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

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.