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Jack Whitten photographed in his Queens studio on October 26, 2015.©KATHERINE MCMAHON

Some artists use their long careers to perfect a style by creating variations on a theme, while others try to keep up with the times by continually doing something new. Jack Whitten was the latter kind of artist. By the end of his life, he had experimented with formalist painting, abstract portraiture, and even mystical visions of current events. "I want a worldview that will teach me how to conduct myself in this new world order," he told ARTnews in an interview for a profile on the occasion of a traveling retrospective. "That's what I'm working on"-and it was something he continued doing up until the end.

Whitten, whose process-based canvases pushed abstraction into new territory, has died at age 78, according to his gallery Hauser & Wirth. "It is with great sadness that we confirm the passing of Jack Whitten," Marc Payot, a partner and vice president at the gallery, said in a statement. "He was a remarkable man-an artist of endless inventiveness, originality, and honesty, as well as a wonderful friend. His intelligence, compassion, and love for life have influenced all of us who knew and worked with him. Our hearts are with Jack's family at this time."

As with many painters whose style matured during the late 1960s and early '70s, Whitten's career wasn't widely recognized until the past few years. But today, when Whitten's visually seductive paintings appear in major museum shows, it has become difficult to imagine a history of abstract painting without his work.

Jack Whitten, April's Shark, 1974, acrylic on canvas.©JACK WHITTEN/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH

Starting in the early '70s, Whitten engineered new extrapolations on Abstract Expressionism. For a series known as the "Slab" works, Whitten utilized an unconventional process for which he would lay the canvas on the floor, drag a squeegee across to mix his color, and then let the paint dry. Paint was piled on as much as a quarter-inch thick in many of them, and all of the tones Whitten chose were left visible. With their warped, colorful forms and their unclear geometries, they resemble long-exposure photographs of things in motion.

By that point, Whitten had eschewed using oil, instead opting for acrylic paint, which dried faster. In doing so, Whitten relinquished some control over his canvases, leaving the final results to chance in some respects. To test the ways that time and tools affected the painting process became Whitten's mandate.

Some of these "Slab" works appeared at a 1974 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York-an unusual fate for a black painter who was relatively unknown in the art world. At the time, Whitten's style was unfashionable. Much of the New York art world had focused on movements that were believed to have more intellectual heft, like Minimalism, Conceptualism, and, later, the workings of the Pictures Generation. Painting had gone out of style, and yet Whitten continued doing it for his entire career, occasionally making forays into sculpture. (Some of his sculptural works were recently on view at Hauser & Wirth in New York.)

Other works by Whitten made use of unconventional tools and materials. In a series from the mid-'70s based on the Greek alphabet, Whitten placed metal sheets beneath his canvases, on which he applied wet acrylic that he then rubbed with pure powdered pigment. Through the process, Whitten was able to create textured canvases in which gray forms appear to hover.

In later works, Whitten came up with a mosaic-like method for applying paint. He would let acrylic dry, crack it into squarish chips, and then combine it to conjure images of people and objects that were important to him. Sometimes, what was being represented is not obvious: a series known as the "E Stamps," from the mid-2000s, eulogized figures in Whitten's life, like the curator Marcia Tucker and the painter Harvey Quaytman, through patterns that resemble postal codes that appear on mailed packages. An ongoing series begun in the '90s known as the "Black Monoliths" memorialized pioneering African-Americans, like Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka, without ever showing their faces.

Jack Whitten, Black Monolith, II: Homage to Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man, 1994, acrylic and mixed media on canvas: molasses, copper, salt, coal ash, chocolate, onion, herbs, rust, eggshell, razor blade.©JACK WHITTEN/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH

Ethereal and oftentimes mystical, Whitten's paintings came out of inquiries into philosophical, scientific, and mathematical concepts. The chipped-paint technique in the "E Stamps" works, for example, often makes his work shine, and it sprang from reading up on the physical properties of light. "We know now that light occurs in extremely small particles," he once told ARTnews. "That's what allows us to see-those little fucking photons bouncing around your retina, and blam-o, I can see!"

Whitten was born in 1939 in Bessemer, Alabama. A formative element of his upbringing was the racism he experienced there-he often referred to the segregation he experienced as "American apartheid." When he went to college at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he became involved in the civil rights movement, staging sit-ins on campus and even peacefully closing the school briefly. In 1960, having tired of the South's racism, Whitten left for New York on a Greyhound bus. He went to Cooper Union and graduated in 1964.

Unlike many artists at the time, Whitten was less interested in gestural abstraction than he was in something he would later term "conceptual painting." He had in mind a specific phrase: "The image is photographic, therefore I must photograph my thoughts." His series of "Head" paintings, some of his first mature works, offered wispy forms that look like specters appearing out of the dark. Crafted using a mesh-like fabric, the works confused his gallerist at the time, Allan Stone, who instead showed Whitten's brushy, chaotically composed abstract oil paintings inspired by the civil rights movement.

Jack Whitten, Apps for Obama, 2011, acrylic on hollow-core door.©JACK WHITTEN/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH

For much of Whitten's career, his work went unrecognized to large segments of the mainstream art world. But the inclusion of his paintings in a 2006 exhibition, "High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975," helped occasion a change. In 2014, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, California, hosted his first major retrospective which later traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Walker Art Center. A 40-work survey of his sculptures will open in April 2018 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and will later travel to the Met Breuer.

By the end of his career, Whitten had started exploring digital technology, creating works such as Apps for Obama (2011), which might be considered a vision of Barack Obama's iPad. The painting made use of Whitten's beloved acrylic chips-an age-old technique that was here rendered new. Where Whitten's work might have gone next will continue to intrigue, especially since Whitten himself often didn't know. He was fond of quoting a sentiment that Stone frequently cited to him: "There's no destination, it's only the journey."

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Jack Whitten, Beloved Painter of Abstract Cosmologies, Dies at 78

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Some artists use their long careers to perfect a style by creating variations on a theme, while others try to keep up with the times by continually doing something new. Jack Whitten was the latter kind of artist. By the end of his life, he had experimented with formalist painting, abstract portraiture, and even mystical visions of current events.

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Jack Whitten was born in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1939. He attended Tuskegee University as a pre-medical student and ROTC cadet, but later transferred to Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana to study art. There, he became involved in the American civil-rights movement and took part in the spring 1960 student demonstrations, staging sit-ins and a shutdown of the university. After living in New Orleans, Whitten moved to New York City, where he received his BFA in painting from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1964.

While Whitten's early work combined figuration and abstraction, he later made a significant conceptual and stylistic shift, moving from oil paint to acrylic to focus on the process and materiality of painting. Whitten's "developer"-a twelve-foot-long wooden rake invented by the artist to move large amounts of acrylic paint in a single gesture-resulted in his "slab" paintings, large color fields defined by a single movement. Whitten's proclivity for invention also manifested in his signature kind of tesserae: small cubes cut from slabs of acrylic paint and adhered to the canvas, angled to catch and reflect light. Investigating the notion of paint as a collage element, Whitten used the tesserae as a vehicle to further explore his passion for science and technology; he thought of the tesserae as individual bytes of information.

For over four decades, Whitten utilized the tesserae to develop his Black Monolith series. Believing that art should reflect the period in which it's made, Whitten created these paintings as abstracted tributes to Black artists, musicians, and public figures such as Ralph Ellison, Chuck Berry, and W.E.B. Du Bois. One of the most influential abstract and conceptual painters of his generation, Whitten lived in New York City, where he passed away in January 2018.

9:19

A weekly digest of things to watch, read, and hear from the comforts of your home, selected by Art21-featured artists and Art21 staff.

A weekly digest of things to watch, read, and hear from the comforts of your home, selected by Art21-featured artists and Art21 staff.

Conversation Starter

Bold color and whimsical brush strokes can evoke a visceral reaction, even if you're not quite sure what you're looking at.

Interview

Interviewed in his Queens, New York studio in October 2017, Jack Whitten reflects on his childhood, the inequality he faced as a Black artist, and the necessity of fighting simplistic dichotomies.

Art21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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The drying oil is a vegetable oil, often made by crushing nuts or seeds. For paints, linseed oil is most commonly used, but poppy, sunflower, safflower, soya bean and walnut oils can also been used. The advantage of the slow-drying quality of oil paint is that an artist can develop a painting gradually, making changes or corrections if necessary.

Oil paints blend well with each other, making subtle variations of colour possible as well as more easily creating details of light and shadow. They can also be diluted with turpentine or other thinning agents. A heavily diluted layer dries relatively quickly, being tack-free in a few days. Thicker layers, containing more oil, take longer. Oil paint continues to dry, getting harder with age over many decades. Pigments and extenders will also affect the rate of drying, so different colours may dry at different speeds.

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The drying oil is a vegetable oil, often made by crushing nuts or seeds. For paints, linseed oil is most commonly used, but poppy, sunflower, safflower, soya bean and walnut oils can also been used. The advantage of the slow-drying quality of oil paint is that an artist can develop a painting gradually, making changes or corrections if necessary.

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First made in the 1950s acrylic paint uses a synthetic resin to bind pigments. As it can be diluted with water and used thinly or thickly depending on how much water is added to it, it can resemble a watercolor or an oil painting, or have its own unique characteristics not attainable with other media.

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Soak-Stain Like Helen Frankenthaler | Oklahoma City Museum of Art | OKCMOA

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Helen Frankenthaler was an American artist who invented a technique called "soak-stain" in the 1950s. This technique involved using thinned-down paint to create abstract paintings. Instead of using thick, opaque oil paint, Frankenthaler would add paint thinner until the paint was the consistency of watercolor.

