Art & Technology
- Synaesthesia

In "The Sense of Beauty" of 1896, the Harvard philosopher George Santayana wrote:

The fledgling abstract painting movement in Europe was at first fascinated by musical notions of colour. One consequence was that occult visions of music came under serious scrutiny. But a reaction to these tendencies soon set in. Piet Mondrian, himself an ardent Theosophist, reduced his palette to red, yellow and blue, with black and white, to avoid the unreal, 'astral' colours of visionary reports. Even when the Belgian painter Vantongerloo invented a colour-music code in 1920, equating the seven tones of music with the seven rainbow colours, (as De Maistre had done in 1919) Mondrian scoffed that: "he hasn't the faintest idea of the difference between the manner of nature and the manner of art".

On the surface, Mondrian's paintings appear nothing if not the purest exercise in the 'manner of art', all form being reduced to intersecting, narrow lines and the rectangular spaces between them. But it is possible their formality held a deeper significance, as worldly metaphors of spiritual verities known only to the artist. When Alexander Calder, renown for his mobiles, remarked that the paintings would look even better if they moved, Mondrian replied that they were in fact very fast indeed. His riposte suggests the theosophical idea that the true nature of all movement is concealed from common understanding, as vibrations that united all matter and evoked coloured auras on higher planes. On these terms, the most static compositions might well indicate a great deal of movement; equally well, the grids on the paintings' surfaces could convey the rhythms and foot-movements of the foxtrot, which Mondrian practiced obsessively.
Illustration 14 : "WHAT DOES THE VIOLET DO?"
Rudolph Steiner's lecture notes, 1924.
What does the violet do? The violet is all nose. The violet perceives very precisely, for example, what streams forth from Mercury. And it builds up its scent-body accordingly. Thus each single being in the world of plants perceives what is to be smelled in the world of the planets. And so in reality, by means of the planets, the fragrances of the heavens come toward us.
   Wassily Kandinsky's rapport with music seemed to include a synaesthetic response to Wagner's "Lohengrin":
"I saw all my colours in my mind;
they stood before my eyes.
Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me."

   To form a more orderly concept of colour, Kandinsky relied on Rudolf Steiner's spiritual and symbolic reinterpretation of Goethe's work on colours. The Theosophist's lectures of 1908 had inspired him to paint the Ariel scene from Goethe's Faust, replete with rainbow motif. Steiner would often still describe the rainbow as the seven basic colours, which could be augmented by five others (variations on Goethe's purpur) to match the signs of the zodiac and the musical keys. Aromas could also be implicated, along with the planets, in forming a grand, cosmic synaesthesia.
   In 1922, Kandinsky was to amend his seminal text on abstraction, "On the Spiritual in Art", removing the more overt references to occult sciences that had appeared in the 1911 original - the same year that saw the Theosophist Scriabin score works for his 'light keyboard', and a year before Steiner himself broke with Theosophy to found Anthroposophy, his own Christianized version.. Kandinsky moved to analogies of colour with musical timbre rather than pitch, rejecting any mathematical code in favour of a qualitative comparison like Goethe's. The sound of flutes was 'seen' as light blue, while the voices of cellos, double-basses and organs were progressively darker blues. Under the modernizing influence of the composer Arnold Schoenburg, a fellow exhibitor with the Blue Rider group in 1912, he theorized that harmonies of simple colours represented a voice from a vanished age, like the music of Mozart. They preferred to emphasize the stresses and contradictions of modern life.

   The problems of painting music were simplified by Paul Klee in the monochrome "Fugue in Red" (1921): the various fugal themes were shown as different shapes progressing across a dark ground from left to right, leaving trails of after-images like the repetitions of the themes. Klee's later works, though polychrome, still managed to condense musical representation so that large ideas could be shown, as distinct from the musical fragments of De Maistre's later works. Indeed, Klee's "Ad Parnassum" of 1932 depicted the nature of all fugues with a dappled grid of shifting colour, in an architectonic framework, representing fugal texture and procedure.

Illustration 14 : "FUGUE IN RED."

Paul Klee's 1921 painting is a clear metaphor for a musical form: the idea of different themes, frequently repeated by quite separate musical voices is nicely achieved. Klee, a gifted musician, gives the impression of movement from left to right, consistent with the direction in which music is read from a manuscript. Others of his works ("Young Forest", 1925) take on the appearance of manuscript pages themselves.


