November 1907, painter and a new-born mother Paula Modersohn-Becker passed away at the age of 31. During her short and largely unrecognized career, she crafted over 700 paintings of precise expressionism. Often, her works depicted quotidian spectacles: still lives, landscapes, and most notably—her nude self-portraits.

The nude self-portraits are by no means fanciful nor extravagant. Instead, her portrayal seems crude with visibly uneven proportions and rudimentary colors. What we’re presented with is neither an impression nor a beauty, but a primitive imagery of a naked woman. Becker was one of the first painters to illustrate a self-portrait in this manner. As time illuminated her body of work, her influences became more prominent.

Janet Burns, professor at University of New Brunswick-Saint John, analyses Becker’s renowned self-portraits alongside the works of Suzanne Valadon and Frida Kahlo. While doing so, she brings up their male contemporaries—which, in case of Becker, was Paul Gauguin. She describes Gauguin’s depictions as an “idealization of exotic non-European women.”

We must put up with those idealizations every now and then: advertisements, influencer posts, and carefully constructed pop stars. People thrive to portray perfection; social media incentivizes it. That’s what Fiona Apple was—or eventually led to being—profusely against during her infamous VMA acceptance speech, as she expresses in A Mistake, “I’ve acquired quite a taste. For a well-made mistake. I wanna make a mistake. Why can’t I make a mistake.”

But the disdain must’ve grown since then. Shortly after, Apple expresses that some remarks of a Spin magazine issue left some unfavorable aftertaste on her, “And I had just sat on the bus and there’s Spin with Björk on the cover and I picked it up and there were all these terrible letters in reaction to my story—’She’s the most annoying thing in the world, etc.” Few weeks before the interview, Apple has delivered a poem to the writer, by the means of an album title.

Paula Modersohn-Becker and Fiona Apple share some qualities. Both artists were exceptions to contemporary idealizations. Becker rejected to draw a glorified herself, while Apple rejected the expectations of press and celebrity culture. Both artists’ works were intentionally rough-edged, at times unpolished, but as a medium of rigid expression.

Rapidly, the term “expressionism” transcended visual arts and was manipulated by innovators of other artistic means—rapidly losing much of its original intent in the process, only for the literal concept to be left. One was a musical movement led by Arnold Schoenberg in 1918, connected by a vague compositional link to artistic expressionism by highlighting its atonality and dynamics.

Die Glückliche Hand, Op.18 is an example of a movement from his expressionist era. It’s a dramatization of Schoenberg’s personal life, a telling of a tragic man who has been abandoned by the same woman twice. It’s an adventurous piece, composed of some terrific high string notes, but also a result of perfectionism, looking at self-written libretto and whimsical stage directions.

The narrative of Verklärte Nacht, while generally not considered as his expressionist work, features similar aspects. Audiences follow a story of a woman, who confesses that she was carrying a child to her new-found mate. Schoenberg’s composition concentrates her concern and guilt, as a harmonic despair is formed by intense dynamics and dissonances. Although, unlike Die Glückliche Hand, Verklärte Nacht ends with a bright message. “You have transfused me with splendour, you have made a child of me,” the man speaks.

However, Fiona Apple’s perspective differs. Throughout the pieces such as To Your Love, Love Ridden and Fast As You Can, she displays her attitude of questioning herself instead of her lover. Even in her accepting and arranged narrative of I Know, Apple casts a shadow of doubt. “I’ll wait by the backstage door,” she sings. Preceded by her firm witnesses of a toxic relationship, the glimpse of forgiveness feels sorrowful.

Fast As You Can feels exceptionally poetic. It’s a more outlandish, more splendid version of Kanye West’s runaway, of an interesting common ground that both lyrics contain “fast as you can” as its chorus (yet Kanye West was a proclaimed fan of Tidal). Apple represents herself as a beast; “I may be soft in your palm. But I’ll soon grow hungry for a fight. And I will not let you win,” she describes. It’s the recognition of her own imperfectness, which reaches deep inside her mind. Her voice alternates through subtlety and power; the occasional vibrato in her voice gives its folkloric warmth; the lyrics speak her bold truth.

It’s around the minute-and-a-half timeframe when this chase sequence morphs into a traditional ballad. And she sings her most beautiful lines, “Sometimes my mind doesn’t shake and shift. But most of the time, it does. And I get to the place where I’m begging for a lift. Or I’ll drown in the wonders and the way.” The 8 lines of poem are a combination of reasonings, desperations, consultations, acceptance, then … oops, back to the chase sequence.

