America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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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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Each year on her birthday, Florine Stettheimer picked an assortment of seasonal flowers and recorded the event in her journal. The central motif of Sun is her fiftieth birthday bouquet. Stettheimer depicts the flowers entwined with a snake, suggesting the disturbance of a feminized Eden by a phallic serpent. The blooms are set against a terraced garden viewed from above, near the Hudson River. A woman, perhaps the artist, lounges under an arbor, contemplating the landscape with its Italianate architecture. Stettheimer included typography in this whimsical work and combined traditional perspective with distortions in viewpoint and scale. As was her common practice, the artist designed the painting’s frame and had it specially fabricated. Sun’s frame was made to simulate white lace, in keeping with the furnishings Stettheimer designed for her family’s New York apartment on West 58th Street in Manhattan and for her own midtown Beaux Arts studio overlooking Bryant Park.

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America Is Hard to See

Music, Pink and Blue

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FLORINE STETTHEIMER (1871-1944), SUN, 1931

Artists

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Music, Pink and Blue

3

FLORINE STETTHEIMER (1871-1944), SUN, 1931

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection