Pictures at an Exhibition
A Visual Reimagining

Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition has accompanied me for more than fifty years. This film is my attempt to turn that music back into pictures — not by reconstructing the past, but by imagining a new visual world around it.

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A piece of music that has stayed with me since I was fifteen

I first discovered Pictures at an Exhibition when I was about fifteen years old — not through Mussorgsky’s original piano score, but through the famous interpretation by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Their recording fascinated me and, for a time, became one of my favourite albums.

Later I returned to Mussorgsky’s original piano composition and played parts of it myself, particularly some of the movements that meant the most to me. I never performed the complete cycle, but the music remained part of my musical memory.

Over the decades it moved somewhat into the background. Then, while creating my more recent films about painters such as Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, Van Gogh and Klimt, an old question suddenly returned:

What did the pictures behind Pictures at an Exhibition actually look like?

Returning to Viktor Hartmann

Mussorgsky wrote the suite after the death of his friend Viktor Hartmann, a Russian artist and architect who died suddenly in 1873 at the age of only thirty-nine.

A large memorial exhibition of Hartmann’s drawings, watercolours, architectural designs, stage sets and costume designs was subsequently held in Saint Petersburg. It was this exhibition that became the inspiration for Mussorgsky’s composition.

But there is a difficulty for anyone who wants to visualize the work today: most of the particular Hartmann works behind Mussorgsky’s music have disappeared. Only a small number survive.

The surviving images are historically fascinating. Yet, for me personally, they did not evoke the same overwhelming imaginative world that I hear in Mussorgsky’s music.

This is not intended as an art-historical judgement on Hartmann. It was simply the point at which I realised that I did not want to make a documentary reconstruction.

This music needed another visual world.

Reimagining the pictures

I therefore decided to reimagine the works rather than attempt to reproduce them historically.

I wanted something of Joseph Mallord William Turner: his extraordinary light, atmosphere and dissolution of solid forms. I wanted something of Caspar David Friedrich: his silence, distance, monumental scale and the feeling of a human being confronted with something larger than himself. And I wanted a subtle trace of Vincent van Gogh: movement, nervous energy and living texture.

But the goal was never to imitate one of these painters. Gradually, through the work on the individual scenes, another visual language began to emerge — one that never existed historically, but which, for me, belongs to Mussorgsky’s music.

AI as part of a long creative process

I used generative AI extensively in creating the images, but not as a shortcut.

The pictures did not emerge from a single prompt. The visual world of the film developed over many days through trial and error: generating, judging, rejecting, changing and refining again and again.

Hundreds of images were generated. Most of them were never used. Composition, perspective, atmosphere, lighting, figures, architecture and small details were repeatedly altered until an image began to correspond to what I had imagined.

Sometimes an image was technically impressive but emotionally wrong. Sometimes the atmosphere was beautiful but the composition did not work. Sometimes a single small detail destroyed an otherwise convincing image. And sometimes, after many unsuccessful attempts, an image suddenly appeared that felt right.

For me, this is an important distinction. AI generated possibilities. But the creative process consisted in deciding what I wanted, recognising what was wrong, rejecting what did not work and continuing until the result fitted the artistic idea.

Mussorgsky enters the gallery

The Promenade movements are different from the other sections of the suite. They are not pictures. They represent Mussorgsky himself moving from one work to another through the exhibition.

This suggested another idea: Mussorgsky himself should enter my film — or, more precisely, a figure resembling him.

I created an imagined nineteenth-century gallery through which he walks, surrounded by the newly created pictures. The paintings used in the film had to appear convincingly inside the gallery frames.

This turned out to be one of the technically most difficult parts of the project. The perspective of the frames, the scale and angle of the pictures, the relationship between Mussorgsky and the paintings, the lighting and the shadows all had to work together before the gallery began to feel believable.

What happens inside the composer?

Yet even after the gallery worked visually, I was not completely satisfied. Showing Mussorgsky walking through an exhibition explained what was happening externally. But what about what might be happening inside the composer’s imagination?

I left the problem alone for several days. Then another idea emerged: perhaps the Promenades could gradually show the transformation from visual perception into musical thought.

This is, of course, not a claim about what Mussorgsky literally experienced. We cannot know the exact psychological moment in which a particular Hartmann image became music. It is a cinematic interpretation.

At first we remain in a relatively realistic gallery. Then, in later Promenades, something strange begins to happen. For a moment, a piano appears inside one of the pictures. Then it disappears. In another painting, piano keys or instrumental forms briefly intrude into the visual world. Reality returns. Later, the transformations last longer.

In Promenade III they are fleeting flashes of thought. By Promenade IV they have become more stable. The boundary between the physical gallery and musical imagination gradually begins to dissolve.

Finally, in Promenade V, Mussorgsky arrives at a real grand piano. He sits down. There is no sheet music. He begins to play from memory and imagination.

The pictures have become music.

The piano performance — Chiara Bertoglio

For the soundtrack I deliberately returned to Mussorgsky’s original conception. Pictures at an Exhibition was written for solo piano, even though many listeners today also know the work through orchestral arrangements.

In principle, I could have played parts of the music myself. I had already played some of the movements when I was younger. But I had not played the work for many years, and preparing and recording the complete cycle at the level I wanted for the film would have required a great deal of practice and time.

Fortunately, I discovered the recording by Chiara Bertoglio.

For me, her playing is a wonderful interpretation of Mussorgsky’s work: precise, imaginative, expressive and full of musical character. I do not think I could have matched what she achieves in this recording, and her performance became the ideal musical foundation for the film.

I am particularly grateful that this excellent recording is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence.

More than placing pictures beside music

Once the images had been created, another part of the work began.

Camera movement, zoom, transitions, timing and synchronization with the music all had to be developed. The intention was not simply to display a sequence of paintings while a recording played in the background.

I wanted image and music to breathe together — sometimes allowing the viewer to contemplate an entire composition, sometimes moving slowly toward a detail, sometimes letting the visual rhythm follow the musical tension.

AI was deeply involved in creating the visual material, and I have no reason to hide that. But saying that the film was simply “created by AI” would miss most of the process.

AI generated possibilities. I chose the artistic direction, rejected images, requested alternatives, changed compositions, controlled perspective and atmosphere, developed the Promenade narrative, planned the camera movements and synchronized the visual journey with the music.

For me, the more interesting question is therefore not simply whether AI was used. The more interesting questions are whether there was an idea, imagination, judgement, meaningful artistic decision-making and a personal vision.

More than fifty years later

This film is my response to music that has accompanied me since I was about fifteen years old.

It began with Mussorgsky. Along the way came Viktor Hartmann, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, Van Gogh, decades of music, and my own more recent work with visual art and film.

More than fifty years after I first encountered this music, it has become something new in my imagination:

a gallery that never existed,
paintings that never existed,
and perhaps a glimpse into a creative moment that we can never actually witness —

the moment when pictures become music.

Credits

The original composition by Mussorgsky is in the public domain.

Subtitles are available in English, German, French, Italian and Turkish.

Watch the complete film on YouTube →