   With fellow teachers at the Bauhaus, Klee and Kandinsky had investigated the role of colour in music, dance and film. But it was their associate Johannes Itten who, as master of the preliminary course at the Weimar Bauhaus from 1919 to 1923, exerted the greatest influence on the students. He devised a colour wheel that was practicable, rational and could be understood by painters and public alike. Itten hoped to reconcile the rainbow to the craft of painting, where pigment colours were restricted and a more controlled palette was desired. He manipulated the spectrum's fixed colours for aesthetic as well as practical purposes, enabling him to explore colour mixes, and some of the optical effects that had intrigued Goethe and Chevreul.
   But rather than using Newton's spectral progression of ROYGBIV, Itten chose the painters' standard colour wheel. Primaries of red, yellow and blue, plus the secondaries of orange, green and purple (or violet) were supplemented by six intermediate hues to form a twelve-coloured system. Itten's code, though only little different from De Maistre's, managed to avoid the imbalance in the violet region that marred the other's spectrally-based system. The choice of twelve colour divisions - one colour for each of the semitone notes of the musical scale - showed the influence of Itten's friend, J. M. Hauer, who, even prior to Kandinsky's collaborator Schoenberg, had pioneered the twelve-tone technique of musical composition.

   In his writings, Itten revealed the origins of his colour system as a colour-music code, steeped in mysticism. He belonged to the Mazdaznan sect, a Zoroastrian-styled movement that was spreading across Germany. Its rituals - meditation, vegetarianism and other personal disciplines - gained currency as Itten, clad in monk-like garments, sought converts among his students, while Mazdaznan principles of inner harmony influenced the formal studies at the Bauhaus. Gertrud Grunow, Itten's able assistant, pressed the theoretical point further, with a twelve-part colour circle of, her own, where each hue was assigned a musical note and a part of the body. The implied physical connection was reinforced by warm-up exercises of expressive movement, conducted before each class, for "the awakening and development of the creative individual in harmony with himself and the world."
   Much was owed to the influence of E. J. Dalcroze, who had taught eurhythmics in Germany since 1910: his collaboration with the stage designer Adolphe Appia lead to the latter's mystic exaltation of the body in space, as set out in "The Work of Living Art" of 1921. Appia, in pursuit of Wagner's ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk (a theatrical synthesis of all art forms), had laid the basis for modern stage design by the end of the 19th century. He rejected illusionistic settings in favour of neutral three-dimensional forms illuminated by a play of colour. The early stage works of Kandinsky, as well as later productions mounted at the Bauhaus, elucidated Appia's principles.
   By astute combination of up-to-date design ideas, Itten devised an innovative educational program that has remained a model for art schools to the present day. At the Bauhaus, differing disciplines converged under general principles, as revealed by the 1922 curriculum:

   An early German precedent, for a rational colour theory for painters, had been published in Philipp Otto Runge's "Colour-Sphere" of 1810. Colours based on the primaries and secondaries flowed around the equator of his sphere; each colour graduating in tonal steps, lighter and darker, towards either pole of white or black. However, Runge attributed symbolic meaning to colour when deployed,: such that primaries could represent the Holy Trinity in his early paintings. In an upsurge of spiritualism, overtly occult tendencies became apparent in painting by the mid-19th century. A Miss Georgina Houghton, for one, claimed that spirits worked through her to choose colours according to their meanings. A catalogue of her exhibition of 1871 in London listed their meanings, starting with red, yellow and blue as Father, Son and Holy Ghost and detailed many others - burnt sienna, for instance, represented Clearness of Judgement.
   By 1916, Austin Osman Spare believed the mind should become a clear and transparent medium, allowing psychic phenomena to emerge as automatic drawing. His 'scribble of twisting and interlacing lines' were seen as a sort of handwriting, rid of stale formulae, that could tap the depths of memory and instinct. To free the hand, the practitioner had to enter a dream-like state, to liberate the germ of an idea from conscious constraint. That Spare moonlighted as a satanist in the Zos Kia Cultus, indicates his desire to conjure up more than automatic drawings. In this guise, he claimed "he who transmutes the traditionally ugly into another aesthetic value has new pleasures beyond fear", a dictum he also applied to design.
   The unrestrained transformation of libidinal energy was what Spare was after, from subconscious (or even superconscious) forms and ideas. Others were soon to join him: the Surrealists took up automatic methods, inspired by Freud's theories, dreams, madness and children's art,. André Breton adopted the technique for writing in 1919, to allow unmediated, non-rational images to flow freely onto the page: painters like Miró carefully traced abstract, spontaneous sketches on their canvasses: Gordon Onslow-Ford described automatic drawing in the 1940s, for the benefit of his students, the abstract expressionists Pollock and Motherwell: and in 1955, Meret Oppenheim still maintained that works produced via psychic automatism "will always remain alive and will always be revolutionary...because they are in organic liaison with Nature".
   Even more exulted moral evocations of Nature had been employed by Itten, in the service of colour symbolism. At times, he was as morally straightforward as Runge or Miss Houghton - the mix of red and blue that gave violet was equated with the combination of love and faith needed for piety. But Nature was often adored in obscure rhetoric and inflated language; his description of green is impossible to decipher, unless we are aware he was employing a metaphor for photosynthesis:    For all his eccentricity and obscuration, Itten succeeded in developing a rational system to examine paint mixes, contrasting and complementary colours, and effects due to simultaneous contrasts and relative size of colour areas. His system, though based on a colour-music code and infused with mystic meaning, provided a painterly working method of considerable value. The studies of later theorists, such as Joseph Albers, were partly grounded in Itten's work and colour-field painters and op artists were, directly or indirectly, indebted to Itten.
   In hindsight, it appears that the rationalizing tendency of European art had a lasting currency. Stress on formal values enabled artists to investigate new directions and to apply their results to architecture, painting and design. Exceptional circumstances at the Bauhaus between the two Wars promoted the style, which diversified and flourished, eventually to become an international movement. Colour music made an important, if obscure, contribution but had its most enduring value when mystical tendencies were subordinated to formal requirements - as was the case with Johannes Itten's useful colour system.

