America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

All

3 / 23

Previous Next

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.

Back

9 / 9

Previous Next

ALFRED STIEGLITZ (1864–1946), SONGS OF THE SKY B3, 1923

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), Songs of the Sky B3, 1923. Gelatin silver print, 4 1/2 × 3 1/2in. (11.4 × 8.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Promised gift of Sondra Gilman Gonzalez-Falla and Celso Gonzalez-Falla to Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and The Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla Arts Foundation P.2014.105. © 2015 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In 1922 Alfred Stieglitz—the influential photographer who played a seminal role in defining and promoting modern art in the early twentieth century—began to document the sky at his family estate on Lake George in New York. He eventually produced more than two hundred images, including Songs of the Sky B3, for the series, which came to be called Equivalent. The small size of these prints, made with a handheld Graflex camera, contrasts with their expansive subject. Light, the very substance of photography, is foregrounded here, expressing the tension between the transitory and the eternal that underlies photographic practice.

This series was a departure for Stieglitz, who spent much of his career advocating for “straight photography” through the numerous institutions he developed. These included the magazine Camera Work and a succession of important galleries in which he championed the work of fellow photographers such as Edward Steichen and Paul Strand along with the paintings of European and American modernists—including his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, whose painterly abstractions of nature may have influenced the Equivalent series.

In this early print from the series, wisps of woolen white-and-gray clouds frame a slice of piercing light against a darkened sky. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the soft, curving shapes of the dissipating clouds, which, disconnected from everyday experience, are meant to suggest an “equivalence” between one’s thoughts and nature. “Several people feel I have photographed God,” Stieglitz wrote to the poet Hart Crane in 1923. By connecting his inner life to the natural world, Stieglitz imbues a cross-section of the sky with spiritual depth through a rhythm of abstracted forms.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 369. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 648 works

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.