America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Music, Pink and Blue

3

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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RICHMOND BARTHÉ (1901-1989), AFRICAN DANCER, 1933

Richmond Barthé (1901–1989). African Dancer, 1933. Plaster, 42 3/4 × 16 7/8 × 14 1/4 in. (108.6 × 42.9 × 36.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 33.53 © artist or artist’s estate

Richmond Barthé studied sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was steeped in the classical sculptural tradition. In African Dancer he used that sculptural vocabulary to counter the racist stereotypes that still prevailed in early-twentieth-century depictions of African Americans. Like many participants in the Harlem Renaissance—including poet Langston Hughes—Barthé used his art to forge connections with his African heritage. This sculpture is most likely a reference to Hughes’s Danse Africaine, published in 1926:

The low beating of the tom-toms,
The slow beating of the tom-toms,
Low . . . slow
Slow . . . low —
Stirs your blood.
Dance!
A night-veiled girl
Whirls softly into a
Circle of light.
Whirls softly . . . slowly,
Like a wisp of smoke around the fire —
And the tom-toms beat,
And the tom-toms beat,
And the low beating of the tom-toms
Stirs your blood.

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

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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

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

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