Illustration 15 : "ARRESTED PHRASE FROM A HAYDN TRIO IN ORANGE-RED MINOR",Roy De Maistre, 1935 (top right).

   De Maistre painted and studied informally in Paris while on scholarship overseas, exhibiting there in mid-1924. He might have seen a one-man show Kupka held in October that year: it is even possible De Maistre was one of the young students to take advantage of the older artist's open-studio policy. There, he could have seen works similar to "Cathedral" (below right). which may have influenced his later colour music paintings. Certainly, the works are stylistically similar with their vertical and diagonal organizations. Thematically, the link seems more tenuous at first, with their different musical and architectural titles. But Kupka himself provided a connection between these different subjects in 1923:

    Though Kupka often expressed dissatisfaction with comparison of his work to music, he continually invoked the metaphor himself. It should also be noted that the painting shown is a variant on his Vertical Planes style, that had its origins in "Piano Keyboard/Lake" of 1909, based on Helmholtz's colour-music code. Very quickly, Kupka had abandoned the pitch-to-colour relations of the code. Early drawing of "Horsemen" and "Woman Picking Flowers", of 1909-10 , showed segmented sequences of motion. Like Muybridge's famous photographs of stop-frame action, their vertical divisions divide the subject into slivers of successive moments. Vertical planes dissolved the subjects in space and time, to produce semi-abstract images of kinetic movement, making Kupka something of a hero to Futurist painters.
   The vertically-divided, horizontal time-sequence - whether of a piece of music or some other event - provides a formal similarity between the works of Kupka and De Maistre. But, while the latter employed the schema to dissect a fleeting moment in music, the former seemed just as inspired by the recent innovations in film. Kupka stressed the geometry of the planes in later paintings, rather than any suggested movement. As realistic motifs were gradually eliminated from Kupka's paintings, De Stijl artists praised them as precursors of their own Neoplastic style. They more and more resembled the architectural designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh or Walter Burley Griffin. Kupka still enjoyed his music, it is true; the pianist Walter Rummel often visited him to play Bach fugues, whose structure Kupka admired. In 1932, Kupka summed up his development in these terms:     Apparently, De Maistre experienced visions that related to his work. But he never made his claims publicly and, in any case, revelations are highly subjective and hard to verify or disprove. His biographer, Heather Johnson, suggests that the lack of music manuscripts in his effects indicated that visions may have inspired his paintings. Otherwise, it is hard to track a coherent development and assess any lasting spiritual influence, due to the spasmodic nature of his colour music work and its abrupt changes in style.
   If we are to believe that De Maistre was clairvoyant, using the hidden but inevitably true colours of music that Theosophists describe, his colour-music code would be the only true one, above all rivals. This interpretation is invited by commentators and is indeed implicit in De Maistre's later works. But it is difficult to believe that an artificial colour-music code, derived from the mismatch of two disparate and highly objective systems (music and colour) had relevance to any visionary or synaesthetic experiences. Moreover, no universal formulation, no code, could account for all person's visions - the synaesthetic experience is particular to each individual and not transferable. Not even Liszt and Rachmaninov could agree on the colours of the musical keys, any more than the card-carrying synaesthetes Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov. However, a colour-music code just might effect visions in a most personal way. If learnt by rote, could it become incorporated in the brain's functioning and, from there, contribute in the production of hallucinations?

