Arnold Schoenberg - Visions and perspectives

16th March to 9th May 2010

At the turn of the 20th century, numerous artists, at odds with academicism, began to devote themselves to new artistic paths. At the head of these leaders, the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg wrote his first atonal works, which changed the face of the history of music, by going beyond the established rules of classical composition and traditional harmony.

In the same years in which he composed his String Quartet no. 2, and his operas Erwartung (“Expectation”) and The Fortunate Hand, he engaged in intense activity as a painter. This new calling, which has often been interpreted as a way of keeping in touch with the concrete visual world in contrast to the ethereal aspect of music, gave rise to a very large number of canvases.

Divided between different genres, as it developed his painting took the various different forms of impressions, portraits, sill lives, sketches of stage sets and even representations of playing cards. Far from being the work of a simple amateur, this visual whole single-handedly conjures up the principal pictorial trends of the period, from late symbolism to pure abstraction and from expressionism to a lyrical representative style.