The sound of music
The Italian futurist Luigi Russolo’s 1911 painting attempts to nail “the complex of musical emotion”, as he described it. The central shadowy figure is a spider pianist with five arms, suggesting speedy fingerwork. A backdrop of blue sky in rhythmic circles is cut by a whiplash of melody. The grinning carnival masks in red, green and yellow are, he stated, meant to represent “harmonic or complementary chords”.
Sticky fingers
Like much futurist painting that tried to channel the technologically supercharged energy of modern life in old-fashioned, slow-burning paint, it’s a failure, albeit a deliriously strange and compelling one.
Chaos theory
Despite Russolo’s explanation, those faces seem more like evil spirits, tormenting the musician, who bears a resemblance to Beethoven. If anything, Russolo was less interested in old-fashioned harmony than pioneering discord.
Boom box
Russolo is best known as the great-grandfather of sound art. His 1913 manifesto The Art Of Noises is a seminal text proposing a new music of found sounds, while his concerts with his own hand-built noise intoners were designed to reproduce the industrial urban soundscape.
Part of the permanent collection, Estorick Collection, N1
