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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Convinced that art’s purpose was to uncover the truths beneath visible appearances, Oscar Bluemner rejected the strict imitation of external reality in favor of an expressionist style that could convey consciousness and mood. His aim, as he described it, was to transform “objective reality to a subjective realization of personal vision.” The evocative title of this painting adds to the meditative, symbolic quality Bluemner invested in his landscapes. In Last Evening of the Year, objects are reduced to simplified geometries with an economy of means that verges on abstraction. Still, landscape elements persist, including snow-covered vegetation and a small dwelling. Interested in Sigmund Freud’s ideas of psychoanalysis and the unconscious, which he began to study around this time, Bluemner referred to gnarled trees—such as those depicted here—as surrogates for the human body, analogously shaped by hardship. This painting was shown at the Whitney Studio Galleries in 1929, where Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney purchased it for her own collection.

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America Is Hard to See

Music, Pink and Blue

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OSCAR BLUEMNER (1867-1938), LAST EVENING OF THE YEAR, C. 1929

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Music, Pink and Blue

3

OSCAR BLUEMNER (1867-1938), LAST EVENING OF THE YEAR, C. 1929

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection