Girl at Piano: Recording Sound
- Dec 11, 2019
- 5 min read
Theodore Roszak painted the Girl at the Piano: Recording Sound in 1935 with oil paints on a thirty-seven by forty-eight inch canvas. The focus of the piece is a girl sitting at a piano recording a song with a gramophone. In her right hand she holds her head contemplatively, and with her left she fingers the notes. Brightly colored cubist shapes and fractured space are irrationally arranged in the composition, with the otherworldly appearance of the figure conveying a surrealistic feeling. The girl’s anatomy and pose are contorted. Accompanied by no eyebrow and indicated by a mere red dot is her right eye, while her left is an eye socket with a deep black abyss where the eyeball should be. Distinct against blue and green skin are deep red lips and a sharply diagonal nose. Tinted vertical lines run down her face, leading our eye to the green palm supporting her distorted jaw. With only four curved yellow lines implying bangs on her forehead, her hair appears extraordinarily straight. Five small green circles are at the ends of the red hair on her right side, complemented by faint orange dots and lines stippled on the corresponding blue section. The curve of her smooth shoulders are garbed in red and blue, contrasting the jagged pattern of her neckline and the green of her neck. Our eye is directed to her angular elbow resting on a red table. On the tabletop is a reflective surface mirroring the zig-zag of her red and yellow neckline in a scientifically impossible manner. From behind her elbow to stroke the keyboard emerges an eerie green hand. The stylized piano is either a propped open grand piano or wonkily shown inside out. Various shapes are presumably depicting the many mechanisms inside a piano. Green hammers angle off the keys, suspended above red strings. Frames, boards, and plates are signified by a conglomeration of small shapes against a large black background shape, possibly the cover of the grand piano. In the foreground is the coolly colored gramophone. Hovering overhead are unattached geometric light fixtures, evoking ghostly associations. A few orange and blue lines are interspersed on the brown and yellow wall. Juxtaposed against yellow rectilinear shapes in the upper right of the composition, a strange blue dot floats in the upper left. Underneath the yellow shapes is a vertically striped plane, guiding our eye to the signed Roszak.
Cubism and Surrealism allowed Roszak to combine his respect for reason with his fascination for imagination. The girl’s geometric and circular right eye joined with her dreamlike and organic left eye are examples of this combination. To delve further into the meaning behind the painting requires additional information regarding the symbolism behind the figure’s pose. Thoughtful resting of the head in the palm of the hand has been understood as representative of artistic genius since the Renaissance. Today, common thinking emojis on electronic devices feature a yellow face with thumb and index finger placed under its chin. In Girl at the Piano: Recording Sound, the pose connotes the musical intelligence of the female figure. While the geometric shapes above the gramophone and next to the keyboard are perhaps portraying the machinery inside a piano, they are possibly suggestive of the introspective meditations of the musician. Roszak himself was an accomplished violinist. The reflective surface under the girl’s elbow, and the disconnected light fixtures above her head are additional allusions to ideas of thinking. Common synonyms for “reflection” and “detachment” are “thought” and “objectivity”. In this theory, the single floating dot may denote the stroke of genius. The medium size of the canvas avoids the mistakes of making the art piece too large and dramatic for its introspective content or too small and modest for its artistic merit. The pigmented oil paints allow Roszak to achieve rich primary colors for the piece. The simple colors combined with the simple shapes of the composition contrasted against the complicated messages behind the work make for an interesting comparison.
Related to Roszak is Kandinsky. Kandinsky painted Improvisation 28 (second version) in 1912 with oil paints on a forty-three and seven-eighth by fifty-three and seven-eighth inch canvas. Both Kandinsky and Roszak possessed an affinity for saturated colors, abstraction, music, and thought. He believed that art was like “orchestrating” color onto a canvas. He may have been a synesthete, or someone who “hears” colors and “sees” sound. Just as music did not have to have a theme, Kandinsky supposed painting could exist without subject matter. Like Roszak, Kandinsky explored nonrepresentational points, planes, lines, curves, diagonals, and angles in his art and figurative images were very few. Long black lines alternate with shorter lines and various areas of color. While both Roszak and Kandinsky examine aspects of the mind and music in their work, Kandinsky’s piece is larger to achieve a symphonic effect, and more expressionistic of the inner turmoil rather than the rational of the mind. Using autonomous working methods, he spontaneously splattered colors that symbolized different emotions onto the canvas. Kandinsky co-founded The Blue Rider group that promoted spiritual leadership in the arts. He thought color affected the soul. Maybe he thought the gods and goddesses themselves may be vibrating with our soul through music and musicians.
Another art piece connected to Girl at the Piano: Recording Sound is The School of Athens. Statues of Apollo (god of sunlight, rationality, poetry, music and fine arts) and Minerva (goddess of wisdom and mechanical arts) appear in The School of Athens. Raphael painted The School of Athens 1510 in buon fresco technique on a nineteen by twenty-seven feet area of a wall in Pope Julius II’s study room. The main focus of The School of Athens is the philosopher student and teacher duo Aristotle and Plato. They are surrounded by various academic minds on the steps of Athens under a barrel-vaulted ceiling. One of these minds is Michelangelo (representing the misanthrope philosopher Heraclitus) in the same aforementioned melancholic pose of the artistic genius. Michelangelo believed painting to be the lesser art, and sculpture to be the higher; therefore he was in a dejected mood about the paintings he was commissioned to do. Although both Raphael and Roszak bring attention to philosophical thought and creativity in the arts, their techniques of painting are vastly disparate. Raphael’s art is highly realistic, while Roszak’s is extremely distorted. Although Raphael and Roszak both use simple shapes in their compositions, Raphael paints implicit idealized triangles, squares and circles into the figures and architecture while Roszak paints the shapes outright. During the Renaissance, the classics and rational thought were acclaimed. Raphael’s logical style honors the standards of his day. Raphael paints many male intellectuals into his piece, but Roszak only paints a single female figure. At the time of Raphael’s painting, women were not valued academically as much as men. Raphael’s painting is more focused on rationality than creativity. It was frescoed on the great wall of a study for the pope while Roszak’s was painted on a canvas. While Raphael had to please his commissioner, Roszak was free to paint Girl at a Piano: Recording Sound as he wished.
For Roszak to have influence from contemporary Kandinsky and Renaissance artist Raphael is a prime example of the blend of old and new. He combined mechanical reason and imaginative creativity into an integrated whole. Hopefully the girl at the keyboard composes a sonata as stunning a success as her painter.
Roszak, Theodore. Girl at Piano: Recording Sound. 1935, Indianapolis Museum of Art.
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