Improvision: Orphic Art in the Age of Jazz

by Simon Shaw-Miller

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.

336 pages, Hardcover

Published June 30, 2022

Reviews

[Reader]

"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