The supplement for Fast as You Can may exist outside When The Pawn… and in her song Left Alone, where she cries in anguish, “Tears calcify in my tummy. Fears coincide with the tow. How can I ask anyone to love me. When all I do is beg to be left alone.” She talks about her past lover Jonathan Ames and the condensation of harsh feeling that she’s forced to embrace. “She sought out Jonathan Ames after a friend kept talking about him and she’d read some of his work; forces, including distance, conspired against the relationship,” wrote Dan P. Lee.

There’s not much overlap between the style of Arnold Schoenberg and Fiona Apple. The genre, the accompanying instruments, the process of critical evaluation, differ limpidly. Same with its era, where Schoenberg ‘s music was inevitably given political contexts due to Europe’s chaotic landscape.

But they are similar in some respects. Both artists seek to venture into the innate vulnerability of human lives. And they use their dynamics in a mode to convey emotions rather than the overarching story. Moreso, their music is both a product of and an escape to the cultural norm. Expressionism in music was a reaction to impressionism, but was influenced by the bigger expressionist movement in art. When The Pawn… was an open cultural rebellion, but Jon Brion’s renowned production was what gave its commercial strength. For example, it will be idiotic to tie her music to the ecosystem of “outsider music,” regarding the enormous commercial and critical praise Apple has gotten right after her music’s release.

TThe supposed narrative of the piano-pop anthem Paper Bag commences with Fiona Apple mistaking a paper bag to a bird. She goes crazy the another day, causing her lover to leave, and comes the feeling of disappointment— “I thought he was a man, but he was just a little boy.”

What stands out more than its opaque narrative, must be her classy use of tropes, as the track is composed of a plenty of juxtaposes, including the song’s motif—paper bag and a dove—one object being significantly less pleasant than the other. The list continues: “a daydream of a boy” and “a hopeless to be had,” “the dove of hope” and “a weary tear,” “hunger hurts” and “starving works.” The combinations feel nonsensical and unjustified; it’s not the sweetest pill to swallow. Together with her excessive syncopations, it creates a melodrama.

Another aspect of the lyrics are its brutal qualities. In the second verse, she sequences her despair throughout her unfavorable departure with her mate. There she uses multiple phrasings which all leads to her desperation of love, such as “looking for a strand to climb,” “a fail to kiss is a fail to cope,” and “a little love here in my void.” It’s an addition to the song’s eerie landscape, but overall, it also conveys a detailed anecdote of losing support in the situations that they’re most needed. Furthermore, it consolidates the statement: “whose reality I knew, was a hopeless to be had.”

Wassily Kandinsky represents another tie between music and expressionism. He’s known as one of the earliest innovators of abstraction. In his works, he uses music—or in detail, improvisation—to describe his willingness to express his art without a mutual structure. Thereby, he addresses his works as a “composition,” each marked by a distinct roman numeral.

Composition IV is an eye-catcher, dappled with a colorful vibrance—reminding of Fauvism—and the ubiquity of thin, crammed, parallel lines. Regarding its human size, one experiences a chaotic spectatorship, of the colors that are both open and concealed, and of the wavering reminiscence of a perspective, resulting in a not-so-three-dimensional space. But not everything’s of nothing, such as the striking rainbow behind all the abstractions; uncertainty feels liminal. To compare to the prominent musical improvisers, it’s more alike Charles Mingus than John Zorn, as Kandinsky’s work is less extreme and more expressive, just like the avant-garde spectacles of Open Letter to Duke and Haitian Fight Song.

But a closer representative of Fiona Apple’s music must be Improvisation 3, a more figurative work of Kandinsky’s abstraction, as of how even the most chaotic works of Apple derives from her comprehensible lyricism. The painting features blunt images of a human, a horse, and a building, like Composition IV, heavily distorted, but in a unified direction facing north-east. Similarly, the colors are mostly primary, with the skies painted recognizably red. Inside a smaller frame, his work does not feel glamorous, but rather expressive and illogical.

The painting bears some resemblance to Paper Bag, being a representation but also a disorder, and intentionally confusing its audiences. The red sky and the red human, characterizes both the painting and the album cover, in a way, that it will be simple to combine the images to one.

It’s not a pure coincidence, that both artists’ careers were at first inspired by their personal troubles, with Apple’s first releases sprouting from her breakups, and Kandinsky’s first artworks being motivated by his anxiety. Music can be used as an emotional vent, as well as art. And I believe that’s the core reason why we relate Fiona Apple’s music to the works of those artists, as their emotions solely lead their compositions. That’s the spectacle of art. When facing mental hardship, people often get lured to drugs and other illegalities. I suggest that art is a better way to cope, because at times, it inspires. But remember, don’t replace your therapy.