>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Anne McLean: Good evening.
I'm Anne McLean from the
Library's Concert Office.
Tonight we welcome John Szwed
for a lecture called
"Painting Jazz".
We are very fortunate
to have Mr. Szwed
at the Library this spring.
He's in residence with
us now as a Library
of Congress jazz scholar through
the generous support of the Reva
and David Logan Foundation,
which is also underwriting
tonight's concert
by Steve Coleman
and Five Elements.
This week in the Music
Division we've had the pleasure
of sharing with him some of
our remarkable jazz treasures
from the collections here.
Author, journalist, and
critic, John Szwed is admired
for a terrific series of
brilliantly perceptive books,
to date eighteen,
including acclaimed portraits
of major figures in jazz.
Their books both
authoritative and provocative
that exhibit an enviably
comprehensive knowledge
and a very personal
experience and expression.
These include "So What: The life
of Miles Davis", "Alan Lomax:
The Man Who Recorded the
World", and "Billie Holliday:
The Musician and the Myth".
He has a distinguished academic
background, receiving Guggenheim
and Rockefeller Foundation
Awards, and teaching at a number
of prestigious universities.
At Yale, John Szwed was
John M. Musser Professor
of Anthropology,
African American Studies,
and Film Studies for 26 years.
He was also Louis Armstrong
Professor of Jazz Studies
at Columbia University, and
editor in chief of the website
"Jazz Studies Online".
And I wanted to be
sure to mention,
given the Library's
historic connection
with Jelly Roll Morton, that
he won a Grammy for Dr. Jazz,
a wonderful book published
with the landmark
Rounder Records box set,
"Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete
Library of Congress Recordings".
So please welcome John Szwed.
[ Applause ]
>> John Szwed: Thank you,
Anne, for that generous,
over generous introduction
and thank you all for coming.
I don't take that lightly.
What I'd like to do, what I'd
like to accomplish is to first
of all, suggest that
there's a tradition between,
tradition that involves
both jazz and painting
which is much richer and deeper
than is normally thought,
and that there's an affinity
between these two arts
that is not usually
paid attention
to by either of the arts.
And I'm fascinated by the idea
of one art affecting another,
but that's never been a popular
subject for anyone to write
about particularly, a
comparative aesthetics,
whatever you want
to really call it.
How literary people,
for example,
respond to painting
and so forth.
But that's part of my interest.
I'd also like to get
across the idea that,
that I have to keep reminding
myself that the high arts
and the low arts, whatever
they are, or they used
to be quaintly called,
often share far more
than they're differentiated by.
And the other point, I
suppose, would be to simply say
that the enormous effects that
African-American aesthetics,
and painters, and artists had
on modernism itself is enough
to call, you can call it
Afro-modernism if you wanted to.
And that's my plan.
I came on this subject
when I heard people talking
about museums having jazz events
and they were saying something
like, "Well, there's the death
of the jazz if it's
going into a museum".
On the other hand, they would
be saying, "They're just looking
for new demographics".
Well, I knew that was wrong but
I didn't know how wrong it was.
For example, starting in 1940,
the Museum of Modern
Art had concerts
and presentations
on jazz every year.
And as far as I know,
has continued
through all those years.
Going further back, 1936, San
Francisco Museum had courses
in jazz, and lectures.
And several of the leading
authors of books on Picasso
and Duchamp were also
people who wrote about jazz.
I'm thinking of Rudy
Blush [assumed spelling]
and Harriet Jenis
[phonetic spelling].
But it goes further.
Well, let's see how far do
we want to go with this.
Dr. Barnes of the Barnes
Foundation, in 1928,
was lecturing on Picasso
and his relationship
to African-American music.
And I don't think
he was saying --
although who knows because
nothing exists from that.
I don't think he was saying that
one was affecting the other,
but that they were
sharing something.
Maybe he was saying it.
I don't know.
I shouldn't even try to
pass by so quickly on that.
But, you know, I think
it's even further back,
even before the first
record that we call jazz
and that itself is probably
a wrong idea to try to figure
out which one the first one is.
