Can you translate music into painting and vice versa? Many artists, from Toulouse-Lautrec to Matisse to Yves Klein, have tried to do just that.

Anyone who has reached a certain age or who stumbled blinkered through the 1990s might find there’s one tune they can’t get out of their head after hearing the title of Daniel Richter’s current exhibition at the Schirn: “Hello, (you fool) I love you. C'mon join the joyride...” – so the artist must be a big Roxette fan then? Daniel Richter is first and foremost a painter, but it’s no secret that music has always played an important role for him too. The exhibition title is simply another indication of this. As his biography reveals, he has been involved in Punk and Pop ever since his youth, and has occasionally designed record sleeves, concert posters or even stage sets for the opera. Indeed, he even has his own record label. It has also often been reported that he listens to a lot of music in his studio and that there, alongside newspaper cuttings, photos and other inspirational material, he has amassed quite a respectable record collection.

So Daniel Richter clearly loves music. Even though he emphasizes time and again that his only language is painting, both art forms have a lot in common, he believes: “Painting is like music – precise and yet unclear. The quality of an image isn’t something you can translate into language. If you could do such a thing, then you wouldn’t need an image in the first place.” (Vice, 2015) Good, so we can say that painting perhaps cannot be translated into language without something being lost. But what about translating music into painting, if Richter claims these two art forms have so much in common? Is Richter’s affinity with music visible in his images?

From a historic perspective, Richter was by no means the first painter to tackle such questions of transference. On the contrary, there are a whole series of artists whose work examines the interfaces between music and painting. Interestingly, here – as with Daniel Richter – the artists were generally dealing with contemporary, popular music. This applies, for example, in the case of the artists of the Belle Époque, whose works were most recently displayed in the Schirn exhibition “Esprit Montmartre”. Fevered Varieté evenings inspired these artists to create their works, and you can positively hear the cancan blaring from Toulouse-Lautrec’s images of Parisian nightlife. Often even the musicians themselves make their way into these pictures. In an entirely more abstract way, music also finds expression in the works of Wassily Kandinsky. His synesthesia meant he could literally “see” music. With his interest in color tones, something that could even be labeled as scientific, he attempted to give music visual expression and thus to trigger vibrations in the souls of observers. Image titles like “Composition” and “Improvisation” could be an indication that he was interested in Jazz.

This is unequivocal in the case of Henri Matisse, who named a whole series of his paper cut-outs Jazz. Here, he too primarily referenced the open, improvised character of this “new” music, as it was at the time. In the postwar period a new generation of painters became interested in Jazz. The Abstract Expressionists, most importantly Jackson Pollock, were fascinated above all by the rhythms, attempting to synchronize their brushwork with the music. Similar approaches can be found among Informalist painters in Europe. Staccato, pauses and sound structures were translated into abstract painting. It was this alternating synchronization of music and painting that Yves Klein was striving for too when he composed symphonies consisting of just one note in the 1960s, similarly to his monochrome painting. Both are an expression of his lifelong fascination with emptiness and the void. Finally, we shouldn’t fail to mention the painters of the 1980s in Germany, whose expressive painting developed in tandem with the blazing Punk movement. You need think only of Helmut Middendorff’s dynamic representation of Punk musicians on stage or the paintings of people dancing at Berlin’s legendary club SO36. These images of musical subculture brought things full-circle back to the abovementioned paintings of the Belle Époque. 

Painting is like music – precise and yet unclear.

Daniel Richter

So back to Daniel Richter. His works present a colorful combination of different pictorial references to (popular) music. Sometimes these are entirely explicit, as with Toulouse-Lautrec or Middendorff, taking the form of musicians or images of concerts. This is demonstrated, for example, in works like “Punktum” (2003), a concert scene that is as ghostly as it is excessive, or “Die Idealisten” (2008), which shows three anonymous superheroes in Rock star poses against a startlingly lifeless urban landscape. Examination of Pop music as a mass phenomenon and the power structures represented therein can be identified in the soldier figures of works like “Reflect” (2008), who carry guitars instead of weapons, or mass scenes like “Les Paul Dictatorship” (2008), in which figures likewise “armed” with guitars stand facing a crowd of people.

Yet if we now look for less explicit musical references – as in Kandinsky’s color tones – or even an example of brushwork determined by music as with the Abstract Expressionists, we soon realize that Richter’s painting shies away from such “scientification”. Yet his anarchic toying with references, the dull and the garish colors and the often daubed, smeared style of painting are testament to an inspired dilettantism, which corresponds entirely with a Punk and new-wave attitude. As far as Richter’s latest series of works is concerned, this applies only in part. We no longer see explicit musical references, either in the titles or in the subjects of the images. In comparison to earlier works, it is certainly possible to identify a more cheerful “mood”, and the open, playful form prompts one to talk about “color tones” and “improvisations”. But we don’t want to over-interpret, as painting is not an easy thing to unravel and strip back to its ingredients, be they musical or of any other nature. Painting is something to be experienced.

Yet those who nevertheless wish to identify a direct link between these paintings and music can go down the opposite route and brave a little self-experimentation in the exhibition. Let’s call it synesthesia for beginners. To this end, you need nothing but your smartphone or an iPod and headphones. How do the images appear with Roxette playing in your ears, for example? Why not give it a try with “Hello, I love you” by The Doors too, which is another reference of the exhibition. In any case, hold on tight and enjoy this audio-visual “joyride”.