   The radical theory of Elkhanon Goldberg postulates a descriptive system within the brain, superimposed on the mutually-exclusive functions of the fixed systems. He locates this facility in the left hemisphere, where it deals with familiar but complex rituals, detecting and handling coded patterns as a matter of routine. Visuo-spacial codes such as architects' plans, musical notation, mathematics, Morse code, games and some languages could all be processed here. Those with artistic skills and other expertise would deal with these codes as a matter of course. Others, with the common eye and the vulgar ear, would be more reliant upon right hemisphere functions to deal with them as concrete but novel experiences; lacking familiarity with the codes, they would not have developed the left-hemisphere capacity to process them automatically and efficiently.
   Richard Cytowic found, by machine testing, that synaesthesia involved the left hemisphere alone. But instead of lighting up the brain with activity, metabolism in the cortex became depressed, to an extent that would indicate crippling brain lesions in normal people. Furthermore, he noted a preponderance of left-handers among synaesthetes. For them, the left-right polarities of the brain are somewhat reversed: the clever processing that happens on the left for right-handers, tends to shift to the right hemisphere.
   To add to the complexity, brain functioning is by no means static throughout the life of any individual. For visual-logical thinking, it is suggested that there is a critical age of between ten and fourteen, beyond which it becomes more difficult to teach the brain new tricks (an example of this is the way children develop almost immediate mastery of video games, that many adults find extremely difficult). Other capacities, like musical skill, can be enhanced by childhood training. But neuronic potential is limitless and develops or deteriorates according to demand. Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz of UCLA's Neuro-Psychiatric Institute, suggests in his recent book "Brain Lock", that even the most basic brain functions can be rerouted, by act of personal will, in later life. Synaesthetes, whose special ability is inherent (probably through the X chromosome), are certainly known to exercise some degree of conscious control over their visions.

   Many visual artists, who learnt music as children, have turned to musical principles to guide their mature careers. If the artist is also a synaesthete, personal visions, as much as vision, can become part of artistic practice. Because the triggers for synaesthesia are often cultural artefacts (the sound of music, the shapes of letters and numbers), its manifestations translate readily into art theory. Synaesthetes are perfectly able to give a significance - often of a mystical nature - to music, art and visionary experience.
   The theoretical and autobiographical writings of the abstract painter Kandinsky frequently explored similarities between colour and music. Selective reading could support the assumption that he was synaesthetic though the overall tenor is as much characteristic of a high Romanticism a young man's reaction to the growing materialism of pre-revolutionary, Muscovite Marxism. Kandinsky's flair for self-publicity (often written retrospectively) suggest his image as a visionary was a self-conscious creation, to some extent. He certainly was aware of contemporary studies of colour-related synaesthesia and chromotherapy. Nor can the influence of his uncle be discounted: Victor Chrisanofovich Kandinsky was considered the father of Russian psychiatry. His researches into hallucinations and related psycho-phenomena could have supplied his young nephew with the language to express visionary yearnings.
   Kandinsky was always impressionable and eclectic. Whether as a teacher at the Bauhaus or an art official in post-revolutionary Russia, he amended his style and theory to suit his position. But it is his distinctive non-objective paintings, executed in the decade preceding his move to the Bauhaus in 1922, on which his reputation chiefly rests. They resemble, at first glance, the automatic drawings of spiritualist artists - spontaneous lines and random patches of colour, produced in a trance-like state while acting as medium for a spirit guide. Kandinsky was fascinated by spiritualism and the occult and certainly knew of their otherworldly visions. He seems to have drawn on descriptions and illustrations of auras in Theosophical literature for some of his early subject matter.
   Kandinsky's notes included a careful outline of meditations advocated by Rudolph Steiner. The artist seemed to think it possible, by following the techniques indicated, to arrive at a state that would suggest new subjects for art, and also induce synaesthesia. Any results would seem to lie outside the present clinical definition of the condition (the causes of which may be genetic). He seems to pine for experiences that, if he were a synaesthete, should have been regular and commonplace. Some elements within his paintings - recurring grids, or lattice maps - might suggest form constants, those visual experiences typical of synaesthesia. But they might readily have mundane origins, as free-hand renditions of graphic devices common to Russian Constructivists.
   Kandinsky's pictures were carefully planned: a wealth of preparatory drawings attest to a painstaking development of symbols from recognizable subjects. One recurrent element was a ship, whether steamer or rowing boat. I would presume these were linked to the artist's youth, spent in Odessa on the shores of the Black Sea (otherwise he lived a landlocked life). It was in Odessa he had first learnt to play cello and piano. Kandinsky's writing on music might have expressed his nostalgic longing for that past, as did the recurrent boats in his paintings. One may surmise that music represented even more to Kandinsky: it embodied his creative urge as it awakened his capacity for self-expression.