Even before the first jazz
record, at the Armory Show
in New York in 1913, we have
the evidence of Stewart Davis,
the youngest painter
who was in that show.
And in reading what he said
about it shortly afterwards,
I think he was only nineteen or
something like that and he was
in suddenly in Gauguin,
and Picasso, and the like.
I remembered that Nudes
Ascending a Staircase,
which was the thing that got
all the attention that year,
was standing alongside of
"Alexander's Ragtime Band"
which was a monster hit that
was changing dance, dress,
everything else in sight.
It was overpowering music.
Anyway, this is what Stewart
Davis, the young artist,
said later, "My objective
was to make paintings
that could be looked while
listening to a jazz record
at the same time without
incongruity of mood".
And when he saw the Gauguin
and Matisse paintings, he said,
"There was an objective
order of those works
which I felt was
lacking in my own.
It gave me the same
kind of excitement I got
from the numerical precisions
of the Negro piano players
in the Saloons of
Hoboken and Newark.
And I resolved that I
would quite definitely have
to become a -- and he puts in
quotes -- a "modern artist".
And it's among his first
paintings are figurative
paintings of those very
piano players and orchestras
that he talked about, the
very dark tones of gray,
and charcoal, and the like.
It should be, I suppose, no
surprise that jazz, modern art,
modern dance, and motion
pictures should share something
because they all grew
up at the same time.
And you can, without too much
trouble, find your way in.
And for example, the
other day in upstairs
in the wonderful music
collection I find the great
drummer, Max Roach, talking
about how all the
beboppers were going to see
"Fantasia" over and over again.
[ Laughter ]
And he was so detailed
about that.
And why not?
I mean -- .
Oh, he also says, "When
we heard [Inaudible],
we said, 'He's one of us'.
We weren't playing wrong notes".
I loved it.
[ Laughter ]
Anyway, the word jazz at
the time, and we're talking
about back into teens and 20's,
had a patina of, that was not,
it had a, it reverberated
a kind of modernism
that was beyond music.
And, in fact, it was often used
in such a way that didn't refer
to music and there's some
documentation that's pretty
severe about this showing
just how far this went.
People would put
up signs at a bar
that said jazz, it had no jazz.
And they also put up escalator,
sex appeal, cocktails,
gramophone, would be just
cool, you know, this is it.
This is the modern stuff.
But I can remind you that
certain rappers started
to be known as jazz
including Jay-Z.
I don't know why
he changed that.
Maybe for some reasons that
we don't want to know about.
But at any rate, there
was the word had this kind
of symbol of modernity.
And when it appeared in its
earliest forms of ragtime,
the talk about the music
became a kind of obsession,
or at least an obsession
[inaudible] backward
over that, a major controversy.
If you ever have the curse
to read everything written
about jazz before
1930, which I've done,
in English at least,
you'll be astonished.
It was everywhere and
everyone was arguing.
And it had to do not
just with the music.
That sometimes disappeared.
Had to do with what
clothing you were wearing,
and how long a woman's
hair should be,
and whether you'd
smoke cigarettes.
You get some of that in F. Scott
Fitzgerald, and particularly
in his [inaudible],
what's it called?
The end of the jazz era where
he's really nasty about -- .
Did anyone read that anywhere?
But he's telling you how it was
awful and we were awful people.
And he says, "One doesn't want
to know anyone who says, 'Yes,
we have no bananas,' anymore".
[Inaudible].
But beyond the fashionable, you
might ask what was it about jazz
that led to its particular
impact in painting?
I don't think it escapes
the painters that,
especially in America,
that jazz was an art form
that was not coming from Europe.
It was quintessentially
American.
It was not coming
from the Mozarts.
It was not one of the
so-called pure traditions of art
and it was wide open
for them to use.
And the Europeans who
picked up the same kind
of influence were coming
from a different place
but they didn't --
how can I put this?
They situated their paintings
in the United States.
I'm thinking of Piet
Mondrian and Francis Picabia.
Their paintings on jazz are all
situated in the United States,
and I'll come back to that
in a second, and not in Paris
where they might
have heard it first.
