Improvision: Orphic Art in the Age of Jazz traces the surprising connections between early abstract art and jazz music. In the first decades of the 20th century, Walter Pater famously proposed that the most appropriate paradigm for all the arts derived from the model of music. While this idea, which underpinned the development of abstract art, has been understood to centre on Western 'classical music', Simon Shaw-Miller theorizes that a richer pairing might be found between abstract art and jazz. This music originated with African Americans but had profound synergies with European artistic sensibilities. Improvision highlights the overlooked theoretical links between these two seemingly diverse cultural phenomena, ranging across the artists associated with the early abstract art movement Orphism but not those most often associated with jazz - such as Fernand Léger - but the more unusual figures of Frantisek Kupka, Francis Picabia, Sonia Delaunay and Marcel Duchamp. Shaw-Miller also considers the important early American absractionist Arthur Dove, discusses Jacques Derrida's interest in jazz, and focuses not on the more familiar figure of Jackson Pollock, but rather on his wife Lee Krasner, and the African American painter Norman Lewis, when visiting 'Orphic' abstract expressionism. Improvision concludes by demonstrating the longevity of the Orphic impulse, via the seemingly diverse arts of Korean-born Nam June Paik, before returning to France with the painter Fabienne Verdier. By spinning all of these figures together, this book shows how Orphic abstraction and jazz share the creative techniques of rhythm, groove, gesture and, above all, improvisation.

Book jacket.