America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Music, Pink and Blue

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Please note: Floor 8 is no longer on view.

Synesthesia is a neurological syndrome in which a person’s senses are transposed: colors may be experienced as sounds or sounds as physical feelings. This condition became a powerful metaphor for many artists working in the early twentieth century. They were fascinated, as Georgia O’Keeffe put it, with “the idea that music could be translated into something for the eye.”

An analogy between music and visual art proved especially useful in explaining the significance of abstract art to those that still greeted it with skepticism. Instrumental music had always expressed feeling without any explicit content; painting and sculpture, surely, could do the same. Even representational imagery might express sensations other than sight, such as a landscape alive with sound or a body moved by it. Increasingly, visual artists declared an affinity with music, while composers and choreographers began taking cues from the visual arts.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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MORGAN RUSSELL (1886-1953), FOUR PART SYNCHROMY, NUMBER 7, 1914-15

Morgan Russell (1886-1953), Four Part Synchromy, Number 7, 1914-15. Oil on cardboard and canvas mounted on cardboard, four parts: 16 × 12 in. (40.6 × 30.5 cm); image, 15 1/4 × 11 3/4 in. (38.7 × 29.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the artist in memory of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney 51.33

It is no accident that the title of this work—Four Part Synchromy, Number 7—sounds like the title of a musical composition. Morgan Russell and fellow painter Stanton MacDonald-Wright named the art movement that they established Synchromism in part because the word means “with color,” but also because it sounds like “symphony,” which means “with sound.”

The Synchromists sought to compose with color just as a musician works with sound. Russell likened the divisions in a canvas such as Four Part Synchromy, Number 7, to musical measures. Perhaps most radically, he imagined that his “color rhythms” would “somehow infuse paintings like this one with the notion of time: they create the illusion that the picture develops, like a piece of music, within a span of time, while the old painting existed strictly in space, its every expression grasped by the spectator simultaneously and at a glance.”

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On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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Learn more at whitney.org/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.