And I think once painters
understood that improvisation
and playing in the moment
was the essence of jazz
that that seemed to
resonate as an idea
that might tone something
for their own practices,
particularly among those
who were interested
in esoteric things or surrealism
where the subconscious was
presumably allowed control
over work.
And jazz could be particularly
attractive in that way.
Some even spoke of jazz
musicians as performing
under spirit possession.
Then there was the impact
of rhythm which was as hard
to grasp how much it turned
heads around at that moment.
It was no longer something that
was underneath or behind music.
It was pushing forward
and front.
And some picked up the fact
that rhythm was itself melodic
which they could have gotten
from any number of cultures,
Latin cultures for that matter,
but they weren't looking
there at that time.
So that this was a new
way of approaching things.
And the drum set, for example,
in Europe became an art object.
Jean Cocteau declared
himself a jazz drummer
for about three weeks, I guess,
and then said he
was all over it.
Francis Picabia and Darish
[Inaudible] both bought drum
sets and said they
were jazz drummers.
Man Ray had himself
photographed as a one-man band.
But rhythm was more than
what the drum was about.
It was, in early jazz especially
there was something going
on that was unheard of before,
at least to me it
seems unheard of.
One is simultaneous
collective improvisation
where musicians are all
playing in their own style
and they're all improvising
at the same time
around a minimal theme and
amazingly enough never clashing,
or at least in our ears today.
That was pretty astonishing
in itself.
I think in broadest sense rhythm
made people think about space,
and perspective, and -- .
Listen to this excitement
of discovery
in a 1933 article titled
"No More Perspective"
by the French designer and
arts writer Rene Gruyere
[assumed spelling].
"In jazz all elements are
brought to the foreground.
This is an important law that
can be found in painting,
in stage design, in films, and
the poetry of this period,"
1930's, "Conventional
perspective with its fixed focus
and its gradual vanishing
point has abdicated.
In jazz it's not
the accompaniment
in song that's similar to a
figure against a background.
In jazz everything works.
There's not a solo instrument
against the background orchestra
and each instrument solos while
participating in the whole.
Each person plays for
themself in general ensemble.
The same law applies to art.
The background is
itself a volume,
that is to say a three
dimensional self."
A decade later Sergei Eisenstein
is [inaudible] summarized
that same article by noting
that jazz had multiple
perspectives instead
of a single fixed perspective
and had erased the strict lines
between foreground
and background.
But then he added, "We've only
to glance at cubist paintings
to know we've already seen
this in jazz records".
This is strong talk.
I don't know how it strikes you
but this is people reaching
right across the arts
and saying something's happening
here that's much bigger
than we've been perceiving
at this point.
Well, some of this jazz
painting connection, well,
I don't think we'll
go into this.
You can talk about sociological
aspects but the fact
that in New Orleans virtually
every jazz musician was also a
house painter, a carpenter,
they still are for that matter.
And I've seen some of their
business cards and they're kind
of interesting to see.
They'll say things like --
I don't know what
you call [inaudible].
What is a person who
sculpts in plaster,
does woodwork in plaster?
[ Inaudible ]
[ Laughter ]
Well, whatever.
That kind of thing.
And then down at the bottom
of the card it will
say, "clarinet player".
So you can use the same
card for multiple purposes.
That kind of thing brought
together people who were good
at several arts at once.
But you would see the same thing
happen in the 1950's at places
like Stanley's Bar, or the
Cedar Bar, or the Five Spot
where artists and
musicians were talking
about these things
in various ways.
And it's not surprising, I
guess, to see that the number
of painters like Franz Kline, or
Frank Stella, and Norman Lewis,
both the de Kooning's would have
oblique references in paintings
that aren't exactly --
there will be a word maybe in
one painting or just a title,
Five Spot, or something.
They're memorializing
this particular encounter
they're having.
Now there's a long history, and
complex history, of comparison
between music and painting.
And many attempts at
turning, making sound visible.
But even if we limit ourselves
to considering only the subset
of these people who were
inspired enough by jazz
to render it into
painted images,
the variety of what they
did is very impressive.
