| The desire to synthesize painting and absolute music, or music without referential literary content, into a new art form of "visual music" is the keynote of modernist abstraction. The universal language of absolute music not only provided the perfect paradigm for abstract painting, but the late nineteenth-century formalist debate in music over absolute and program music also established a theoretical precedent for the public discourse on visual abstraction after 1900. In a period when the public had considerable musical training and critics covered both the visual and musical arts, the rhetoric and metaphor of music gave artists the inspiration for their first breakthroughs to abstraction, while affording the public a familiar ground for appreciating the new art.;This study first focuses on the evolution of the nineteenth-century concept of absolute music and the analogy between music and painting and how these ideas became the ideological foundation for such notable turn of the century American critics, curators, and educators as James Gibbons Huneker, Sadakichi Hartmann, Charles Caffin, Ernest Fenollosa, and Arthur Wesley Dow, among others. It then documents the link between the visual arts and the 1910s revival of Aesthetic and Symbolist literature, which, coinciding with a resurgence of Classical absolute music, projected the music analogy and theory of correspondence into the twentieth century. And, finally, it demonstrates how the music analogy formed the basis for the color theory of Synchromism, America's first abstract art movement. |
