The Music of Painting : Music, Modernism and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to John Cage

Composers and artists have always borrowed from each other. Peter Vergo, for the first time, offers an in-depth study of how and why, in the modernist era, music and painting became intertwined. Artist-composer relationships examined include Debussy's interest in Whistler, Tuner, and Monet, Franz Liszt's fascination with Raphael and Michelangelo, Kandinsky with Schoenberg and Paul Klee's influence from Polyphonic music. How artists attempted to translate musical rhythms, and structures into painting and how musicians developed visual themes, all within the backdrop to modernism, as time of huge change in freedoms, industry, expression, ideological frameworks, and artistic practice.

Peter Vergo is one of Britain's leading experts on modern German and Austrian art. H e was awarded the Golden Order of Merit by the Republic of Austria for his services to Austrian Art. He has curated exhibitions at the Tate (Abstraction: Towards a New Art), and Whitechapel Art Gallery (Emil Nolde). As editor of The New Museology he launched a controversial debate about the role of museums in society. The first of his two books about the relationship between art and music, entitled That Divine Order, was published by Phaidon in 2005.