And now what I want to do
for the rest of time is talk
about a few of these painters.
Francis Picabia, Arthur Dove,
Piet Mondrian, Stewart Davis,
Harry Smith, Jeff
Schlanger, and Robert Ryman.
And when I can, I'm
using musical examples
that we know they were listening
to when they painted it
and actually said it was
part of the painting.
That's kind of hard to
find but I've found a few
and we'll reel up as they can.
One of the first -- .
Let's get going here.
One of the first is a
painting done by Picabia.
Just had a big show in New York.
And he, very colorful fella
who was supposed to be
over here making
deals with the Cubans.
Or he was on his way to Cuba
to make deals to get sugarcane
for sugar for World War I,
but he put it off for months
and stayed in the Village where
he was drinking, and carousing,
and listening to music, and so
forth til his wife wrote him
that he was about to
be court marshaled.
That would mean he'd be shot
because he never did what
he was supposed to do
in the Army and he went on.
He's remembered today
as a collector
of 120-some cars and so forth.
But I'm fascinated by
the fact that he went
to a Harlem cabaret during his
first week in New York in 1913,
when his own show was on and
this painting is one of the two
that resulted from it.
It's called "Chanson Negre".
This is number one
and the other is two.
We don't know what he's
listening to except it was
about a singer at that cabaret
he said, which moved him deeply.
When he was asked by a "New York
Times Herald Tribune" reporter
to explain the principles
of abstraction, he says,
"Does the musical composer
attempt the literal reproduction
of the landscape scene, of
its details of form and color?
No. He expresses
it in sound waves.
And is there absolute
sound waves?
So there are absolute
waves of color and form".
Now abstractions
of music that were
as a subject is no surprising
thing and not a big thing.
And, you know, you go back
to the nineteenth century
Walter Peters' insistence
that all great arts will
aspire to the status of music
and that kind of thing has been
floating around a long time.
I'd only add here that written
music is itself already an
abstraction of music.
And when you get to jazz
when people are playing off
of just chord indicators,
it gets even more abstract.
While in New York, Picabia met
the young American painter,
Arthur Dove, and they found
they were using similar forms
and repeated arcs in their
work to suggest rhythm
in their music paintings, as
well as some of the colors.
Arthur Dove in the 20's
did paint from recordings
and daringly attempted
to produce works
that were the visual
equivalent of the feelings
and sensory qualities involved
in the acts of playing music,
recording it, and listening
to it all on a single canvas
and that meant that in some
of his paintings you can
actually see the playback
machine, you can see sound
waves, and you can see some kind
of rendering of music.
He's trying to do
it all at once.
Let me go to this one which
is "Rhapsody in Blue".
He was at the premier of
"Rhapsody in Blue" in 1924,
very excited about it.
It was Paul Whiteman's orchestra
and George Gershwin
on the piano.
And when the recordings came
out, which is, if I'm right
about this, it was a two-sided
78 abbreviated recording
of what had happened.
So that was going
to be the basis
of the two paintings he would
make, side A and side B.
And this is side A, or
part one, as he called it.
He spent days of listening
and painting, he said,
turning the record over
and over as he worked.
He said his painting
will make people see
that the so-called abstractions
are not abstract at all.
It's an illustration.
I'm not sure what
he was up to there,
whether he's saying
abstract is too scary.
I don't want to drive
people away.
I don't many people would
see "Rhapsody in Blue"
in that painting, though.
But he certainly heard it.
Oops.
[ Inaudible ]
[ Music ]
That's the original
recording, not the original,
but the recording that he
was listening to at the time.
And there's something -- .
Let me go back to that.
There's something odd
about this painting.
Right here is a aluminum, or it
seems to be an aluminum hook.
And then a watch spring is
unraveling down there, in fact,
it [inaudible] watch spring.
Did you see that on the sides?
[ Inaudible ]
It's funny, you know, I'm
not an artist for sure
and I don't quite understand the
language but they seem to worry
about was that really the
clarinet being [inaudible]
rising up or was it really
the crank of the phonograph
which had a spring in it?
Well, it beats me.
