Dialogue by Mark:

Our awesome art history piece from the KidsArt Masters' Gallery is also about music today. This painting is called Girl at the Piano: Recording Sound. It was painted in 1930 by the American artist Theodore Roszak.

Even though this picture looks abstract, you can recognize everything. The girl with her long hair and fluffy bangs is concentrating on her music. She's resting her chin on one hand and picking out notes with the other. You can easily tell the piano keyboard with it's white and black keys. Roszak even shows us part of the inside of the piano...the little felt-covered hammers that attach to the keys.

The recording machinery is in the foreground. There's a round old-fashioned record player connected to some sort of decvice. Roszak paints the feeling of the machinery, with delicate parts to pick up the sounds.

What do you suppose the three plates floating in the air above the piano represent? Are they part of the piano, or the recorder? Maybe they show what the girl is thinking about the tune she's creating.

In the 1920's and 30's, two new styles of art were invented by painters like Roszak. One style was called cubism, because artists showed objects with pure geometric shapes like cubes, circles and straight lines. You can see lots of straight lines and pure shapes in Roszak's painting.

Roszak is more often called a surrealist, though. Surrealism was the other new style from his time. The surrealists created art that felt like a dream. They painted realistic subjects, but in an unusual way. Thanks to Kim Solga, our art history expert at KidsArt, and to the Indianapolis Museum of Art for sending us this image.