Musical Portraits of Visual Artists

Chapter 2 considers the connections between musical and visual modes of representing identity through the study of musical portraits of visual artists, with special focus on Morton Feldman’s “de Kooning” and Philip Glass’s “A Musical Portrait of Chuck Close.” Considering these musical portraits in relation to works by the artists they depict reveals how they portray their subjects by organizing musical structures to serve as metaphors of visual strategies of representation, evoking aspects of biography while representing painterly techniques in patterns of sound. These portraits do not only portray the artists named in their titles: they also highlight the very methods by which music operates for these twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers as a medium of representation.