I mean, it's abstraction, right.
So you go with that.
Mm. Mondrian had
already heard jazz played
by Black American servicemen
in Paris after World War I
and learned some of the new
dances that had accompanied it.
He was apparently a bad
dancer, but he insisted
on doing it publicly
all the time.
In 1927, he wrote an essay
called "Jazz in the Neoplastic,"
in which he spells out
not only his plan to paint
in the purest form possible,
that is with straight
and horizontal lines, square
and rectangles, primary colors
and no colors, but
it's fascinating to me
that he conceived of this purest
of the pure art while
he was listening
to what many White
Americans at the time thought
of as the most debased
of musics, jazz.
"But jazz," he says,
"now realizes an almost
pure rhythm thanks
to its greater intensity
of sound.
Its rhythm gives the illusion
of being open and unhampered
by form," and form and
tone were his big issues.
"Jazz, above all, creates
the nightclub's open rhythm.
It annihilates form.
It frees rhythm from form.
The nightclub is a
haven created for those
who would be free of form."
[Laughs]. I love it.
When he first came to New
York, he surrendered to jazz.
He'd spend nights
dancing with Lee Krasner
and Peggy Guggenheim
at Cafe Society.
For those of you interested
in trivia, the connection
to Jackson Pollack through
Krasner is interesting here.
You know, there was always a
question if he really liked jazz
or was he really painting
to it, but whatever.
It seems to have been
someone there before him.
This is my latest discovery.
He was also in Harlem at
Minton's, an afterhour club
that I believe didn't open
til about four in the morning.
Larry, is that right
[inaudible]?
You didn't take that
casually, you know,
[inaudible] there was
some seriousness in mind.
And he befriended, or was
befriended by, Thelonious Monk.
And this is the time when bebop
was beginning to take over.
And Monk often, according to
people, some Dutch writers
who were there said, often
referred to his own music
as if it was like
Mondrian's paintings.
This is getting really
fascinating to me.
That's as far as
I've gone with that.
So let's look at the most
famous of his paintings,
Broadway Boogie-Woogie.
And this they fortunately
have lots of pictures --
I don't have them here -- but
lots of pictures of his studios
and they were pretty Spartan,
very white with these
basic colors in play,
and then there easels, and
very neatly laid out things,
and a huge pile of
boogie-woogie records
that he played all the
time he was working.
He thought, despite this
connection to bebop,
that's another thing I've
got to find out later,
he loved boogie-woogie,
especially as played
by the piano trio of Albert
Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis,
and Pete Johnson at Cafe Society
was the quintessential form
of the music.
I don't know why he said that
exactly, although it seemed
to me that that kind of music
always had a kind of form
that seemed to have no
beginning, middle, and end.
It was just rolling out like
a train through the night
with no particular
ending in sight on it.
His 1942 and '43 painting
of Broadway Boogie-Woogie
was associated with one
of those records Ammons,
Johnson, and, and whoever.
I'm blocking it out now.
Oh, Meade Lux Lewis.
Oops. Sorry.
This is my first time using
this stuff and it's scary.
[ Laughter ]
History goes backwards.
[ Music ]
If you google this
painting, you'll fine -- .
[ Music ]
Attempts to rework that
including a Pac-Man game
in which the Pac-Men
change color as they fuse
with each other and so -- .
And then multidimensional
versions of it.
It's still obsessing people.
Stewart Davis, we
mentioned before,
he had painting jazz musicians
in New Jersey when he was a kid.
He became very close to Duke
Ellington, to Earl Hines,
to [inaudible] Pete Johnson.
He actually named his two sons
Earl for Earl Hines and George
for George Wettling, a
drummer who he liked,
and Wettling became
a painter himself
of some quality later on.
And if you look at his
work before he was really
into the jazz work, you get this
kind of thing which has hints
of pop art to come,
and so forth.
These are actually, it's
two separate paintings
which he presented together
like that under the title
of A House and Street 1931.
And I bring this up because when
he did this painting in 1945,
and kept working
on it until 1951,
he had in mind over-painting
the previous paintings.
