Did You Know: Many Famous Composers Were Also Visual Artists

By Robert Markow | From the September-October issue of Strings Magazine

Some of them were quite good. Felix Mendelssohn was a talented draftsman and watercolorist. Carl Maria von Weber was a painter. He even referred to himself as a tonkünstler (tone artist) to distinguish himself from Beethoven, a tondichter (tone poet). Arnold Schoenberg seriously pursued a career in painting as a young man, but most of his nearly 100 paintings are in private collections and have not been publicly shown. He even went so far as to become a member of the Blaue Reiter (an Expressionist group that included artists such as August Macke, Franz Marc, Alexej Jawlensky, Gabriele Münter, and Wassily Kandinsky). 

George Gershwin and Edgard Varèse, too, were respectable painters. R. Murray Schafer, one of Canada’s most famous composers, originally intended to pursue a career in the visual arts. Harry Freedman, another Canadian, attended art school for five years before beginning serious musical studies. And how many violinists know that Zino Francescatti wrote a composition called Neuf Portraits, inspired by nine famous painters, among them Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Georges Braque?

Turning the tables, Braque was also a violinist and flutist; Kandinsky was a cellist and pianist; Adolf Hölzel, Odilon Redon, Eugène Delacroix, Henri Matisse, and Paul Klee were all violinists. Klee was good enough to play in string quartets and in the municipal orchestra in Bern. Matisse practiced every day until he was 50 before going to his easel. 

Then there is the case of the Lithuanian Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911), who was equal parts composer and artist. He created about 300 paintings in addition to nearly 400 musical compositions, which included symphonic poems, choral works, and piano pieces. (Some of these can be heard on YouTube.)