Art Inspiring Music: Spectacle and Leisure in Paris
Capturing the spirit of Paris at the turn of the nineteenth century, this concert will present chamber music works of Debussy, Ravel, Massenet and Satie. Featured performers include Megan Stout, harp, Vince Varvel, guitar, and Kelly Decker-Daniel, soprano along with the forces of a string quartet. Co-sponsored by the Kemper Art Museum, this performance is being presented in conjunction with the exhibition Spectacle and Leisure in Paris: Degas to Mucha, on view at the Museum February 10 - May 21, 2017.
Andaluza
Sylvie (1886)
Les Anges (1886)
Je Te Veux (1897)
Fleur des Blés (1881).............................................Claude Debussy
Nuit d’Etoiles (1880)
Beau Soir (1891)
Vincent Varvel, guitar
Kelly Daniel-Decker, soprano
Jane Price, violin
Laura Reycraft, viola
At the turn of the nineteenth century France prided itself as a global cultural leader. Republican politics promoted both a booming business climate and an empowering belief in the importance of the arts, and leading artists presented Paris as a unique site of urban modernity through their focus on its spectacles of entertainment and the allure of its particular forms of leisure.
Bringing together a broad selection of prints, posters, photographs, and film, this exhibition offers an overview of the thriving entertainment cultures of Paris in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The art of Pierre Bonnard, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso, and others addresses the pulsating life of the boulevards, the speed of the racetrack, and the performance worlds of the café-concert, ballet, opera, and the theater, both classical and popular. These diverse themes inspired traditional as well as innovative mediums: fine art prints by Édouard Vuillard and Degas are rivaled, for example, by the rapid development of the popular commercial poster in the hands of Jules Chéret, Alphonse Mucha, and Toulouse-Lautrec, whose bold designs promoted the celebrity status of such figures as Jane Avril, Sarah Bernhardt, and Loïe Fuller. This exhibition thus also reveals the intersection of the visual arts with public life in Paris during this creative and vibrant time.
The exhibition is curated by Elizabeth C. Childs, Etta and Mark Steinberg Professor of Art History and chair of the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences.
Image credit
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901), May Milton, 1895. Color lithograph, Ed. 100, 31 1/2 x 24 5/8". Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. Gift of John Frank Lesser, 2008.