America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

Music, Pink and Blue

Music, Pink and Blue

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.

It is no accident that the title of this work—Four Part Synchromy, Number 7—sounds like the title of a musical composition. Morgan Russell and fellow painter Stanton MacDonald-Wright named the art movement that they established Synchromism in part because the word means “with color,” but also because it sounds like “symphony,” which means “with sound.”

The Synchromists sought to compose with color just as a musician works with sound. Russell likened the divisions in a canvas such as Four Part Synchromy, Number 7, to musical measures. Perhaps most radically, he imagined that his “color rhythms” would “somehow infuse paintings like this one with the notion of time: they create the illusion that the picture develops, like a piece of music, within a span of time, while the old painting existed strictly in space, its every expression grasped by the spectator simultaneously and at a glance.”

Each year on her birthday, Florine Stettheimer picked an assortment of seasonal flowers and recorded the event in her journal. The central motif of Sun is her fiftieth birthday bouquet. Stettheimer depicts the flowers entwined with a snake, suggesting the disturbance of a feminized Eden by a phallic serpent. The blooms are set against a terraced garden viewed from above, near the Hudson River. A woman, perhaps the artist, lounges under an arbor, contemplating the landscape with its Italianate architecture. Stettheimer included typography in this whimsical work and combined traditional perspective with distortions in viewpoint and scale. As was her common practice, the artist designed the painting’s frame and had it specially fabricated. Sun’s frame was made to simulate white lace, in keeping with the furnishings Stettheimer designed for her family’s New York apartment on West 58th Street in Manhattan and for her own midtown Beaux Arts studio overlooking Bryant Park.

Richmond Barthé studied sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was steeped in the classical sculptural tradition. In African Dancer he used that sculptural vocabulary to counter the racist stereotypes that still prevailed in early-twentieth-century depictions of African Americans. Like many participants in the Harlem Renaissance—including poet Langston Hughes—Barthé used his art to forge connections with his African heritage. This sculpture is most likely a reference to Hughes’s Danse Africaine, published in 1926:

The low beating of the tom-toms,
The slow beating of the tom-toms,
Low . . . slow
Slow . . . low —
Stirs your blood.
Dance!
A night-veiled girl
Whirls softly into a
Circle of light.
Whirls softly . . . slowly,
Like a wisp of smoke around the fire —
And the tom-toms beat,
And the tom-toms beat,
And the low beating of the tom-toms
Stirs your blood.

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.

0:00

Charles Burchfield, Cricket Chorus in the Arbor, 1917

0:00

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.

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.

0:00

Georgia O'Keeffe, Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, 1918

0:00

Wanda Corn: When these paintings were seen for the first time, very often critics would see in them female forms. They would see in it allusions to the womb or to female reproductive organs. They would see womanly colors such as the pinks, the blues and the lavender. And it would be read as a painting that was one that could only have been made by a female intelligence.

This was a common way of talking about O'Keeffe's paintings in her early years. It was one that was prompted by her husband Alfred Stieglitz who liked to read in O'Keeffe's paintings an expression of the sort of eternal female.

O'Keeffe herself felt as if that was more a comment on the critic than what she intended. She often would say it's about natural forms, but it's not to be tied to exclusively the female body. And she would have you rather see in a work like this a kind of slipperiness of form where you can't tie it to any one thing, be it a flower or be it a female body or be it a landscape. But that it has poetic allusions to all of those.

In her abstract paintings, Georgia O’Keeffe invented a new and original language of form and color. Rather than depicting the outward, tangible forms of nature, she evoked the experience of being in nature, enveloped by an infinity and wonder that could not be expressed in words. Using a vocabulary of undulating, biomorphic forms and a technique of gently feathering her palette of hues into one another, she created animate, breathing works that suggest the fluid rhythms of the natural world and—as with symphonic music—portray emotions beyond conscious grasp.

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

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.

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 646 works

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Music, Pink and Blue

MORGAN RUSSELL (1886-1953), FOUR PART SYNCHROMY, NUMBER 7, 1914-15

FLORINE STETTHEIMER (1871-1944), SUN, 1931

RICHMOND BARTHÉ (1901-1989), AFRICAN DANCER, 1933

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

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

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

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986), MUSIC, PINK AND BLUE NO. 2, 1918

AGNES PELTON (1881-1961), UNTITLED, 1931

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

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Music, Pink and Blue

MORGAN RUSSELL (1886-1953), FOUR PART SYNCHROMY, NUMBER 7, 1914-15

FLORINE STETTHEIMER (1871-1944), SUN, 1931

RICHMOND BARTHÉ (1901-1989), AFRICAN DANCER, 1933

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

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

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

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986), MUSIC, PINK AND BLUE NO. 2, 1918

AGNES PELTON (1881-1961), UNTITLED, 1931

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

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection