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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Shortly before World War I, Stanton Macdonald-Wright and fellow artist Morgan Russell coined the term Synchromy to distinguish their kaleidoscopic canvases from other early manifestations of modernism. Meaning “with color,” the word also evokes “symphony” and thus suggests a relationship to music—the most abstract and, for Macdonald-Wright, ecstatic of art forms. Macdonald-Wright made some completely abstract works, but by 1916 he began to utilize a style of color-infused figuration, as in this painting. Decades later, he said that the picture was “based—in its forms & arrangement & subject matter—on an opium smoking group.” A quartet of figures appears among the shifting colors, with the glow of opium radiating to the right of center. A face, a bent elbow, a bulbous thigh, and an uplifted arm emerge from the richly hued planes. While the blue and green of the title predominate, a full range of hues fans out across the canvas.

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America Is Hard to See

Music, Pink and Blue

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STANTON MACDONALD-WRIGHT (1890–1973), ORIENTAL – SYNCHROMY IN BLUE-GREEN, 1918

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Music, Pink and Blue

3

STANTON MACDONALD-WRIGHT (1890–1973), ORIENTAL – SYNCHROMY IN BLUE-GREEN, 1918

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection