Eye Music: Kandinsky, Klee and all that Jazz

Catalogue produced for the exhibition Eye-Music: Kandinsky, Klee and all that Jazz at Pallant House Gallery from 30 June to 16 September 2007. Read more about the exhibition.

Searching for a new visual language at the beginning of the twentieth century, many artists were inspired by musical forms and ideas in their early experiments in abstract art. This book explores the results of these investigations from some of the pre-eminent names of Modern art including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, František Kupka, Piet Mondrian, Eduardo Paolozzi and British artists Alan Davie and John Tunnard.

For many artists, music, the paradigm of non-figurative art, became a model for experiments with abstraction; where colours became tones and visual equivalents were found for rhythm and time. Concurrently, composers also pushed the limits of their discipline and found new means of expression beyond traditional and accepted notions of harmony. The boundaries between art forms became increasingly blurred as new types of performance developed and artists explored the possibilities of synaesthetic experience. And the arrival of jazz shocked both disciplines into creating responses to its syncopated beats and vital sensuality.

This book accompanies the exhibition of the same name at Pallant House Gallery and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. It includes three specially commissioned essays and fully illustrated catalogue entries for all the exhibits from private and public collections in Britain and Europe.

This title is now out of print.