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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AGNES PELTON (1881-1961), UNTITLED, 1931

A surreal painting with a white swan, golden flowers, and abstract shapes against a deep blue background with a star.
A surreal painting with a white swan, golden flowers, and abstract shapes against a deep blue background with a star.

Agnes Pelton, Ahmi in Egypt, 1931. Oil on canvas, 36 3/16 × 24 3/16 in. (91.9 × 61.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Modern Painting and Sculpture Committee 96.175

Agnes Pelton was among the generation of American modernists in the first decades of the twentieth century who rejected realism in favor of portraying their inner emotional states. Her formative training at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, under the art educator Arthur Wesley Dow, instilled in her a lifelong appreciation for the importance of abstract relationships and Japanese aesthetic traditions, in particular the balancing of large asymmetrical areas of black and white (nōtan, as it was called in Japanese). In her first years as a painter she affiliated with members of the Introspectives group, who used traditional, classical forms to convey romantic, mystical ideas. Two of her “imaginative paintings” in this mode, using single female figures in shallow landscape settings to portray nature’s quiet harmonies, were included in the 1913 Armory Show. 

By 1926 Pelton’s desire to paint “the without seen from within,” as she called it, led her to abstraction. For the rest of her life she used the curvilinear, biomorphic shapes of nature to depict the unseen order she believed existed in the world. Untitled, with its fairytale imagery and fantastic elements, is among the most narrative of her abstractions, suggesting a processional journey from right to left on a blood-red river that metaphorically ferries viewers from dark void into the light of transcendence and enlightened truth. In the mid–1930s, Pelton became aligned with a group of younger abstract painters in New Mexico dedicated to portraying the realm of spiritual awareness. Throughout her career she remained committed to producing depictions of what she called the “inside” of experience.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 300. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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On the Hour

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Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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