I am pleased to highlight two fine works by Austrian-American artist Max Oppenheimer (1885–1954), which depict his greatest subject: the world of music.

Oppenheimer (also known as MOPP) was an accomplished violinist and music expert, who studied painting in Prague and Vienna from 1900 to 1906. He was a regular at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, the unofficial headquarters of the avant-garde during World War I, where he was exposed to many new artistic idioms. Cubism, with its fractured geometric planes, and Futurism, with its focus on simultaneity and speed, particularly captured his imagination.

In his depictions of orchestras, ensembles, and musicians-known as his Klangkompositionen (Sound Compositions)-Oppenheimer sought to translate sound into visual form. Streichquartett (String Quartet), c. 1941, conveys the intimate connection between musicians and their instruments. Its luminous composition, with its dynamic interplay of color and forms, shows the musicians’ slender fingers holding their bows and pressing the strings of their cellos and violins, as their sheet music tumbles together in the center. Streichquartett closely resembles Das Klingler-Quartett (The Klingler Quartet), 1917, now in the collection of the Belvedere Gallery, Vienna, and one of Oppenheimer’s most accomplished paintings.

With the rise of the Nazis, Oppenheimer faced persecution for being Jewish and gay. In 1938, he fled Austria and settled in New York. In a passage from his 1945 autobiography, Aus meinem Leben (From My Life), he reflected on this period of instability: "You never stay still, there is no uniformity that forces inactivity; instead, you drift restlessly toward new experiences, toward unknown horizons."

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Achim Moeller