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A Study on the Polyphonic Principles of Mozart Adopted in Paul Klee’s Paintings

  • Journal of History of Modern Art
  • 2021, (50), pp.113-137
  • Publisher : 현대미술사학회
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Art > Arts in general > Art History
  • Received : October 28, 2021
  • Accepted : November 30, 2021
  • Published : December 31, 2021

Chang, Won 1

1부산대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to investigate specific methods of adopting the polyphonic principles of Mozart’s music in making two-dimensional paintings in the works of Paul Klee, a painter during the early twentieth century. Klee absorbed diverse art principles in the flow of abstraction but did not merely imitate or follow them. Instead, he adopted and visualized the highest level of polyphonic structure of music of the eighteenth century to his paintings. Particularly, Klee composed paintings in the manner of musical composers through the polyphonic principles of Mozart, for whom he had a profound affection through his life. Klee’s polyphonic property set forth in deploying the simultaneity of the counterpoint in the fugue form on the flat surface of canvas based on line, color, and tone, which he regarded significant in the composition of painting. Taking inspiration from Mozart’s method of composing multi-thematic music with un-imitative plural themes, like his 41st Symphony “Jupiter” (K.551), Klee composed non-figurative forms or embodied the figures of specific objects with fundamental geometric forms such as circles, squares and triangles as well as simple curving lines. I refer to Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony to explain how Klee acquired various forms with the same motive used in diverse pieces by appropriating and transforming a single motive. Consequently, I argue that Klee achieved a sense of rhythm by forming and visualizing the temporality of music on the two-dimensional space of painting. Klee realized a model of convergent art through seeking and exploring painting with his affection for the world and objects in it.

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