Schoenberg and the Gesamtkunstwerk path to abstraction

In the years before 1914, the Austrian composer and artist Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) produced abstract images for a planned Gesamtkunstwerk (synthesis of the arts) based on Balzac’s (1799-1850) novella, Seraphita, a fictionalized version of the religious ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). The images were intended to be transformed into a fully abstract synthesis of music and moving pictures: a film with synchronous sound. This concept presented technical challenges which might be insoluble even with modern technology; it was never fully realized. This thesis contributes to the current art-historical discourse on the genesis of abstraction and offers an alternative to the more usual narrative of “coloured paint on a flat canvas”.