De Grazia: The Man and the Myths

7: A Marriage Ends

63 7 A Marriage Ends An artist must sacrifice too many things—family, security, privacy. —De Grazia1 aT The universiTy, De Grazia pursued his fascination with the relationship between art and music. He had thought the idea original , but he soon discovered that the same concept had been proposed by Aristotle more than 2,300 years before.2 It is also likely that he knew about Synchromism, an art movement stressing the musical qualities of color founded in the early 1900s by two American painters in Paris.3 While in Bisbee he had constructed an intricate fourteen-foot panel into which he had installed seven miles of wire, which connected to a special keyboard that controlled more than three hundred light bulbs. As music played, De Grazia manipulated the keyboard, causing the panel to light up. The lights “translated” into various colors, specific abstractions that De Grazia devised for all musical notes, phrases, and movements. The same abstractions were used in his paintings of music.4 De Grazia earned his bachelor’s degrees in music and art and then entered a master’s program. For his thesis, he planned to continue exploring the relationship between art and music. “Basically, music and painting are the same, the common root being emotion,” he said. And he couldn’t help but take a swipe at the art establishment. “Too many painters today have forgotten the important lesson, that chapTer 7 64 true art is life interpretation, not merely an exercise in technique.”5 De Grazia contended that since music moved from left to right, he painted left to right, meaning that his paintings began on the left side of the canvas and ended on the right. “High notes rise, legato is female, staccato is male.”6 He painted eight classical works from sheet music to support his thesis. Using brushstrokes that rose and fell with the notes on the sheet music, De Grazia’s oil painting of Stravinsky’s “Nightingale ” seems to show a rain forest and a waterfall. His rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Concerto no. 1 in B-flat Minor has a look of modern art with lines, circles, squares, and triangles and “gives the feeling of man caught in the whirlpool of life,” while his painting of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude, op. 23, no. 5 is black at the bottom of the canvas with brilliant colors shooting upward. In his thesis he wrote, “There is no doubt in this writer’s mind that pure colors and music will in the future be inseparable and that one will not be thought of without the other. It will appeal to man’s intellects, emotions, and imaginations.”7 Under the direction of Professor Katherine Kitt, De Grazia conducted two tests to establish the relationship between music and art. He gave one test to 358 music, drama, and education students, who listened to Brahms’s Hungarian Dance no. 5. The test’s results surprised even him. “The principal inference to be drawn was that fundamentally people will feel in music what they experience in painting , which was an encouraging conclusion.”8 The second test was a color-and-music pattern experiment given to 370 of the same types of students. He had them listen to Sibelius’s Finlandia, op. 26. The test result, De Grazia said, “proved that the feeling roused by music can be translated into painting so that what the ear hears the eye can see.”9 De Grazia suggested to the students that when making their choices they should listen, not to their brains, but to their emotions. Freshman Roberta Sinnock recalled that De Grazia used to sit on the wide steps of the library (now the Arizona State Museum) and hold court during class breaks. “We’d all sit around, and he was sort of the master, you know, because he was so far advanced in his work compared to us. And he was very kind to us.” The students looked up to De Grazia, then thirty-five, although Sinnock, who later became an illustrator for children’s books, said A Marriage Ends 65 he looked younger than his age and “he was very nice looking.” To conduct the test, De Grazia set up easels with his paintings on them and then played music. He walked around the room pointing to the paintings as the music rose and fell. This, he felt, prepared the students to understand the questions on...