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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CHARLES BURCHFIELD (1893-1967), CRICKET CHORUS IN THE ARBOR, 1917

Charles Burchfield, Cricket Chorus in the Arbor, 1917

In America Is Hard to See

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Charles Burchfield, Cricket Chorus in the Arbor, 1917

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James Welling: Cricket Chorus seems to depict a hedge or a thick foliage with the sounds of crickets so it must be later in the summer when crickets come out, say in August.

Narrator: Photographer James Welling.

James Welling: It appears to be a sunset image with heavy shadows, deep shadows, and sunlit clouds in the background. Burchfield was extremely interested in representing sound in his work and for him the way to represent sound was through repetitive patterns. So this work starts out probably with a pencil drawing done on location and then the more ornate parts of the foliage, the repetitive patterns done in black watercolor or gouache, for Burchfield seemed to represent the sound patterns that the crickets are making. 

Narrator: This painting is from a period that Burchfield later described as his “golden years”—an enormously productive stretch from 1916 to 18 when he was working for a machine parts company by day and making vast numbers of watercolors before and after work. He had recently finished art school and returned to his home in Salem, Ohio. In this painting and others he tried to express his childhood memories of nature. His focus on transitional moments—when evening turns to night, or summer to fall—suggests that with beauty comes loss. 

Cricket Chorus in the Arbor depicts a modest garden scene that seems to pulsate with the energy of nature. This sensation is largely a result of Charles Burchfield’s efforts to express the sounds of the natural world. We don’t see any crickets here; rather, the artist gave shape to their invisible hum with short, clustered cattail marks and doubled curlicues. Even the leaves appear to rustle in rhythm.

Artists

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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.