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having the property of transmitting light without appreciable scattering so that bodies lying beyond are seen clearly : pellucid; allowing the passage of a specified form of radiation (such as X-rays or ultraviolet light); fine or sheer enough to be seen through : diaphanous... See the full definition

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At first glance, it's hard to know what to make of Helen Frankenthaler's heaving, atmospheric painting, The Bay.

Is its subject what the title suggests-a landform of some kind with certain emblematic associations? Is the swelling amorphous blue mass floating amid that moss green and cream border meant to stand for something beyond itself? With many Abstract Expressionist paintings of the 1950s and 60s, it's important not to get too caught up with possible social and historical contexts and biography, but to focus on what's before us-the physical elements of the work itself because those elements can tell us so much about the painting.

When Helen Frankenthaler painted The Bay, she was already a well-regarded artist. She'd been the subject of a LIFE Magazine profile in 1956 and was one of the handful of women among the traditional all-boys' club of the New York Abstract Expressionists. The Bay was chosen as one of the paintings for the American pavilion of the 1966 Venice Biennale. Looking closely you can see that the shades of blues that run into one another are part of a specific process of pouring paint on to the canvas rather than painting the colors onto the surface with a brush, as the leading Abstract Expressionist painters, like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, were so famous for doing.

Frankenthaler's approach here was to use a soak-stain method with diluted acrylic paint. Acrylics gave her more flexibility with viscosity and movement than oils, and allowed her more control as she poured that thinned paint onto the taut unprimed canvas so that it would get absorbed into the weave of the fabric. As a substitute for the action of the brush, Frankenthaler would lift the canvas and tilt it at various angles so that the paint would flow across the surface. She had to account for gravity and the ebb and flow of a liquid across a flat surface, so a fascinating aspect of Frankenthaler's method is the blend of the artist's control paired with the unpredictability of the forces of nature.

This kind of painting is often classified as Color Field painting, painting characterized by simplicity of line and a focus on color as the subject rather than as an add-on. The first generation of Abstract Expressionists, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman were the first important Color Field painters, while Helen Frankenthaler is often classified as a second-generation member of the group.

Frankenthaler was inspired by the drip method of Jackson Pollock who began painting on the floor in the late 1940s, but she knew she wanted to work differently. Pollock and other artists such as de Kooning and Franz Kline had made the painted gesture too famous and recognizable by the early 1950s. In 1952, at the age of 23, Frankenthaler's experiments lead her to produce her first major painting, Mountains and Sea, an expansive luminous depiction of the landscape of Nova Scotia, where she'd recently taken a holiday.

Mountains and Sea in turn inspired other painters to use this soak-stain method to great success, painters like Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Paul Feeley, whose canvases of floating thinned color heralded in a new era of abstract painting. The sense of natural spontaneity and devotion to color is part of what makes The Bay and the work of the Color Field painters so compelling. The basic formal elements of a painting speak for themselves as the viewer experiences the work in a fundamental, direct manner.

The influential mid-20th century art critic, Clement Greenberg, a close friend of Frankenthaler (and Pollock), believed that if art made after the trauma of the second world war was going to have any real impact on the social consciousness of Americans it would have to radically change and move towards the abstract. For Greenberg, abstraction could reach a more universal and expansive mode of visual communication.

In a 1965 interview for Artforum Magazine with the art critic Henry Geldzahler, Helen Frankenthaler described her process of conceptualizing her work:

"When you first saw a Cubist or Impressionist picture there was a whole way of instructing the eye or the subconscious. Dabs of color had to stand for real things. It was an abstraction of a guitar or a hillside. The opposite is going on now. If you have bands of blue, green and pink, the mind doesn't think sky, grass and flesh. These are colors and the question is what are they doing with themselves and with each other. Sentiment and nuance are being squeezed out." Helen Frankenthaler [1]

That last sentence, "sentiment and nuance are being squeezed out," is crucial. The colors on the canvas don't have to represent something in particular, but can have a more ambiguous, emblematic quality for the viewer. The basic act of responding to color, the way one would respond to a sunset, or to light from a stained-glass window, simplicity and pure emotion through clarity of color and form.

The same year she painted The Bay, Frankenthaler painted a series of similar soak-stain paintings with titles referring to water and geography: Canal, Low Tide, Blue Tide, inspired by the landscape of her country home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. As Frankenthaler said, it's important for us not to be too encumbered by context and speculation when we look at her work. We're to take from it what we will on our own terms.

[1] Henry Geldzahler, "An Interview with Helen Frankenthaler," Artforum Magazine 4, no. 2 (1965): pp. 36-38.

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Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay (article) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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Helen Frankenthaler's abstractions, often made by staining vibrant hues into unprimed canvas, have captured the minds of many, even if at one point, their aesthetic charm was once considered a demerit. "She is too proficient about beauty," the critic Sanford Schwartz once wrote. On the occasion of a 1960 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, in a review that personally rankled Frankenthaler and her friends, ARTnews critic Anna Seelye wrote, "All of the paintings are nervous and therefore distracting." Others poked fun at her work, comparing her canvases to wet rags.

Helen Frankenthaler, Before the Caves, 1958.

These days, it is hard to imagine anyone lobbing these kinds of insults at Frankenthaler, who is now considered one of the most important Abstract Expressionists. With her expansive paintings featuring forms that many have compared to landscapes and natural elements, she engineered a style that tended toward large swaths of color that were allowed to bleed into the canvas. Frankenthaler knew she was playing to the senses with these works, and often saw no problem with that. "What concerns me when I work," she told the New York Times in 1989, "is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is-did I make a beautiful picture?"
But just how, exactly, did Frankenthaler make her beautiful pictures? With Fierce Poise, a new book about Frankenthaler's rise in 1950s New York, due out later this month, below is a look back at the artist's life and work.

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952
Helen Frankenthaler, Eden, 1956.
Helen Frankenthaler receiving the National Endowment for the Arts's National Medal of Arts Awards in 2002. Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivai/AP
Soak and Stain
Many have attributed the beginnings of Frankenthaler's famed aesthetic-"soak-stain," as she often termed it-to a habit from her childhood. As a kid living on New York's Upper East Side, she would fill the bathroom sink with cold water and pour her mother's drip red nail polish into it, allowing it to disperse and create abstract forms in the water, contrasting with the stark white porcelain. (While her parents were bemused by the behavior, the affluent family's maid was not.) This would act as a precursor to the technique she began deploying in the 1950s, when she allowed her paint to absorb into her canvas, creating inky, barely-there forms that coalesce in the mind's eye to form landscapes.
In her creative breakthrough Mountains and Sea (1952), for example, a pile-up of rose- and cerulean-colored forms is cast against a dirtied background. Standing over an unstretched canvas place on the floor, Frankenthaler poured her paint, thinned with turpentine, from coffee cans, allowing it to spill forth, drip, and splatter. Because Frankenthaler's paint was so thin, the drips are still visible. Though no obvious mountains or sea can be glimpsed here, it evokes the essence of a real landscape that Frankenthaler glimpsed while traveling in Nova Scotia. Eight years later, critics began using the term Color Field painting to refer to works such as this one.
While Frankenthaler's art would grow increasingly rich in its hues and more and more dense in its compositions, her work of that era stood in sharp contrast to the most famous Abstract Expressionists. Jackson Pollock had become known for his all-over abstractions made by flinging globs of paint around giant canvases, and Barnett Newman had made his mark on the New York scene with his steely and-relatively speaking-more minimal paintings alluding to religion and philosophical inquiries. These and works by Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and other male artists associated with the movement are bombastic, grand paintings that feel epic as one stands before them. By contrast, Frankenthaler's paintings are more sedate affairs, filled with cool colors and exposed, unprimed canvas that hints at a psychologically fraught atmosphere. The critic Clement Greenberg, who dated Frankenthaler during the '50s, once ascribed their searching quality to what he called Innerlichkeit, or inwardness, which he felt was "the real task" for Jewish Americans like himself and Frankenthaler. Her goal, her nephew Clifford Ross says in Nemerov's new book, was to create "a richer, slower sense of how you perceive a picture, how you read a picture."

'I'm Not a Suffragette'
Although Frankenthaler is not a household name in the same way as Pollock or Rothko, it's impossible to describe her as an outsider when it comes to Abstract Expressionism. A second-generation Abstract Expressionist who grappled with how she could tweak Pollock's innovations for her own means, Frankenthaler rose to fame in her early twenties and was at the center of the New York scene. She led a relationship with Greenberg, one of the top art critics of the day, and she later married Robert Motherwell, who was known for his foreboding black abstractions focused on death and absence. (They divorced in 1971 after 13 years of marriage.) And she had contact with the day's top artists, from David Smith to Grace Hartigan.
Frankenthaler's gender has always been a sort of fascination, both during her lifetime and after, because she was one of the few female Abstract Expressionists. (Mary Gabriel's essential 2018 book Ninth Street Women charts the manifold ways that gender influenced how people thought of Frankenthaler, Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, and Elaine de Kooning.) But Frankenthaler did not believe in the label "women artist" because she thought gender ought not play a role in determining whether someone has talent.
In 1989, when critic Deborah Solomon asked Frankenthaler whether she was a feminist, Frankenthaler replied, "I'm not a suffragette."
Born in 1928, Frankenthaler got a strong art education at the Dalton School, a prestigious New York prep school, from Rufino Tamayo, a Mexican painter of Surrealist scenes. Afterward, she attended Bennington College in Vermont. Even though she vowed to stop taking art classes after she graduated in 1949, she began to study with painter Hans Hofmann at the urging of Greenberg, who she started dating in 1950. Those classes helped her get away from the Cubism-inspired mode she had been trying to make her own and pushed her toward complete abstraction. By the end of her 20s, thanks in part to a Life magazine appearance featuring a portrait shot by Gordon Parks, who would later become famous for his civil rights movement photography fame, Frankenthaler had become one of New York's most famous artists.

Fireworks
By the start of the 1960s, however, interest in Frankenthaler's art was declining as more conceptually inclined movements, which did not place as much emphasis on color, line, form, and beauty, began to take over the New York. Even though Frankenthaler's art came to seem "old" to a younger crowd when the artist had just barely turned 30, the world's most august institutions continued to take note. She was given a Whitney Museum retrospective in 1969, and a Museum of Modern Art retrospective followed 20 years later. And in 1966, she represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennale in Italy.
All the while, Frankenthaler's art shifted dramatically. During the '60s, she began to eschew oil for acrylic, a faster-drying paint that caused her forms to appear less translucent. And her compositions began to grow more intense, with an emphasis on blotchy forms and more vivid colors.
A fan of Old Masters artists like Peter Paul Rubens, whose Baroque art made use of dramatic compositions and dynamic imagery, Frankenthaler continued creating abstractions that feel animated by an unseen energy. "Something in her pictures implies that color is a force, as if the painter must commit to it as a full-on saturation of the canvas, a power that all but dyes itself on the eye, if it is to have any reason for being there at all," Nemerov writes in Fierce Poise.
Her colors continued to heat up during the '70s, when velvety reds and deep blues began to fill the whole space of her canvases, though her '80s works marked a return to more placid territory. Almost always, these paintings-and the ones she would continue to produce up to her death in 2011-seem to refer to landscapes, even when they descend into total abstraction. In Grey Fireworks (1982), for example, pops of pink, purple, red-orange, and white acrylic paint dot an inky background resembling a kind of fog. Although the work's title feels downcast (what could be more disappointing than a drab firework?), the painting itself seems to resist expectations, its bursts of color create a shocking diversion from everything else surrounding them.

- Alex Greenberger for ARTnews

© Helen Frankenthaler / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Courtesy Berkeley Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gagosian

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Helen Frankenthaler's Liberated Abstractions Charted A New Path For Painting

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Helen Frankenthaler's abstractions, often made by staining vibrant hues into unprimed canvas, have captured the minds of many, even if at one point, their aesthetic charm was once considered a demerit. "She is too proficient about beauty," the critic Sanford Schwartz once wrote.

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Definition of drip painting | Dictionary.com

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Drip painting definition, a technique of abstract painting exemplified chiefly in the later works of Jackson Pollack and marked by the intricately executed dripping and pouring of the paint on a canvas placed on the floor. See more.

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1866-1944, abstract expressionist, co-founder of the artist group "The Blue Rider" Kandinsky has, like no other, the written "Alphabet of 20th century art". In his abstract painting he brought the original force of colour and composition without the distraction of mapping of object effect. The mystery of life could be captured and represented only by the abstract clash of colour and graphic form in his opinion.

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866 and died in 1944 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. The Economist and lawyer decided in 1896 with his relocation to Munich, finally for an artistic career and began the study of art there. In 1901 he founded time school "Phalanx", he met his future partner of the Munich years Gabriele Munter. Many travels through Europe and Tunis marked its artistic possibilities of expression through the various impressions. Gabriele Munter bought a house in Murnau in 1909, this was a longer period of stay in the town and in Munich.

Kandinsky's early Munich pictures were under the influence of Art Nouveau and the Russian folk art, whose fairy-tale themes long worked in his works after. The glass paintings of the co-founder of the "New Artists' Association Munich" from 1909 and the "The Blue Rider "of 1911 reflect Kandinsky impressions of popular Bavarian art tradition.

During the First World War, the Russians held back on in Moscow. In 1922 he returned to Germany and played a decisive role at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. Ultimately, it took Kandinsky however to Paris. He lived from 1933 with his wife, whom he had married in Russia, until his death in the metropolis on the Seine.

The encounter with the Russian constructivists showed his mark in Kandinsky's work through geometry and lines that are in dynamic tension with each other. In his theoretical writings he outlined the fundamental harmony of abstract art. The close relationship between music and painting discovered the viewer not only in his paintings, but it is also underlined by the composer Kandinsky: "Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, and the soul is the sound body with many strings. The artist is the virtuoso who brings the soul to vibrate with its grips ..."

This form of presentation comes from the world of professional photographers and exhibition organizers. More and more artists create their works for this aluminum carrier in high-tech composite. The metallic surface create a synthesis with the colors. White image areas are shimmering matt-metallic, depending on the light source. They let the picture look classy and puristic. Thanks to the direct color pigmentation the details are rendered accurately. Alu-Dibond is durable and resistant.

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Original: 1925, oil on canvas, 128 x 201,5 cm (H/W). Gifted by Nina Kandinsky, 1976, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne. Reproduction under the 3 mm thick acryllic glass on the aluminum plate. Limited edition 499 copies. Format 60 x 95 cm (H/W).

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Kenneth Noland, Beginning, 1958, magna on canvas painting, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Working in Washington, D.C., Noland was a pioneer of the color field movement in the late 1950s.

Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."

During the late 1950s and 1960s, color field painters emerged in parts of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the United States, particularly New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, using formats of stripes, targets, simple geometric patterns and references to landscape imagery and to nature.

Henri Matisse, Porte-fenêtre à Collioure (French Window at Collioure), 1914, Centre Georges Pompidou, "Throughout my life, the 20th-century painter whom I've admired the most has been Matisse", Robert Motherwell 1970.[3]

The focus of attention in the world of contemporary art began to shift from Paris to New York after World War II and the development of American abstract expressionism. During the late 1940s and early 1950s Clement Greenberg was the first art critic to suggest and identify a dichotomy between differing tendencies within the abstract expressionist canon. Taking issue with Harold Rosenberg (another important champion of abstract expressionism), who wrote of the virtues of action painting in his article "American Action Painters" published in the December 1952 issue of , Greenberg observed another tendency toward all-over color or color field in the works of several of the so-called "first generation" abstract expressionists.

Mark Rothko was one of the painters that Greenberg referred to as a color field painter exemplified by Magenta, Black, Green on Orange, although Rothko himself refused to adhere to any label. For Rothko, color was "merely an instrument". In a sense, his best known works - the "multiforms" and his other signature paintings - are, in essence, the same expression, albeit one of purer (or less concrete or definable, depending on the interpretation) means, which is that of the same "basic human emotions", as his earlier surrealistic mythological paintings. What is common among these stylistic innovations is a concern for "tragedy, ecstasy and doom". By 1958, whatever spiritual expression Rothko meant to portray on canvas, it was growing increasingly darker. His bright reds, yellows and oranges of the early 1950s subtly transformed into dark blues, greens, grays and blacks. His final series of paintings from the mid-1960s were gray, and black with white borders, seemingly abstract landscapes of an endless bleak, tundra-like, unknown country.

Rothko, during the mid-1940s, was in the middle of a crucial period of transition, and he had been impressed by Clyfford Still's abstract fields of color, which were influenced in part by the landscapes of Still's native North Dakota. In 1947, during a subsequent semester teaching at the California School of Fine Art (known today as the San Francisco Art Institute), Rothko and Still flirted with the idea of founding their own curriculum or school. Still was considered one of the foremost color field painters - his non-figurative paintings are largely concerned with the juxtaposition of different colors and surfaces. His jagged flashes of color give the impression that one layer of color has been "torn" off the painting, revealing the colors underneath, reminiscent of stalactites and primordial caverns. Still's arrangements are irregular, jagged, and pitted with heavy texture and sharp surface contrast as seen above in 1957D1.

Another artist whose best known works relate to both abstract expressionism and to color field painting is Robert Motherwell. Motherwell's style of abstract expressionism, characterized by loose opened fields of painterly surfaces accompanied by loosely drawn and measured lines and shapes, was influenced by both Joan Miró and by Henri Matisse. Motherwell's Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110 (1971) is a pioneering work of both abstract expressionism and color field painting. While the Elegy series embodies both tendencies, his Open Series of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s places him firmly within the color field camp. In 1970 Motherwell said, "Throughout my life, the 20th-century painter whom I've admired the most has been Matisse", alluding to several of his own series of paintings that reflect Matisse's influence, most notably his Open Series that come closest to classic color field painting.

Barnett Newman is considered one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters. Newman's mature work is characterized by areas of color pure and flat separated by thin vertical lines, or "zips" as Newman called them, exemplified by Vir Heroicus Sublimis in the collection of MoMA. Newman himself thought that he reached his fully mature style with the Onement series (from 1948) seen here. The zips define the spatial structure of the painting while simultaneously dividing and uniting the composition. Although Newman's paintings appear to be purely abstract, and many of them were originally untitled, the names he later gave them hinted at specific subjects being addressed, often with a Jewish theme. Two paintings from the early 1950s, for example, are called Adam and Eve (see Adam and Eve), and there are also (1954) and (1949), a very dark painting, which, in addition to being the name of a biblical patriarch, was also the name of Newman's father, who had died in 1947. Newman's late works, such as the Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue series, use vibrant, pure colors, often on very large canvases.

Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt and Arshile Gorky (in his last works) were among the prominent abstract expressionist painters that Greenberg identified as being connected to color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s.

