Improvision: Orphic Art in the Age of Jazz

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Professor Simon Shaw-Miller (Chair of the History of Art, University of Bristol, UK)

Improvision

Orphic Art in the Age of Jazz

Professor Simon Shaw-Miller (Chair of the History of Art, University of Bristol, UK)

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English

Bloomsbury Visual Arts
30 November 2023

Central to the development of abstract art, in the early decades of the 20th century was the conception (most famously articulated by Walter Pater) that the most appropriate paradigm for non-figurative art was music. The assumption has always been that this model was most effectively understood as Western art music (classical music).

However, the musical form that was abstract art’s true twin is jazz, a music that originated with African Americans, but which had a profound impact on European artistic sensibilities. Both art forms share creative techniques of rhythm, groove, gesture and improvisation. This book sets out to theorize affinities and connections between, and across, two seemingly diverse cultural phenomena.

By: Professor Simon Shaw-Miller (Chair of the History of Art University of Bristol UK)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781350203464
ISBN 10: 1350203467
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 30 November 2023
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction & Theoretical Preliminaries: Art, Abstraction and All That Jazz 1. The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz: Words, Definitions & Rags 2. Orphism and a New Tune I: Dance, Music, Painting 3. Orphism and a New Tune II: Words, Music, Image 4. Orphism in America: Art, Machines and Jazz Rhythm 5. Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm: Kandinsky, Duchamp and Beyond

Simon Shaw-Miller is Chair of History of Art, University of Bristol, UK. He is an Honorary Associate and Research Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Reviews for Improvision: Orphic Art in the Age of Jazz

Shaw-Miller’s brilliant new volume is a virtuosic critical riff on improvisation as aesthetic principle and artistic practice. Productively entwining histories of jazz and abstraction in 20th-century visual art, this text is a revelatory account of modernism at its most playful and creative. * Daniel Grimley, Professor of Music, University of Oxford, UK * In a wide-ranging and compelling argument, Shaw-Miller rethinks the theory and practice of improvisation in early-20th-century transatlantic culture and offers an essential account of the “jazz modernism” that continues to challenge the racial and experiential hierarchies of modernity. * Michael Hatt, Professor of History of Art, University of Warwick, UK * Having amassed prodigious research, Simon Shaw-Miller is a terrific Orphic guide to the vast musical-visual territory that he fearlessly traverses. Even as he embraces the mutability of jazz as a category, Shaw-Miller offers a jazz paradigm for the visual arts that is sturdy and capacious enough to accommodate composition, execution, and reception in equal measure. * Anne Leonard, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, & Photographs, Clark Art Institute, USA *