[Essay] Pictures at an Exhibition: A Guest Curated Exhibition by the Lakeland Symphony Orchestra

This Fall, the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College is partnering with the Lakeland Symphony Orchestra (LSO) for a one-of-a-kind exhibition that promises to delight art and music lovers alike, transporting gallery visitors visually and aurally, engaging their eyes and their ears. Guest curated by instrumentalists of the Orchestra, Pictures at an Exhibition pairs artwork from the Museum’s permanent collection with hand-picked musical selections performed by the musicians themselves for a unique multi-sensory viewing and listening experience.

Pictures at an Exhibition takes its name and conceptual jumping-off point from Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s beloved 1874 ten-piece suite of the same name. The suite, created as a composition for piano, was inspired by the close friendship between Mussorgsky (1839-1881) and artist and architect Viktor Hartmann and the composer’s ownership of two paintings by Hartmann. Like many artists in various media who seek to create art that stands out from the rest, Mussorgsky and Hartmann bonded over a mutual interest not only in honing their own individual voices but also in developing distinctively Russian works of art. When Hartmann died suddenly in 1873 at only 39 years old, the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg staged a memorial exhibition featuring more than 400 works by Hartmann, including the two paintings Mussorgsky held in his private collection.

As the story goes, Mussorgsky, still heartbroken over the loss of his dear friend, visited the exhibition, which opened in the Spring of 1874, and was so moved that over the course of the next three weeks he dropped the projects he had been focused upon and composed — from start to finish — the complete Pictures at an Exhibition. The suite of ten pieces represents in music Mussorgsky’s — and thus his listeners’ — tour of the memorial exhibition, with each piece a musical interpretation of the experience of looking at ten of Hartmann’s drawings and paintings on display in the show. Mussorgsky may have composed Pictures at an Exhibition rapidly, but the suite was not published until 1886 — by which time the composer had been deceased for five years. In the years since, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition has been reinterpreted, revised, and rearranged for full symphony performances, most famously by Maurice Ravel, with his 1922 version.

Our Pictures at an Exhibition carries Mussorgsky’s concept fully into the 21st century. We invited members of Polk County’s own resident Symphony Orchestra to be similarly inspired by works in the Museum’s permanent collection — and not merely to be inspired and to guest curate but also to perform and record the musical compositions they most associate with the visual compositions they selected. Each work in this exhibition thus provides an exciting visual and musical pairing, proposing that visitors augment the close-looking processes to which they have become accustomed with simultaneous auditory-interpretation by gifted musicians.

For instance, members of the woodwind and brass sections have chosen the painting Woodstock Summer by Richard Segalman, delighted by its leisurely summer vibe, and imagine its musical counterpart in Summer Music by Samuel Barber. Likewise, instrumentalists from the strings section of LSO have selected the serigraph For the Love of Darkling by Andi Woung, a work whose visual cues they believe echo the motifs of Dido’s Lament (When I am Laid in Earth) from the opera Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell. And it is an untitled Dalí in the exhibition that inspires the full symphony to play March to the Scaffold from Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz.

In this most experimental of exhibitions, in addition to the joys of looking at art alone, visitors to the Museum this Fall are in for an extra-sensory treat, guided by the minds — and ears — of trained and celebrated musicians. Just scan a QR code beside each work and, in the spirit of Mussorgsky’s original Pictures, you, too, can be taken on an unparalleled artistic and musical tour.

By by H. Alexander Rich, Ph.D., Executive Director and Chief Curator

Pictures at an Exhibition will be on view September 11, 2021 through January 9, 2022 in the Perkins Gallery.