Although Pollock is closely associated with action painting because of his style, technique, and his painterly 'touch' and his physical application of paint, art critics have likened Pollock to both action painting and color field painting. Another critical view advanced by Clement Greenberg connects Pollock's allover canvases to the large-scale Water Lilies of Claude Monet done during the 1920s. Greenberg, art critic Michael Fried, and others have observed that the overall feeling in Pollock's most famous works - his drip paintings - read as vast fields of built-up linear elements often reading as vast complexes of similar valued paint skeins that read as all over fields of color and drawing, and are related to the mural-sized late Monets that are constructed of many passages of close valued brushed and scumbled marks that also read as close valued fields of color and drawing that Monet used in building his picture surfaces. Pollock's use of all-over composition lend a philosophical and a physical connection to the way the color field painters like Newman, Rothko and Still construct their unbroken and in Still's case broken surfaces. In several paintings that Pollock painted after his classic drip painting period of 1947-1950, he used the technique of staining fluid oil paint and house paint into raw canvas. During 1951 he produced a series of semi-figurative black stain paintings, and in 1952 he produced stain paintings using color. In his November 1952 exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City Pollock showed Number 12, 1952, a large, masterful stain painting that resembles a brightly colored stained landscape (with an overlay of broadly dripped dark paint); the painting was acquired from the exhibition by Nelson Rockefeller for his personal collection. In 1960 the painting was severely damaged by fire in the Governors Mansion in Albany that also severely damaged an Arshile Gorky painting and several other works in the Rockefeller collection. However, by 1999 it had been restored and was installed in Empire State Plaza.

While Arshile Gorky is considered to be one of the founding fathers of abstract expressionism and a surrealist, he was also one of the first painters of the New York School who used the technique of "staining". Gorky created broad fields of vivid, open, unbroken color that he used in his many of his paintings as grounds. In Gorky's most effective and accomplished paintings between the years 1941 and 1948, he consistently used intense stained fields of color, often letting the paint run and drip, under and around his familiar lexicon of organic and biomorphic shapes and delicate lines. Another abstract expressionist whose works in the 1940s call to mind the stain paintings of the 1960s and the 1970s is James Brooks. Brooks frequently used stain as a technique in his paintings from the late 1940s. Brooks began diluting his oil paint in order to have fluid colors with which to pour and drip and stain into the mostly raw canvas that he used. These works often combined calligraphy and abstract shapes. During the final three decades of his career, Sam Francis' style of large-scale bright abstract expressionism was closely associated with color field painting. His paintings straddled both camps within the abstract expressionist rubric, action painting and color field painting.

Having seen Pollock's 1951 paintings of thinned black oil paint stained into raw canvas, Helen Frankenthaler began to produce stain paintings in varied oil colors on raw canvas in 1952. Her most famous painting from that period is Mountains and Sea (as seen below). She is one of the originators of the color field movement that emerged in the late 1950s. Frankenthaler also studied with Hans Hofmann. Hofmann's paintings are a symphony of color as seen in The Gate, 1959-1960. Hofmann was renowned not only as an artist but also as a teacher of art, both in his native Germany and later in the U.S. Hofmann, who came to the United States from Germany in the early 1930s, brought with him the legacy of Modernism. Hofmann was a young artist working in Paris who painted there before World War I. Hofmann worked in Paris with Robert Delaunay, and he knew firsthand the innovative work of both Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Matisse's work had an enormous influence on him, and on his understanding of the expressive language of color and the potentiality of abstraction. Hofmann was one of the first theorists of color field painting, and his theories were influential to artists and to critics, particularly to Clement Greenberg, as well as to others during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1953 Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland were both profoundly influenced by Frankenthaler's stain paintings after visiting her studio in New York City. Returning to Washington, DC., they began to produce the major works that created the color field movement in the late 1950s.

In 1972 then Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler said:

Clement Greenberg included the work of both Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland in a show that he did at the Kootz Gallery in the early 1950s. Clem was the first to see their potential. He invited them up to New York in 1953, I think it was, to Helen's studio to see a painting that she had just done called Mountains and Sea, a very, very beautiful painting, which was in a sense, out of Pollock and out of Gorky. It also was one of the first stain pictures, one of the first large field pictures in which the stain technique was used, perhaps the first one. Louis and Noland saw the picture unrolled on the floor of her studio and went back to Washington, DC., and worked together for a while, working at the implications of this kind of painting.

Morris Louis's painting Where 1960, was a major innovation that moved abstract expressionist painting forward in a new direction toward color field and minimalism. Among Louis's major works are his various series of color field paintings. Some of his best known series are the Unfurleds, the Veils, the Florals and the Stripes or Pillars. From 1929 to 1933, Louis studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts (now Maryland Institute College of Art). He worked at various odd jobs to support himself while painting and in 1935 was president of the Baltimore Artists' Association. From 1936 to 1940, he lived in New York and worked in the easel division of the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. During this period, he knew Arshile Gorky, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jack Tworkov, returning to Baltimore in 1940. In 1948, he started to use Magna - oil-based acrylic paints. In 1952, Louis moved to Washington, D.C., living there somewhat apart from the New York scene and working almost in isolation. He and a group of artists that included Kenneth Noland were central to the development of color field painting. The basic point about Louis's work and that of other color field painters, sometimes known as the Washington Color School in contrast to most of the other new approaches of the late 1950s and early 1960s, is that they greatly simplified the idea of what constitutes the look of a finished painting.

Noland, working in Washington, DC., was also a pioneer of the color field movement in the late 1950s who used series as important formats for his paintings. Some of Noland's major series were called Targets, Chevrons and Stripes. Noland attended the experimental Black Mountain College and studied art in his home state of North Carolina. Noland studied with professor Ilya Bolotowsky who introduced him to neo-plasticism and the work of Piet Mondrian. There he also studied Bauhaus theory and color with Josef Albers and he became interested in Paul Klee, specifically his sensitivity to color. In 1948 and 1949 he worked with Ossip Zadkine in Paris, and in the early 1950s met Morris Louis in Washington, DC.

In 1970 art critic Clement Greenberg said:

I'd place Pollock along with Hofmann and Morris Louis in this country among the very greatest painters of this generation. I actually don't think there was anyone in the same generation in Europe quite to match them. Pollock didn't like Hofmann's paintings. He couldn't make them out. He didn't take the trouble to. And Hofmann didn't like Pollock's allover paintings, nor could most of Pollock's artist friends make head or tail out of them, the things he did from 1947 to '50. But Pollock's paintings live or die in the same context as Rembrandt's or Titian's or Velázquez's or Goya's or David's or ... or Manet's or Ruben's or Michelangelo's paintings. There's no interruption, there's no mutation here. Pollock asked to be tested by the same eye that could see how good Raphael was when he was good or Piero when he was good.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s young artists began to break away stylistically from abstract expressionism; experimenting with new ways of making pictures; and new ways of handling paint and color. In the early 1960s several and various new movements in abstract painting were closely related to each other, and superficially were categorized together; although they turned out to be profoundly different in the long run. Some of the new styles and movements that appeared in the early 1960s as responses to abstract expressionism were called: Washington Color School, hard-edge painting, geometric abstraction, minimalism, and color field.

Gene Davis also was a painter known especially for paintings of vertical stripes of color, like Black Grey Beat, 1964, and he also was a member of the group of abstract painters in Washington, D.C. during the 1960s known as the Washington Color School. The Washington painters were among the most prominent of the mid-century color field painters.

Jack Bush, Big A, 1968. Bush was a Canadian abstract expressionist painter, born in Toronto, Ontario in 1909. He became closely tied to the two movements that grew out of the efforts of the abstract expressionists: color field painting and lyrical abstraction.[21]

The artists associated with the color field movement during the 1960s were moving away from gesture and angst in favor of clear surfaces and gestalt. During the early to mid-1960s color field painting was the term for the work of artists like Anne Truitt, John McLaughlin, Sam Francis, Sam Gilliam, Thomas Downing, Ellsworth Kelly, Paul Feeley, Friedel Dzubas, Jack Bush, Howard Mehring, Gene Davis, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Goodnough, Ray Parker, Al Held, Emerson Woelffer, David Simpson, Vasa Velizar Mihich and others whose works were formerly related to second generation abstract expressionism; and also to younger artists like Larry Poons, Ronald Davis, Larry Zox, John Hoyland, Walter Darby Bannard and Frank Stella. All were moving in a new direction away from the violence and anxiety of action painting toward a new and seemingly calmer language of color.

Although color field is associated with Clement Greenberg, Greenberg actually preferred to use the term post-painterly abstraction. In 1964, Clement Greenberg curated an influential exhibition that traveled the country called post-painterly abstraction. The exhibition expanded the definition of color field painting. Color field painting clearly pointed toward a new direction in American painting, away from abstract expressionism. In 2007 curator Karen Wilkin curated an exhibition called Color As Field: American Painting 1950-1975 that traveled to several museums throughout the United States. The exhibition showcased several artists representing two generations of color field painters.

In 1970 painter Jules Olitski said:

I don't know what Color Field painting means. I think it was probably invented by some critic, which is okay, but I don't think the phrase means anything. Color Field painting? I mean, what is color? Painting has to do with a lot of things. Color is among the things it has to do with. It has to do with surface. It has to do with shape, It has to do with feelings which are more difficult to get at.

