Painting the Absolute: Music as a Model for Painting

Vista general

For scholar, collector, and founder of The Phillips Collection, Duncan Phillips, the subject of music was highly meaningful. Music permeates his writings and forms a central tenet in his evolving art historical agenda: the promotion of an experiential and spiritual experience of art. Phillips’s synesthetic ideal and recourse to the example of music were both embedded in the intellectual thought of the time but also unique to his activities as a collector, shaping his understanding of individual artists and their work.

In this lecture, join Jeremy Ney, Senior Director of Phillips Music at The Phillips Collection, to learn about the rich history of association between music and painting, and how the idea of union between the arts was influential to the developments of American modernism and the artistic philosophy of Duncan Phillips. Through an engagement with works from the exhibition, we’ll explore shifting ideas about the nature of music as a model for painting, what it means for an artwork to be ‘musical,’ and how the interplay between the visual and the aural continues to offer something generative to artists working today.