So if you go back and you
look to the brick walls
on the far side and the color of
the side over on the other side,
it must be the L or something
over there in the yellow
and building colors, you can see
it still operating on the left
and right side of this.
Only here, now he's
gotten into a thing
where he writes cool
things on his paintings.
Sometimes they're cool.
Sometimes it's just
embarrassing but -- .
[ Laughter ]
This one, this one, the mellow
pad, that actually sounds
like the 60's, right,
but the mellow pad was,
he said he was somewhere
deep into this
and he was doing it for years.
He said, "What I needed was
Punch Miller's trumpet,"
and that's what I've got here.
[ Music ]
Usually these songs is
to me kind of remarkable,
but I'm not ready to say
how I think that worked
out in the paintings
exactly yet.
For this I'm turning to Harry
Smith, more famous as a person
who changed how folk
music was thought about,
a very strange man I'm trying
to write a book about
at the moment.
And this is a kind
of mandala and it's,
if a mandala is supposed to
be about the entire universe,
this is about an entire record
and the record is Dizzy
Gillespie's 1947 record,
"Lover Come Back to Me".
Now the way he operated with
this painting was to put it
on the floor using mirrors
it reflected to the side
and he would follow the,
show you what the things were
in the painting as
he went along.
Now the only person
alive who seemed
to have paid close attention
to this was Jordan Belson,
the filmmaker and painter.
And he drafted out a
kind of schematic of this
but it's really a
very minimal in trying
to figure out what it what.
You can sort of see that it
began, it says [inaudible]
on the side but it also seems
to be coming from the top,
and it says, "slow trumpet,"
and then it starts around,
going clockwise and you
could see first solo,
second solo, and so on.
This is a little
bit of that music.
[ Music ]
This is the only, that's the
only painter I know who's ever
tried to copy --
that's not the word.
He's trying to translate,
to make a total translation
from one form to
another one that way.
The contemporary painter
is a little different.
Jeff Schlanger who
calls himself --
what does he call himself
-- the music witness.
And he paints live
performances in live time,
that is he starts the second
the performance starts.
He stops when they stop.
And he operates on the
assumption, I think he told me
that music was the fastest means
of communicating
information on earth.
Oh, I'm not going to argue.
And that if it takes
fifteen seconds
to play, it takes to hear.
So if he's painting, it takes
fifteen seconds to paint.
This is Cecil Taylor.
It's a painting called
Art [Inaudible].
And you can sort of vaguely see
to the left a pianist
[inaudible] figurative stuff
there, but the rest
of it involves him not exactly
throwing paint, but moving it
and then shifting
that he's working
with so it flows
in various ways.
No one else has tried
this and it's,
to me at least, very
interesting.
Well, let's see, with the
little time I've got left I want
to touch on Robert Ryman.
Ryman was a musician who came
to New York in the 1950's
after being in the Army to
study with Lennie Tristano,
a very cultish, not
well known pianist.
I say not well known, but,
you know, "Time Magazine" used
to mention him and they've
called him the Bartok
or the Schoenberg of jazz.
It made no sense but
they'd throw it in.
And Elvis actually encounters
him in "Jailhouse Rock"
where he's out of prison and
he's being taken to a house
where a bunch of college
professors are discussion how
jazz has gone too far, and
how Brubeck is too far out.
And then someone
brings up Tristano
and said he went over the edge.
And the professor turns
to Elvis and says,
"What do you think, young man?"
And he says, "Frankly, I
don't know what the hell you
talking about".
[ Laughter ]
So minor, yes, and out
of it, well, you know,
and he had some kind
of importance.
Now when Ryman got to New York,
bebop was the form of music
that was in operation
and it was, you know,
it was a singularly,
what can I say?
It was aiming to be unpopular,
let's put it that way,
at least much of it was.
It was not about, it was
musical effrontery in a sense.
It was self-consciously and
relentlessly demanding skills
and approaches that were not
in that particular genre.
And one of the things
they did was to -- .
By the way, they often
dressed as artistes,
in full artiste with, you
know, berets and what have you.
Dizzy Gillespie especially.