Jack Bush was a Canadian abstract expressionist painter, born in Toronto, Ontario in 1909. He was a member of Painters Eleven, the group founded by William Ronald in 1954 to promote abstract painting in Canada, and was soon encouraged in his art by the American art critic Clement Greenberg. With encouragement from Greenberg, Bush became closely tied to two movements that grew out of the efforts of the abstract expressionists: color field painting and lyrical abstraction. His painting Big A is an example of his color field paintings of the late 1960s.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s Frank Stella was a significant figure in the emergence of minimalism, post-painterly abstraction and color field painting. His shaped canvases of the 1960s like Harran II, 1967, revolutionized abstract painting. One of the most important characteristics of Stella's paintings is his use of repetition. His Black Pin Stripe paintings of 1959 startled and shocked an art world that was unused to seeing monochromatic and repetitive images, painted flat, with almost no inflection. During the early 1960s Stella made several series' of notched Aluminum Paintings and shaped Copper Paintings before making multi-colored and asymmetrical shaped canvases of the late 1960s. Frank Stella's approach and relationship to color field painting was not permanent or central to his creative output; as his work became more and more three-dimensional after 1980.

In the late 1960s Richard Diebenkorn began his Ocean Park series; created during the final 25 years of his career and they are important examples of color field painting. The Ocean Park series exemplified by Ocean Park No.129, connects his earlier abstract expressionist works with Color field painting. During the early 1950s, Richard Diebenkorn was known as an abstract expressionist, and his gestural abstractions were close to the New York School in sensibility but firmly based in the San Francisco abstract expressionist sensibility; a place where Clyfford Still has a considerable influence on younger artists by virtue of his teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute.

By the mid-1950s, Richard Diebenkorn along with David Park, Elmer Bischoff and several others formed the Bay Area Figurative School with a return to Figurative painting. During the period between the fall 1964 and the spring of 1965 Diebenkorn traveled throughout Europe, he was granted a cultural visa to visit and view Henri Matisse paintings in important Soviet museums. He traveled to the then Soviet Union to study Henri Matisse paintings in Russian museums that were rarely seen outside of Russia. When he returned to painting in the Bay Area in mid-1965 his resulting works summed up all that he had learned from his more than a decade as a leading figurative painter. When in 1967 he returned to abstraction his works were parallel to movements like the color field movement and lyrical abstraction but he remained independent of both.

During the late 1960s Larry Poons whose earlier Dot paintings were associated with Op Art began to produce looser and more free formed paintings that were referred to as his Lozenge Ellipse paintings of 1967-1968. Along with John Hoyland, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Ronald Davis, Ronnie Landfield, John Seery, Pat Lipsky, Dan Christensen and several other young painters a new movement that related to color field painting began to form; eventually called lyrical abstraction. The late 1960s saw painters turning to surface inflection, deep space depiction, and painterly touch and paint handling merging with the language of color. Among a new generation of abstract painters who emerged combining color field painting with expressionism, the older generation also began infusing new elements of complex space and surface into their works. By the 1970s Poons created thick-skinned, cracked and heavy paintings referred to as Elephant Skin paintings; while Christensen sprayed loops, colored webs of lines and calligraphy, across multi-colored fields of delicate grounds; Ronnie Landfield's stained band paintings are reflections of both Chinese landscape painting and the color field idiom, and John Seery's stained painting as exemplified by East, 1973, from the National Gallery of Australia. Poons, Christensen, Davis, Landfield, Seery, Lipsky, Zox and several others created paintings that bridge color field painting with lyrical abstraction and underscore a re-emphasis on landscape, gesture and touch.

Color field painting is related to post-painterly abstraction, suprematism, abstract expressionism, hard-edge painting and lyrical abstraction. It initially referred to a particular type of abstract expressionism, especially the work of Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb and several series of paintings by Joan Miró. Art critic Clement Greenberg perceived color field painting as related to but different from action painting.

An important distinction that made color field painting different from abstract expression was the paint handling. The most basic fundamental defining technique of painting is application of paint and the color field painters revolutionized the way paint could be effectively applied.

Color field painting sought to rid art of superfluous rhetoric. Artists like Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Adolph Gottlieb, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Friedel Dzubas, and Frank Stella, and others often used greatly reduced formats, with drawing essentially simplified to repetitive and regulated systems, basic references to nature, and a highly articulated and psychological use of color. In general these artists eliminated overt recognizable imagery in favor of abstraction. Certain artists quoted references to past or present art, but in general color field painting presents abstraction as an end in itself. In pursuing this direction of modern art, these artists wanted to present each painting as one unified, cohesive, monolithic image often within series' of related types.

In distinction to the emotional energy and gestural surface marks and paint handling of abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, color field painting initially appeared to be cool and austere. Color field painters efface the individual mark in favor of large, flat, stained and soaked areas of color, considered to be the essential nature of visual abstraction along with the actual shape of the canvas, which Frank Stella in particular achieved in unusual ways with combinations of curved and straight edges. However, color field painting has proven to be both sensual and deeply expressive albeit in a different way from gestural abstract expressionism. Denying connection to abstract expressionism or any other Art Movement Mark Rothko spoke clearly about his paintings in 1956:

I am not an abstractionist ... I am not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. ... I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on - and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions. ... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!

Joan Miró was one of the first and most successful stain painters. Although staining in oil was considered dangerous to cotton canvas in the long run, Miró's example during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s was an inspiration and an influence on the younger generation. One of the reasons for the success of the color field movement was the technique of staining. Artists would mix and dilute their paint in buckets or coffee cans making a fluid liquid and then they would pour it into raw unprimed canvas, generally cotton duck. The paint could also be brushed on or rolled on or thrown on or poured on or sprayed on, and would spread into the fabric of the canvas. Generally artists would draw shapes and areas as they stained. Many different artists employed staining as the technique of choice to use in making their paintings. James Brooks, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Paul Jenkins, and dozens of other painters found that pouring and staining opened the door to innovations and revolutionary methods of drawing and expressing meaning in new ways. The number of artists who stained in the 1960s greatly increased with the availability of acrylic paint. Staining acrylic paint into the fabric of cotton duck canvas was more benign and less damaging to the fabric of the canvas than the use of oil paint. In 1970 artist Helen Frankenthaler commented about her use of staining:

When I first started doing the stain paintings, I left large areas of canvas unpainted, I think, because the canvas itself acted as forcefully and as positively as paint or line or color. In other words, the very ground was part of the medium, so that instead of thinking of it as background or negative space or an empty spot, that area did not need paint because it had paint next to it. The thing was to decide where to leave it and where to fill it and where to say this doesn't need another line or another pail of colors. It's saying it in space.

Few artists used the spray gun technique to create large expanses and fields of color sprayed across their canvases during the 1960s and 1970s. Some painters who effectively used spray painting techniques include Jules Olitski, who was a pioneer in his spray technique that covered his large paintings with layer after layer of different colors, often gradually changing hue and value in subtle progression. Another important innovation was Dan Christensen's use of a spray technique to great effect in loops and ribbons of bright color; sprayed in clear, calligraphic marks across his large-scale paintings. William Pettet, Richard Saba, and Albert Stadler, used the technique to create large-scale fields of multi-colors; while Kenneth Showell sprayed over crumpled canvases and created an illusion of abstract still-life interiors. Most of the spray painters were active especially during the late 1960s and 1970s.

Stripes were one of the most popular vehicles for color used by several different color field painters in a variety of different formats. Barnett Newman, Morris Louis, Jack Bush, Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland and David Simpson, all made important Series' of stripe paintings. Although he did not call them stripes but zips Barnett Newman's stripes were mostly vertical, of varying widths and sparingly used. In Simpson and Noland's case their stripe paintings were all mostly horizontal, while Gene Davis painted vertical stripe paintings and Morris Louis mostly painted vertical stripe paintings sometimes called Pillars. Jack Bush tended to do both horizontal and vertical stripe paintings as well as angular ones.

Magna, a special artist use acrylic paint was developed by Leonard Bocour and Sam Golden in 1947 and reformulated in 1960, specifically for Morris Louis and other stain painters of the color field movement. In Magna pigments are ground in an acrylic resin with alcohol-based solvents. Unlike modern water-based acrylics, Magna is miscible with turpentine or mineral spirits and dries rapidly to a matte or glossy finish. It was used extensively by Morris Louis, and Friedel Dzubas and also by Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Magna colors are more vivid and intense than regular acrylic water-based paints. Louis used Magna to great effect in his Stripe Series, where the colors are used undiluted and are poured unmixed directly from the can.

In 1972, former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler said:

Color field, curiously enough or perhaps not, became a viable way of painting at exactly the time that acrylic paint, the new plastic paint, came into being. It was as if the new paint demanded a new possibility in painting, and the painters arrived at it. Oil paint, which has a medium that is quite different, which isn't water-based, always leaves a slick of oil, or puddle of oil, around the edge of the color. Acrylic paint stops at its own edge. Color field painting came in at the same time as the invention of this new paint.

Acrylics were first made commercially available in the 1950s as mineral spirit-based paints called Magna offered by Leonard Bocour. Water-based acrylic paints were subsequently sold as "latex" house paints, although acrylic dispersion uses no latex derived from a rubber tree. Interior "latex" house paints tend to be a combination of binder (sometimes acrylic, vinyl, pva and others), filler, pigment and water. Exterior "latex" house paints may also be a "co-polymer" blend, but the very best exterior water-based paints are 100% acrylic.

