| This dissertation is a study of music listening as a subject of art during the years 1880–1900 in France and Belgium. With the progressive interiorization of musical experience over the nineteenth century, the music listener appeared as a figure of increasing prestige and independence. In order to explain this phenomenon, we gather and analyze scores of visual examples in the light of period art criticism and theory, also taking into account concurrent developments in philosophy, psychology, and literature.;Richard Wagner's music revolutionized listening, not only because of the longer attention span it required but also because of its outsized emotional impact. The extraordinary accounts of Wagner's music (by Charles Baudelaire and others) implicitly challenged painters to find ways to represent this new listening. Artists answering the challenge, such as Henri Fantin-Latour and Fernand Khnopff, begin to invite their beholders to greater emotional identification with pictured listeners.;At the close of the century, the external, visual aspects of listening wane in importance. Symbolist tenets, which had crowned music as the supreme art, favored at the same time a focus on private experience so complete that music-makers and even music itself become superfluous in images of listeners. With this portrayal of radical subjectivity, artists can expand and manipulate the representation of time in painting, in an attempt to secure prolonged attention such as music itself commands.;The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the first abstract experiments in transforming beholders into listeners. |
