themselves in the tableaux vivants of Bellmer, with dolls transgressing the boundaries of the animate and inanimate. Bellmer positioned his dolls in enclosed settings of rooms and cabinets, with their joints rearranged and bodies partially assembled. They look both seductive and threatening, representing the deepest desires and the worst nightmares.

3. Femininity

Bellmer’s mother represented all things the father was incapable of expressing: gentleness, understanding, support, and comfort. In fact, adopted femininity became Bellmer’s principal instrument long before he started to work on his dolls. According to the memories of Bellmer’s brother Fritz, Hans sometimes wore dresses and wigs and even signed his letters with female names. Moreover, both Hans and Fritz adopted, as they called it, a girl-like way of behaving around their father, mostly to confuse and destabilize him, avoiding possible attacks.

In 1957, Bellmer met Unica Zurn, a German writer and artist who shocked him with her resemblance to his dream dolls. Bellmer was already a widower with two children but was never truly content with his personal life, haunted by his dreams and doll figures. With Zurn’s enthusiastic consent, he progressed in his art, moving from photographs of dolls to a series of images and montages featuring Zurn’s body, similarly positioned and arranged.

Bellmer’s self-identification with his dolls never went away. Some photographs of his later period include a photomontage of his head inside Zurn’s abdomen as if he was both possessed by her and controlling her from within her body.

4. Modernist Grotesque

Modernist art has a long and detailed history of exploring grotesque bodies and their limits. The works of Egon Schiele, Bellmer’s contemporary, distorted human anatomy almost beyond recognition, and Futurists blended it with heavy industrial machinery. All of them were concerned with the limits of the human body. At what point does the inanimate come alive, and when does a living thing cease its conscious existence?

Bellmer similarly explored the body limits, although in the context of desire and eroticism turning into threatening presences. On the one hand, his dolls were the ultimate creations of the male gaze—they were sexualized bodies devoid of personality. On the other hand, while losing all non-essential parts, they turn from desirable to haunting, possessing a threat to the one who built them for his pleasure. A destructive relationship between a man and his creation is an archetypal story found in many cultures. In 1919, the famous Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka created a life-sized doll of his ex-lover Alma Mahler before ritually decapitating it.

5. Hysteria as an Aesthetic Phenomenon

One of the peculiarities of the Surrealist movement was its exploration of hysteria—an old phenomenon and pseudomedical diagnosis that mostly referred to women. Hysteria was expressed through prolonged mental disturbance, fits of emotional distress, or simply the refusal to comply with the normative rules of feminine behavior. Prior to the development of psychiatry, hysteria was considered a physical disease but was reclassified as mental in the early 20th century. The origins of hysteria, according to some experts of the time, lay either in prolonged stress or in repressed sexual trauma.

Surrealists, namely their ideological leader Andre Breton, considered hysteria an aesthetical rather than a medical phenomenon. Reading medical reports and observing protographs of hysteria patients in epileptic or catatonic fits, they regarded it as the ultimate expression of the unconscious. Repressed desires finding their way out through hysterical episodes for them represented the highest possible state of automatism. Bellmer’s works explore this concept of hysteria as self-expression. His four-legged creatures, devoid of heads or even torsos, express their torments through convulsions, similar to those of a child during a temper tantrum.

6. Body as Text

In his writings explaining the logic behind his creations, Bellmer mentioned a medical case of two teenagers, both diagnosed with hysteria in their puberty. According to their medical files, the girls were convinced they went blind, and yet one insisted she could see objects through her nose and the other through her right hand. Following the idea of the hysterical body displacing and moving its sense organs, Bellmer further developed the idea. What if the human body could move and concentrate its senses in areas unrelated to its immediate sensory organs? And what if sexual pleasure could be experienced by the entire body rather than by its part?

In his writings, Bellmer formulated the concept of a body as an erotic palindrome or an anagram—a phrase or a word with its letters mixed and reassembled to form another or similar idea. Moreover, Bellmer’s constructions were meant to be not only easy to transform but interchangeable. Many photographs showed disassembled dolls with their torsos and hips made from identical details and breasts turning into buttocks.

What Is Hans Bellmer’s Legacy?

Although Bellmer’s creations and story were too unsettling to make him a superstar artist, his influence on the artistic scene was immediate and transformative. After receiving several photographs from Ursula, Andre Breton almost immediately published them in a Surrealist periodical Minotaure. Figures on dolls and mannequins were already popular among Surrealist painters, but Bellmer’s series launched a new wave of obsession. The issue was not only in the dolls themselves but in the way the artist modeled artificial spaces within his photographs.

For the first time in history, surrealist experiments with collage and montage separated photography from reality, allowing it to create its own alternative realms. One of the most prominent exhibits of the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition was The Mannequin Alley—a gallery of life-sized mannequins, each decorated by one of the artists present on the show and inspired by Bellmer’s fetishistic figures.

Bellmer continued to work on his dolls and photographs until 1970. That year, Unica Zurn died by suicide, exhausted by her years-long fight with schizophrenia. Historians and medical professionals still argue whether her collaboration with Bellmer was therapeutic or destructive for her. Bellmer died five years later, succumbing to bladder cancer.

Despite its relative obscurity, Bellmer’s work continued to influence creatives of all kinds. In 1997, fashion designer Alexander McQueen released a collection inspired by Bellmer’s designs. Some garments’ proportions were distorted to fit Belmeer’s monstrous creations, while others featured metal cages as parts of their structures.