Soon after the water-based acrylic binders were introduced as house paints, both artists - the first of whom were Mexican muralists - and companies began to explore the potential of the new binders. Acrylic artist paints can be thinned with water and used as washes in the manner of watercolor paints, although the washes are fast and permanent once dry. Water-soluble artist-quality acrylic paints became commercially available in the early 1960s, offered by Liquitex and Bocour under the trade name of Aquatec. Water-soluble Liquitex and Aquatec proved to be ideally suited for stain painting. The staining technique with water-soluble acrylics made diluted colors sink and hold fast into raw canvas. Painters such as Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Dan Christensen, Sam Francis, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Larry Poons, Sherron Francis, Jules Olitski, Gene Davis, Ronald Davis, Sam Gilliam and others successfully used water-based acrylics for their new stain, color field paintings.

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No.129, 1984. The Ocean Park series connects his earlier abstract expressionist works with Color field painting. The influence of both Henri Matisse and Joan Miró is particularly strong in this painting.

Henri Matisse, View of Notre-Dame, 1914, Museum of Modern Art. The Matisse paintings French Window at Collioure and View of Notre Dame[45] both from 1914 exerted tremendous influence on American color field painters in general (including Robert Motherwell's Open Series) and on Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings specifically.

The painterly legacy of 20th-century painting is a long and intertwined mainstream of influences and complex interrelationships. The use of large opened fields of expressive color applied in generous painterly portions, accompanied by loose drawing (vague linear spots and/or figurative outline) can first be seen in the early 20th-century works of both Henri Matisse and Joan Miró. Matisse and Miró, as well as Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian directly influenced the abstract expressionists, the color field painters of post-painterly abstraction and the lyrical abstractionists. Late 19th-century Americans like Augustus Vincent Tack and Albert Pinkham Ryder, along with early American Modernists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, and Milton Avery's landscapes also provided important precedents and were influences on the abstract expressionists, the color field painters, and the lyrical abstractionists. Matisse paintings French Window at Collioure, and View of Notre-Dame both from 1914 exerted tremendous influence on American color field painters in general, (including Robert Motherwell's Open Series), and on Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings specifically. According to art historian Jane Livingston, Diebenkorn saw both Matisse paintings in an exhibition in Los Angeles in 1966, and they had an enormous impact on him and his work. Jane Livingston says about the January 1966 Matisse exhibition that Diebenkorn saw in Los Angeles:

It is difficult not to ascribe enormous weight to this experience for the direction his work took from that time on. Two pictures he saw there reverberate in almost every Ocean Park canvas. View of Notre Dame and French Window at Collioure, both painted in 1914, were on view for the first time in the US.

Livingston goes on to say "Diebenkorn must have experienced French Window at Collioure, as an epiphany."

Miró was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He pioneered the technique of staining; creating blurry, multi-colored cloudy backgrounds in thinned oil paint throughout the 1920s and 1930s; on top of which he added his calligraphy, characters and abundant lexicon of words, and imagery. Arshile Gorky openly admired Miró's work and painted Miró-like paintings, before finally discovering his own originality in the early 1940s. During the 1960s Miró painted large (abstract expressionist scale) radiant fields of vigorously brushed paint in blue, in white, and other monochromatic fields of colors; with blurry black orbs and calligraphic stone-like shapes, floating at random. These works resembled the color field paintings of the younger generation. Biographer Jacques Dupin said this about Miró's work of the early 1960s:

These canvases disclose affinities - Miró does not in the least attempt to deny this - with the researches of a new generation of painters. Many of these, Jackson Pollock for one, have acknowledged their debt to Miró. Miró in turn displays lively interest in their work and never misses an opportunity to encourage and support them. Nor does he consider it beneath his dignity to use their discoveries on some occasions.

Taking its example from other European modernists like Miró, the color field movement encompasses several decades from the mid 20th century through the early 21st century. Color field painting actually encompasses three separate but related generations of painters. Commonly used terms to refer to the three separate but related groups are abstract expressionism, post-painterly abstraction, and lyrical abstraction. Some of the artists made works in all three eras, that relate to all of the three styles. Color field pioneers such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, John Ferren, Adolph Gottlieb, and Robert Motherwell are primarily thought of as abstract expressionists. Artists like Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Francis, Richard Diebenkorn, Jules Olitski, and Kenneth Noland were of a slightly younger generation, or in the case of Morris Louis aesthetically aligned with that generation's point of view; that started out as abstract expressionists but quickly moved to post-painterly abstraction. While younger artists like Frank Stella, Ronald Davis, Larry Zox, Larry Poons, Walter Darby Bannard, Ronnie Landfield, Dan Christensen, began with post-painterly abstraction and eventually moved forward towards a new type of expressionism, referred to as lyrical abstraction. Many of the artists mentioned, as well as many others, have practiced all three modes at one phase of their careers or another. During the later phases of color field painting; as reflections of the zeitgeist of the late 1960s (in which everything began to hang loose) and the angst of the age (with all of the uncertainties of the time) merged with the gestalt of post-painterly abstraction, producing lyrical abstraction which combined precision of the color field idiom with the malerische of the abstract expressionists. During the same period of the late 1960s, and early 1970s in Europe, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and several other painters also began producing works of intense expression, merging abstraction with images, incorporating landscape imagery, and figuration that by the late 1970s was referred to as Neo-expressionism.

The following is a list of color field painters, closely related artists and some of their more important influences:

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Schwabsky, Barry. "Irreplaceable Hue - Color Field Painting". ArtForum 1994. Look Smart 20 April 2007.

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Wilkin, Karen and Belz, Carl. Color As Field: American Painting, 1950-1975. Published: Yale University Press; 1 edition (November 29, 2007). ISBN 0-300-12023-0, ISBN 978-0-300-12023-3

Livingston, Jane. The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, with essays by John Elderfield, Ruth E. Fine, and Jane Livingston. The Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997, ISBN 0-520-21257-6

De Antonio, Emile and Tuchman, Mitchell. Painters Painting A Candid History of The Modern Art Scene, 1940-1970, Abbeville Press 1984, ISBN 0-89659-418-1

Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró Life and Work, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publisher, New York City, 1962, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-19132

Various authors: Barbara Rose, Gerald Nordland, Walter Hopps, Hardy S. George; Breaking the Mold, Selections from the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, 1961-1968, exhibition catalogue, Oklahoma City Museum of Art 2007, ISBN 0-911919-05-8

Cynthia Goodman. Hans Hofmann, with essays by Irving Sandler, and Clement Greenberg; Exhibition Catalog, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in association with Prestel-Verlag, Munich, ISBN 0-87427-070-7

Irving Sandler. The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties, Harper & Row, 1978 ISBN 0-06-438505-1

Aldrich, Larry. Young Lyrical Painters, Art in America, v.57, n6, November-December 1969, pp. 104-113.

Peter Schjeldahl. New Abstract Painting: A Variety of Feelings, Exhibition review, "Continuing Abstraction", The Whitney Downtown Branch, 55 Water St. NYC. The New York Times, October 13, 1974.

Kertess, Klaus. Peter Young Paintings 1963-1980. Parc Foundation. ISBN 978-1-931885-68-3

Kertess, Klaus. The Nature of Paint, Ronnie Landfield:Forty Years of Color Abstraction, Exhibition Catalog, ISBN 978-0-9820841-2-0

Carmean, E.A. Toward Color and Field, Exhibition Catalogue, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 1971.

Carmean, E.A. Helen Frankenthaler A Paintings Retrospective, Exhibition Catalog, Harry N. Abrams in conjunction with The Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, ISBN 0-8109-1179-5

Henning, Edward B. Color & Field, Art International May 1971: 46-50.

Tucker, Marcia. The Structure of Color, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, 1971.

Robbins, Daniel. Larry Poons: Creation of the Complex Surface, Exhibition Catalogue, Salander/O'Reilly Galleries, pp. 9-19, 1990.

Michael Fried. Morris Louis, Harry N. Abrams, Library of Congress Number: 79-82872

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Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists.

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https://theartofeducation.edu/2014/03/18/10-creative-critiques-to-try-this-school-year/

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Many of us might cringe thinking back to our days of college art critiques. A poorly-facilitated critique can not only be a waste of time, but can also be disheartening for students. Many of us have been on the teacher side of things too, asking students to respond and engage and getting crickets in return. So, the question is, how can we make the critique process useful? Dare I say, enjoyable? I'd like to share some incredible critique activities to try in your room. You just might find yourself in the midst of a fantastic, meaningful discussion!

Here are 10 Creative Critiques to Try This School Year

1. Table Top Twitter

Place a piece of art in the middle of each table on top of a large sheet of paper. Have students use 140 characters or less to leave a written response on the large paper.

2. Ping Pong Critique

Write thought-provoking questions on ping pong balls and place them in a jar. Students must draw a ball and talk or write about the question. As they get better, students can write their own questions to place in the jar.

3. Strengths/Weaknesses

Make a two-column graphic organizer. For each piece of art have students write three strengths and three weaknesses. Always have them back up their opinions with visual evidence!

These ideas are a great place to start. If you're looking for a comprehensive take on critiques in the art room, be sure to check out the Critiques at Every Level PRO Learning Pack. You'll learn how to simplify critiques and engage your students!

4. Interview

Have students use a set of questions to interview each other about their art and the process of making it. Students must report to the class about their partners' work, rather than their own.

5. I Wonder...

Rather than forming statements or opinions, limit the students to only writing questions about the work. Warn them that they may never know the real answers!

6. Limitations

Give students a limitation ( sometimes the path to the most creative thinking!) on how they participate in the critique. For example: You must comment 3, and only 3, times.

7. Love Letters

Write a love letter or Dear John letter to a piece of art. Bring some student emotion into the discussion by having them explain why they love or hate the piece.

8. What happens next?

Ask students to extend their thinking by making inferences. Have students look at a piece of art and create or write about what happens in the next five minutes of the scene, or in the five minutes before the scene. This works best for narrative pieces.