   Like De Maistre, Kandinsky turned to painting in his twenties, abandoning his academic studies to do so. Both artists sought, in music, a prototype for painting and a model of a formal approach. Painting sublimated music, to provide a raison d'ętre and, in De Maistre's use of a colour-music code, a working method. Visionary experiences, even synaesthesia, may have been pivotal for them, as well as for other artists, but their work cannot be interpreted from that perspective alone. Other personal considerations, their respective cultural milieus, and certain philosophical traditions that ascribe meaning to the mingling of the senses, all contributed to the creation of their artworks. Similar factors, of course, apply to each of us who attempts to extract a present meaning from the results of our endeavours.
   Describing the role of synaesthesia is always problematic; proof of its very presence mostly depends on whatever disclosures synaesthetes care to make. Medical science usually requires more certain symptoms, and its theories tend to classify what may be highly variable, individual experiences in the manner of general syndromes. The term 'synaesthete' becomes over-scrupulous in the hands of neurologists, even redolent of mental illness and interventionist treatment. As a consequence, scientific definitions of mental states may have little general acceptance, as Lawrence Durrell succinctly pointed out:

   Diagnosis of synaesthesia is particularly difficult in dead men, such as Kandinsky or De Maistre, as it leaves no known pathological trace. Science is on surer ground with other celebrated artists, where Marfan's syndrome (Paganinni), Paget's disease (Beethoven) and mercury poisoning (Cellini) have been indicated. The work of Van Gogh has been scoured for evidence of absinth or digitalis poisoning, or both. But when such forensic evidence is reported, it can seem intrusive and irrelevant at best - sometimes it is met with howls of outrage, for trammelling the sacred preserve of the creative spirit.

   Application of all these theories to Roy De Maistre could prove fascinating, failing the opportunity for brain surgery. He studied music at a time in history when the fusion of art forms was considered aesthetically valid. Perhaps prompted by synaesthesia, his amalgamation of painting with music theory was very much in line with trends of the day. His early spiritual style suggested he was subject to visions: clearly colour was a numinous experience for the new-born painter, who attempted to convey both creativity and personal vision via a code. Superimposed upon De Maistre's work like icing on a cake, the colour-music code seemed to progressively dominate an aspect of his work.
   When his colour-music code was first unveiled, De Maistre was 25 years old - well beyond a formative age. Fifteen years elapsed before his colour-music code re-surfaced in England. Paintings done in the 1930s showed deliberately-coded music, not an unaffected personal vision: the colour-music code appeared to have taken over. Is it possible that, over the years, De Maistre taught his brain the colour-music code he had devised? When he listened to music, did his mind automatically react to musical pitch according to the code for which his brain had been re-programmed? It seems unlikely, even unhealthy.

   By the mid-1930s, De Maistre had evolved a universal method for painting music. He executed a small number of colour music paintings in oil, but their surfaces were flat and patternistic; they lacked the other-worldly sense of the earlier Australian style. Gone were the sweeping curves and arrangements of forms in space. Instead, the picture plane was divided into a number of vertical stripes, crossed by horizontal and oblique lines to form rows of rectangles and lozenges.
   The compositional device seemed intended to clarify musical structure, to paraphrase the musical manuscript. Colour music paintings of the period show De Maistre relied on the grid, as much as on the colour-music code itself. One set of exercises saw him employing the same grid again and again but with a variety of colourations, as if the music were transposing into different keys. The technique culminated in a lengthy sketch called "Colour Music", painted on a piano roll. Now, De Maistre could rely on his musical training to pick apart a piece of music after repeated listening; he could reassemble it visually, using the colour-music code applied to a standardized grid. Far from being descriptions of visions or synaesthesia, his later English works seem quite analytical studies, intended to depict the musical subject literally. Putting aside any subjective reactions, he arrived at an intentionally objective product whose cryptic air resulted from the elaborate methods used mapping an invisible subject-matter.

Illustration 17 : COLOUR MUSIC.

In England, De Maistre settled on a final format for paintings of music that, stylistically, sits somewhere between Mondrian's neoplasticism and the Orphism of Robert Delaunay. The intimate nature of this definitive exercise is emphasised by its format - like a Chinese scroll, it must be unrolled to be seen. That it is painted on a piano roll reflects not only its subject matter, but also De Maistre's poverty and lack of other artists' materials.