Recording Sound

Theodore Roszak, Recording Sound, 1932, plaster and oil on wood, 32 x 48 x 6 ³⁄₄ in. (81.3 x 121.9 x 17.1 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1989.25

Artwork Details

Title: Recording Sound
Artist: Theodore Roszak
Date: 1932
Location: Smithsonian American Art Museum
/
2nd Floor
/
North Wing
Dimensions: 32 x 48 x 6 ³⁄₄ in. (81.3 x 121.9 x 17.1 cm)
Credit Line: Museum purchase
Mediums: plaster
oil
Mediums Description: plaster and oil on wood
Classifications: Sculpture
Subjects: Object — furniture — stereo
Architecture Interior — detail — stairs
Allegory — senses — hearing
Object Number: 1989.25
Linked Open Data: https://edan.si.edu/saam/id/object/1989.25

Artwork Description

Theodore Roszak celebrated the new recording technologies of the 1930s with this light-hearted painted relief. The horn of the phonograph resembles the ear of a listener, who hears the music and imagines the world of the opera, pictured with comical plaster figures on a tiny stage. Even the turntable, with one mechanical device resembling a costumed figure, evokes the stage where the performance occurred. A tiny balloon at the upper right suggests the fantasy and escape that music can provide. Circles and spirals throughout the image evoke the motion of sound waves and the grooves of "sound" cut into the master recording.

Recording Sound is in many ways a self-portrait. Roszak studied music, but chose to pursue a career in art. He was making the transition from painting to sculpture when he created this work, which has elements of both. Roszak imagined himself as a kind of machine that absorbed experiences, recreated them, and transmitted them to others, just as the new recording technology replayed real events for new audiences.

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006

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Recording Sound by Theodore Roszak combines painting and sculpture in a unique way. A three-dimensional plaster stage projects forward and backward from the canvas plane to a depth of about three inches. It's a miniaturized opera performed for the modern miracle of the phonograph. Roszak, an accomplished violinist, was so involved with music that he put musical references into many paintings.

BETSY BROUN: “Recording Sound” by Theodore Roszak combines painting and sculpture in a unique way. A three-dimensional plaster stage projects forward and backward from the canvas plane to a depth of about three inches. It’s a miniaturized opera performed for the modern miracle of the phonograph. Roszak, an accomplished violinist, was so involved with music that he put musical references into many paintings. He must have loved the new electric phonographs introduced in the mid-1920s, which replaced the old hand-crank technology. For the first time, the complex sounds of a full orchestra could be recorded with clarity. In recording sound, Roszak encompasses the world of live performance within the horn of the gramophone.

This archival photo shows that there used to be little, painted wood singers on the stage. They were apparently too tempting to the touch, and they are missing today. Roszak loved geometric forms, and even when creating a mini universe cradled by the moon, he inscribed it in a perfect circle. The circle form is echoed throughout the stage composition and throughout the larger field of the painting. The crescent shape of the moon appears again and again in his art over many decades. “Recording Sound” dates to 1932, a period of deep depression, but it was a period Roszak found extremely fruitful. He had just spent two years traveling in Europe, where he had discovered the utopian constructivism of the Bauhaus and de Chirico’s metaphysical surrealism. The mixture of geometry and fantasy in “Recording Sound” shows how he’d like to mingle both tendencies, but Roszak was balancing more than two stylistic ideas. He knew that many artists were dedicating their work to social and political causes in the 1930s. Roszak, however, asked what could the artist do to enhance life not socially and politically but generally for all men living under an industrial kind of civilization?

By the late 1930s, Roszak was working in the design laboratory of New York, exploring industrial forms. He wrote, “I had every conceivable tool, weapon, material that modern industry had at my disposal right there in my shop. I designed tools and dyes for industry. I designed machines. I built a whole plastic automobile. I mean the whole works.” His 1937 wood and plexiglas sculpture called “Construction in White” is rooted in this concept of industrial design as a means of enhancing society. Just the way Roszak prepared blueprints for his geometric sculptures shows how thoroughly he considered himself an industrial artist. He said, “I always felt that the two-dimensional aspects of abstract painting were very much like a blueprint for architecture.”

The Second World War was shattering to those who believed so fervently in the industrial world. After 1945, all the hopeful geometry disappeared from Roszak’s art. It was replaced by a spiky, threatening mutation from nature’s garden. This big, bronze part-moth, part-thistle is dedicated to Louis Sullivan. Sullivan was the early modern architect from Roszak’s hometown of Chicago, who found in nature an elegant, decorative design vocabulary to embellish his early modern buildings. It’s almost as if Roszak is saying, “See how our modern industrial world has perverted nature's forms? How can we build with these?”

“Recording Sound” remains a favorite of mine because what it is recording is the music of life at its purest. At a time when the artist was full of ambition and enthusiasm, just married, on the brink of a long career, and still believing the essential balances would hold.