9. Reflection Process

When reflecting, have students get into higher order thinking by asking these questions in this order - What did I do? What was important about it? Where could I use this again? Did I see any patterns emerging? How well did I do? What should I do next?

10. Devil's Advocate

Have students write both an argument for why a piece is successful and why it is not successful. By having to explain opinions opposite of their own, they must think even more deeply.
Have you used any of these methods in your classroom? What would you add to the list?

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10 Creative Critiques to Try This School Year - The Art of Education University

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Many of us might cringe thinking back to our days of college art critiques. A poorly-facilitated critique can not only be a waste of time, but can also be disheartening for students. Many of us have been on the teacher side of things too, asking students to respond and engage and getting crickets in return.

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Missouri-based artist Melissa McCracken paints music. As a synesthete, the sounds that she hears every day-whether it's someone's name or a song on the radio-are translated into vibrant, beautiful colors that carry the cadence of melodies. McCracken's vivid paintings stem from her desire to capture her daily experiences so that others can understand the brilliant, saturated world she inhabits.

Until the age of 15, McCracken thought that everyone lived in the same hue-rich, dynamic realm of color that she had known since birth. "Basically, my brain is cross-wired," she explains regarding her synesthesia. "I experience the 'wrong' sensation to certain stimuli. Each letter and number is colored and the days of the year circle around my body as if they had a set point in space. But the most wonderful 'brain malfunction' of all is seeing the music I hear. It flows in a mixture of hues, textures, and movements, shifting as if it were a vital and intentional element of each song."

Her oil and acrylic paintings express snippets of the dizzyingly spectacular sights she sees and hears each day. Inspired by certain songs, the works of art burst with texture and splashes of polychromatic delight. To get a better sense of what the artist experienced as she created each painting, click the song title beneath each image to listen to the music that inspired such gorgeous works.

As an artist with synesthesia, Melissa McCracken paints abstract paintings inspired by music.

All images via Melissa McCracken.

This post has been updated.

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Artist with Synesthesia Paints Music as Gorgeous Splashes of Color

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Missouri-based artist Melissa McCracken paints music. As a synesthete, the sounds that she hears every day-whether it's someone's name or a song on the radio-are translated into vibrant, beautiful colors that carry the cadence of melodies. McCracken's vivid paintings stem from her desire to capture her daily experiences so that others can understand the brilliant, saturated world she inhabits.

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https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/wassily-kandinsky-1382

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Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky ( ; Russian: Василий Васильевич Кандинский , tr. Vasiliy Vasilyevich Kandinskiy, IPA: [vɐˈsʲilʲɪjvɐˈsʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕkɐnʲˈdʲinskʲɪj]; 16 December [O.S. 4 December] 1866 - 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in western art. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in Odesa, where he graduated from Odesa Art School. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession, he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat (today Tartu, Estonia). Kandinsky began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.

In 1896 Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbe's private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts. He returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. Following the Russian Revolution, Kandinsky "became an insider in the cultural administration of Anatoly Lunacharsky" and helped establish the Museum of the Culture of Painting. However, by then "his spiritual outlook... was foreign to the argumentative materialism of Soviet society", and opportunities beckoned in Germany, to which he returned in 1920. There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France, where he lived for the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939 and producing some of his most prominent art. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944, three days before his 78th birthday.

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Artist page for Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

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https://mymodernmet.com/synesthesia-art/

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Have you ever wondered what the color red sounds like? While most of us experience color visually, around 4% of the world's population are able to experience hues through multiple senses. These people have a neurological condition called synesthesia, meaning their brains process stimulation in a way that allows them to experience several senses at one time-a concept that may seem like super-human powers for the other 96% of us. Many people with synesthesia-past and present-have used their abilities to create art, visualizing how they perceive sounds, time, letters, numbers, and more.

What is synesthesia?

Best described as a union of the senses, synesthesia is when one sensory experience involuntarily, and consistently, prompts another. There are up to 70 different types, such as the ability to see sounds, hear time, and taste shapes; however, the most common involve color.

Some scientists believe that synesthesia results from "crossed-wiring" in the brain. This means that for synesthetes (people who have synesthesia), neurons and synapses that are usually contained within one sensory system cross to another. It is not known exactly why this might happen but some researchers believe that these crossed connections are present in everyone at birth-it's not until later that the connections are refined.

Master Artists of the Past Who Painted Sounds

Vincent van Gogh

The work of Vincent van Gogh is known for being vibrant and full of expressive movement, but perhaps there's a reason for his distinct style. Many art historians believe that Vincent van Gogh had a form of synesthesia called chromesthesia-an experience of the senses where the person associates sounds with colors. This is evident in various letters that Van Gogh wrote to his brother-in one he reveals, "Some artists have a nervous hand at drawing, which gives their technique something of the sound peculiar to a violin."

Van Gogh also took up piano in 1885, but struggled to grasp the instrument. He declared that the experience of playing was overwhelming because each note evoked a different color. Unfortunately for Van Gogh, the teacher took this as a sign of insanity and forced him to leave.

Wassily Kandinsky

For Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, music and color were inextricably linked. The abstract painter, cellist, and synesthete created an iconic collection of abstract paintings that expressed how he associated each musical note with an exact hue. He once said, "The sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble."

Contemporary Synesthesia Artists

Melissa McCracken

Missouri-based artist Melissa McCracken translates the sounds she hears into vibrant splashes of color on canvas. Her vivid oil paintings are inspired by certain songs, showcasing how she sees musical notes as different textures and hues.

"I experience the 'wrong' sensation to certain stimuli," says McCracken. "Each letter and number is colored and the days of the year circle around my body as if they had a set point in space." The artist enjoys the many creative experiences of synesthesia, especially when it comes to music. "The most wonderful 'brain malfunction' of all is seeing the music I hear," she say. "It flows in a mixture of hues, textures, and movements, shifting as if it were a vital and intentional element of each song."

Jack Coulter

Northern Irish artist Jack Coulter has a rare gift: he can see sounds. He uses his synesthesia experiences to inform his abstract expressionist paintings, each of which is full of vivid brushstrokes. At just 25 years old, the talented artist has already gained huge respect in the contemporary art world and was recently chosen by M&C Saatchi to collaborate with worldwide music streaming service, Deezer. The project involved producing a "musical painting" for Glastonbury Festival 2016, which Coulter composed after listening to every artist who was performing at the event in chronological order.

Coulter explains, "When I listen to a piece of music, the bleeds of my visual auditory senses are in need of freedom, I feel the instant urge to birth a painting that represents what I am intrinsically and extrinsically experiencing."

Daniel Mullen

Amsterdam-based artist Daniel Mullen explores the sensory phenomenon with an ongoing painting series titled Synesthesia. Although Mullen doesn't experience the condition himself, he teamed up with artist, filmmaker, and synesthete Lucy Engelman to visualize how she perceives time, numbers, and letters.

At first glance, Mullen's artwork looks like rows of colorful plexiglass. However, each piece is actually painted by hand, rendered in bright, rainbow hues. Each piece is a close-to-perfect visualization of Engelman experiencing various times. For example, the 1950's-80's are visualized in vibrant pink, orange, blue and green. In another piece, representing ancient times between 5132-5097 CE, the colors appear softer, and the lines are thinner.

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5 Synesthesia Artists Who Paint Their Multi-Sensory Experiences

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Have you ever wondered what the color red sounds like? While most of us experience color visually, around 4% of the world's population are able to experience hues through multiple senses. Many people with synesthesia use their abilities to create art, visualizing how they perceive the world.

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Summary of Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler was among the most influential artists of the mid-20 th century. Introduced early in her career to major artists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline (and Robert Motherwell, whom she later married), Frankenthaler was influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting practices, but developed her own distinct approach to the style. She invented the "soak-stain" technique, in which she poured turpentine-thinned paint onto canvas, producing luminous color washes that appeared to merge with the canvas and deny any hint of three-dimensional illusionism. Her breakthrough gave rise to the movement promoted by the influential art critic Clement Greenberg as the "next big thing" in American art: Color Field Painting, marked by airy compositions that celebrated the joys of pure color and gave an entirely new look and feel to the surface of the canvas. Later in her career, Frankenthaler turned her attention to other artistic media, most notably woodcuts, in which she achieved the quality of painting, in some cases replicating the effects of her soak-stain process.

Accomplishments

While creating Mountains and Sea (1952), Frankenthaler arrived at her innovative variant of Jackson Pollock's pouring technique, in which she likewise poured paints onto enormous canvases placed on the floor. But while Pollock used enamel paints, which remain on the surface of the canvas when dried, Frankenthaler poured oil paints that she had thinned with turpentine that then soaked into the fabric of the canvas. Frankenthaler's soak-stain process created luminescent, misty compositions dominated by large areas of color that seemed to have emerged onto the canvas naturally and organically.

Frankenthaler's work influenced Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, who recognized works like Mountains and Sea as a mode of abstract painting that moved beyond Pollock's textured, psychologically fraught canvases to compositions almost entirely based on color. On the basis of the soak-stain technique and the color wash, Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland went on to develop Color Field Painting. In such works, the entire space of the picture is conceived as a "field" that appears to spread beyond the edges of the canvas; figure and ground became one and the same, and three-dimensional illusionism is completely jettisoned.

In another major departure from first-generation Abstract Expressionism, Frankenthaler was an abstract artist for whom the natural landscape - rather than the existential confrontation with the canvas or search for the sublime - served as the major focus and inspiration. Her pared-down forms were often informed by her impressions of nature, be they the arid terrain of the American Southwest; a mulberry tree seen in upstate New York; or the Long Island Sound, viewed from the artist's home in Darien, Connecticut.

