Article ID: CBB204426688

The Articulate Eye: Color-Music, the Color Sense, and the Language of Abstraction (2017)

unapi

This essay uses color-music, a performance-based art in which mobile arrangements of luminous hues are projected onto a screen, to expand our understanding of the cultural meanings of abstract color at the turn of the twentieth century. I argue that the justifications that accompanied color-music, especially in their appeals to an evolving "color sense" that had been damaged by mass culture, reveal how the pursuit of pure color as an aesthetic medium drew on nineteenth-century debates about the nature of perception and its relation to language and technology. Using color-musician Alexander Wallace Rimington and painter Wassily Kandinsky as my main examples, I then show how color-music and the color sense shaped the reception of post-Impressionism in the United States and United Kingdom—but also how this affiliation occluded the most interesting aspects of the discourse around color-music, including its dynamic account of how the art of abstract color connects the perceiver to the perceived world.

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Authors & Contributors
Fuldner, Carl
Robinson, Aileen Kaye
Maya Rae Oppenheimer
Rossi, Michael Paul
Wilson, Preston S.
Tyler, Christopher
Concepts
Color
Color theory
Technology and art
Photography
Technology and culture
Drama, dance, and performing arts
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
18th century
20th century, late
Medieval
20th century
Places
United States
Great Britain
Germany
France
Institutions
University of Michigan
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