And they would throw words
around like anthropology,
and epistrophe, and ornithology.
And it was really exciting
music to a group of ex-soldiers,
and those who never served
because they never
knew the war was on,
and those who were traveling
one place to the other.
And there were experiences of
discrimination, and dislocation,
and strikes, and war time.
But bebop melodies and rhythms
were singularly asymmetrical
and jagged.
And then added to that was
the use of altered chords
which they often
left unresolved.
As one older musician who didn't
like that music said to me,
"It's like somebody's wash is
out on the clothesline flapping
in the wind and it
never stops flapping
and that's what that is like.
It doesn't resolve, you
know, it didn't go anywhere".
Previously jazz musicians
had picked up tunes,
played you the tune at the
beginning, and at the end,
and in between they did
variations of the theme
so the audience would
know what they were doing.
These people were going
in a different way.
You would find the
harmonic structure
of a song overlaying
with another song.
So "Sweet Georgia Brown" could
be turned into Coleman Hawkins'
"Hollywood Stampede",
or Thelonious Monk's
"Bright Mississippi", the old
subliminal melody shimmering
underneath this new one.
It's what the musicologists
would call a contrafact,
often a form of homage
or parody.
But in bebop these
ghostly surfaces
with something shimmering
through it opened up attention
that looked like new
possibilities were involved
with it.
Now people that didn't like
this music would call it
Chinese music.
And I was fascinated with what
the same people were calling
abstract expressionism
Chinese painting.
Why is it Chinese are taking
the bulk of this, I don't know.
It's like someone
said of, I know,
it was said about John
Coltrane who spent a lot
of time studying Indian music,
"Shouldn't they have said
Indian music and not Chinese?"
Anyway, Ryman was studying
this music and then he gave it
up after becoming a
security guard at the Modern
and seeing a lot
of painters' work.
And the way you, what he chose
to do, if you know his work,
nearly all of it is pure white.
He spent 40, 50 years
of painting white.
He said his paintings weren't
abstractions of anything.
They weren't about
anything except paint,
if you can picture this.
So he's concerned with brush
strokes and the way white works.
And there's a joke
in here somewhere
but I'm not going to go into it.
But at any rate, whenever he
was talked to by arts people,
he would try to answer
as a musician
and it would take
him off the subject.
So I went back and looked up
so here's some of the -- .
"I came from music
and I think that type
of music I was involved
with, jazz or bebop,
had an influence on my painting.
We played tunes.
It's all songs nowadays,
telling stories very similar
to representational painting
where you tell a story
with paint and symbols.
But bebop is a more advanced
development than swing.
It's like Bach.
You have the chord structure,
you use that to develop
in many ways.
You can play written
compositions
and improvise off those.
So you learn your instrument,
you play within a structure.
It seemed logical to be
in painting that way.
I wasn't interested in
painting a narrative
or telling a story
with a painting.
Right from the beginning
I felt that I could do
that if I wanted to, but
it wouldn't interest me.
Music is an abstract medium
and I thought painting should
also be just what it's about
and not about other things, not
about stories or symbolism."
And then he said, "There must be
something about the relationship
between art and music that
makes the transition from one
to the other easy and natural.
Maybe it's the patterns
and deviation.
Maybe it's the same way a jazz
player plays the melody straight
the first time and
then rewrites it.
Good art sets up a structure
that everyone's familiar with,
square mounted on a wall,
paint on it, and then departs
from the expected tune and
inspires you to go home
and think, or blow your
horn, or something."
What he went so far as to
say that he wasn't going
to title any of his paintings
because a title would
suggest something
when it's just about paint.
Paint is paint.
And he spends a lot of
time working with paint.
He said, "It would be disastrous
to put a title on it."
But that wasn't quite true.
I found as I was
looking at his paintings,
for ten years he kept
putting in musical titles
which he somehow
wanted to forget later.
"Love Lines" which was the name
of a Lennie Tristano piece based
on "Fooling Myself," a song
associated with Billie Holiday.
And "Untitled" and then
behind the "Untitled" is
"Background Music" in 1962,
which a Warne Marsh
composition based
on harmonic structure
of "All of Me".
So what I'd like to do
is show you the painting
as a concluding operation here.
Now the problem with this,
with his white paintings is you
can't see what it is he wants
you to see which is what's
underneath the white.
But can you see a
little bit of it?
The [inaudible] coming through.
Let me go back now.
[ Music ]
That's Billie Holiday
and "All of Me".
[ Music ]
And this was a favorite musician
she worked with [inaudible].
[ Singing ]
And this is "Background
Music" which is built
on the harmonic structure
of that piece.
[ Music ]
Now we don't have his comments
on this but we do have comments
on another painting,
mainly because it was the
only painting he ever did
with real color.
And in an interview in London
when this was being shown there,
they said, "Well,
what's happening here?
I mean, this is the only
thing you really untitled,
'Orange Painting'".
He said, "Well, I don't
remember the process.
There are probably all kinds
of things going on there.
It didn't start off
orange, I'm sure of that".
[ Laughter ]
And then he pointed
to the edges,
particularly the upper right and
to all around, but particularly
up there, and he said,
"That's important".
[ Laughter ]
On another occasion he said more
clearly, "They are not white
or monochromatic paintings".
Because people were
saying, "It's always white.
I mean, you know, come on".
Because of the surfaces
functioning as a second color
in contrast to the
white of the paint.
And then he'll spend a
little time talking about,
which I don't need to
go into, but about, no,
here's one more I'll give you.
"It was a matter of making
the surface very animated,
giving it a lot of
movement and activity.
This was done not just with
the brush work and the use
of quite heavy paint,
but with color
which subtly creeping
through the white".
So he's rather modest
about his work
and about what he's
done with his stuff.
And it seems to me he's
creating the visual equivalent
of the form and organization of
a certain type of jazz and one
that was originally developed
in interaction with other people
through performance rather
through in solitary composition.
And that raises the question of
why would you listen to records
when you do these things
if you're not actually
going to copy them?
I'd like to suggest without any
more evidence than my guessing
that it puts you in interaction
with the musicians in some way.
So you see this in
Jackson Pollack's,
almost dancing, swirling.
But there were other more
simpler ways to do that just
with brush strokes and the like.
This kind of music I'm talking
about which is learned
while you're playing
with others primarily rather
than in solitary composition,
creates a kind of an
aesthetic through performance
and the music is something of
an ethic as well as an aesthetic
because you're dealing
with other people.
And I think Ryman is alluding
to that ethic in this work
and that may also tell us
why he paints listening
to music like he does.
Well, that's the
general argument.
I'm running out of time and I
thought I could summarize this
but instead of summarizing it,
I'll just give you an anecdote
which won't quite handle
what I'm talking about
but nonetheless it's this.
Elaine Kooning, Elaine Kooning
and Willem Kooning were big
jazz fans to start with.
She did a painting of, actually
a charcoal of Ornette Coleman
which was quite realistic for
her, quite clear is what it was,
and signed it, and
gave it to Ornette.
My wife and I were at a
party at Ornette's once,
probably a New Year's
Eve or something,
and he gave out copies
of this to everybody.
It was just great to have
because there was only
one of them out there.
But he had erased her
name and put his name in.
And when asked about it, he
said, "It was my picture".
[ Laughter ]
But, do any of you
know this story
about Rauschenberg
erasing de Kooning?
[ Inaudible ]
Robert Rauschenberg got the idea
as a young guy it would be cool
to erase something of
one of his seniors.
So he went to de
Kooning and said,
"Have you got a drawing
I could erase?"
And de Kooning thought he was
nuts, you know, this is crazy.
So he just kept badgering him,
"It's just something I
could do something with".
So he gave him one,
and by the way,
it's not completely erased but,
you know, it's mostly there.
And then he signed it
Robert Rauschenberg.
Well, I suppose this is
getting with, from both sides
of the Rauschenberg
thing coming back to -- .
So my point again is the role
of these arts and interacting
with each other which I don't
think has been properly dealt
with, the role of
African-Americans at the base
of this music, and whatever
else you get out of it.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
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