Frankenthaler applied her breakthrough soak-stain technique to other painterly media, most notably, watered-down acrylic, which she used in place of turpentine-thinned paint starting in the 1960s. Subsequently, she also sought to replicate the method's effects in printmaking, creating woodcuts that not only resembled paintings, but also achieved the misty, watercolor-like quality of her color washes.

Important Art by Helen Frankenthaler

Mountains and Sea

This canvas is the artist's landmark piece in which she first pioneered her soak-stain process. Despite its large size (7 x 10 feet), it is a work of quiet intimacy. Painted on the artist's return from Nova Scotia, Mountains and Sea retains the artist's impressions of the Cape Breton environs; as she famously described, the region's landscapes "were in my arms as I did it ... I was trying to get at something - I didn't know what until it was manifest." Here, color takes on a new, primary role, with washes of pink, blue, and green defining the hills, rocks, and water, the forms of which are sketchily outlined in charcoal. Following their encounter with Mountains and Sea and other works by Frankenthaler produced by means of the soak-stain technique, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland promptly embraced the method and, together with Frankenthaler, launched the "next big thing" in American art: Color Field Painting.

Oil on canvas - Collection Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. (on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Canyon

The topographical features of the landscape often served as inspiration for Frankenthaler's abstract imagery. With its brilliant red wash filling most of the canvas, Canyon reflects the change in Frankenthaler's artistic practice introduced several years earlier, when she began replacing turpentine-thinned oil with watered-down acrylic poured in larger stains and blots. The painting's gentle luminosity evokes the art critic Nigel Gosling's 1964 description of Frankenthaler's work, written in connection with the artist's London gallery exhibition of that year: "If any artist can give us aid and comfort, Helen Frankenthaler can with her great splashes of soft color on huge square canvases. They are big but not bold, abstract but not empty or clinical, free but orderly, lively but intensely relaxed and peaceful."

Acrylic on canvas - The Phillips Collection

Savage Breeze

Depicting an open space above a mountain-like divide, Savage Breeze was Frankenthaler's first foray into the medium of woodcut. Her concern in this work with achieving the same vibrant color and amorphous forms as her painting resulted in a major technical innovation for this art form. The artist cut a thin sheet of plywood into separately inked shapes and then, in collaboration with ULAE (Universal Limited Art Editions), the Long Island studio that printed the work, devised a special method for eliminating the white lines between them when printing. The newly designed technique - hailed by one writer as "a departure so profound that virtually all subsequent woodcuts incorporated the thinking it embodied" - had a major impact on subsequent printmaking. Indeed, Savage Breeze is far removed from the graphic appearance of the traditional woodblock print, giving the appearance of painted, rather than carved, wood.

Woodcut

Desert Pass

With its minimally defined forms and earthy palette, Desert Pass is an excellent example of the ways Frankenthaler responded to the natural landscape. Inspired by a trip to the American Southwest, the painting captures the colors and forms as well as the climate of the region. Among them: yellow-gold, evoking sand as well as the desert's aridity and intense light and greenish-blue, suggesting the form and color of cacti.

Acrylic on canvas - Smithsonian American Art Museum

Essence Mulberry

An eight-color woodcut, Essence Mulberry consists of a large bluish gray area containing orange markings, framed by two broad stripes of rich red. The print's palette had sources in both art history - the faded colors of 15 th-century prints Frankenthaler encountered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - and nature: a mulberry tree located outside Kenneth Tyler's printmaking studio in New Bedford, New York. Using mulberry juice to capture the tree's rich red, the artist achieved the quality of painting - defying the graphic nature and helping expand the possibilities of the medium. Printed by Tyler Graphics, Essence Mulberry was the first of Frankenthaler's many collaborations with the master printer occurring over a roughly twenty-five year period.

Woodcut composition - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Madame Butterfly

Although the central white shape suggests a butterfly, this print evokes rather than depicts its subject, with a sense of delicacy appropriate for the Japanese heroine of Puccini's tragic opera of the same name. Frankenthaler's final collaboration with Tyler Graphics, Madame Butterfly is an incredibly complex work, involving 106 colors, 46 woodblocks, and measuring 6' in length. Both its subject and the manner in which the print was created, using traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e carving techniques, reflect the artist's sustained engagement with Asian art and culture. With its color washes, floating forms, and watercolor-like effect, Madame Butterfly is reminiscent of works like Mountains and Sea - a seeming realization of the soak-stain technique in the medium of woodcut.

Woodcut

Biography of Helen Frankenthaler

Childhood

Helen Frankenthaler was born and raised in a wealthy Manhattan family with her two older sisters. Her parents recognized and fostered her artistic talent from a young age, sending her to progressive, experimental schools. The family took many trips in the summertime, and it was during these trips that Frankenthaler developed her love of the landscape, sea, and sky. Her father was a judge on the New York State Supreme Court and died of cancer when she was eleven years old. The loss affected her deeply, sending Helen into a four-year period of unhappiness during which time she suffered from intense migraines.

Early Training

At fifteen, Frankenthaler was sent to the Dalton School in New York and began to study under the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo. By the time she was sixteen, she decided to become an artist, enrolling in Bennington College in Vermont, where she studied under Paul Feeley, who was fundamental in arranging exhibitions of Abstract Expressionists.

Mature Period

In 1948, Frankenthaler moved back to New York. Two years later, she met the prominent art critic Clement Greenberg (19 years her senior) at an exhibition she organized for Bennington alumnae. They began a romantic relationship that would last for several years, in that time Greenberg introduced her to several leading Abstract Expressionists artists, including Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline. Greenberg also prompted Frankenthaler to study under Hans Hofmann in 1950. 1952 was the breakthrough year for Frankenthaler; upon returning home from a trip to Nova Scotia, she created Mountains and Sea, a groundbreaking canvas where she pioneered her "soak-stain" technique. Working on a large canvas placed on the floor, Frankenthaler thinned her oil paints with turpentine and used window wipers, sponges, and charcoal outlines to manipulate the resulting pools of pigment.

The following year, Greenberg brought the painters Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland to Frankenthaler's studio to see Mountains and Sea; their excitement over the work led to their experimentation with Frankenthaler's soak-stain technique and to the development, with Frankenthaler, of Color Field Painting. Louis would later declare that Frankenthaler's work was the "bridge from Pollock to what was possible". The achievement is also noteworthy given that Frankenthaler was just 24 years old at the time, while Pollock and de Kooning were in their 40s and 50s, and struggled many years before achieving recognition.

In the years that followed, Frankenthaler continued using the new method she had developed, drawing on her abiding love of landscape for inspiration. In 1957, she met fellow artist Robert Motherwell, another leading Abstract Expressionist painter, and the following year they began their thirteen-year marriage, marking a period of mutual influence in their artwork. Since Motherwell and Frankenthaler had both come from privilege, the two aroused jealousy among other, cash-poor Abstract Expressionist artists and were famously nicknamed "the golden couple."

In the 1960s, Frankenthaler began to use acrylic paint in place of oil. She achieved large washes of bright color in acrylic paintings like Canyon (1965), which reveal the possibilities of this new material. In 1964, her work was included in an exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Identifying this new strain of painting that emerged out of Abstract Expressionism, Greenberg titled the show Post-Painterly Abstraction - his preferred title for the style of painting developed by Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland, which is more generally referred to as Color Field Painting. Frankenthaler also began to show her work internationally, exhibiting at the Venice Biennale in 1966 and at the United States Pavilion at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal. She simultaneously began to develop her proficiency in other artistic media; in particular, she embraced printmaking, creating woodcuts, aquatints, and lithographs that rivaled her painting in their inventiveness and beauty.

After her divorce from Motherwell in 1971, Frankenthaler traveled to the American Southwest. Two trips she made in the mid-1970s resulted in Desert Pass (1976) and several other works capturing the colors and tones of the Southwestern landscape.

Late Period

Frankenthaler continued making art during the 1980s and 1990s, up through the last years of her life. In addition to her work in painting and printmaking, she experimented with a variety of other media, including clay and steel sculpture, even designing the sets and costumes for England's Royal Ballet. Several years after being honored at the prominent gallery Knoedler & Company in New York with the exhibition Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades, Frankenthaler died in 2011 at her home in Darien, Connecticut.

The Legacy of Helen Frankenthaler

Frankenthaler's soak-stain technique gave rise to the Color Field movement, having a decisive impact on the work of the other artists associated with this style, such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski. In addition its striking departure from first-generation Abstract Expressionism, Color Field art is often seen as an important precursor of 1960s Minimalism, with its spare, meditative quality.

The canvases of Frankenthaler and her fellow Color Field painters also resonated with the theories of the movement's biggest promoter, Clement Greenberg. Their lack of illusionistic space embodied what Greenberg articulated as modernist painting's logical end result: an increasing embrace of medium's intrinsic quality, which for him was the concept of 'flatness,' or the two-dimensionality of the picture plane. Eventually, the movement and Greenberg's ideas lost their popularity and succumbed to the stronger forces of Pop art and Minimalism.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Helen Frankenthaler

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

Similar Art

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Helen Frankenthaler was among the most influential artists of the mid-20 th century. Introduced early in her career to major artists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline (and Robert Motherwell, whom she later married), Frankenthaler was influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting practices, but developed her own distinct approach to the style.

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https://americanlifestylemag.com/life-culture/editorial/shades-of-sound/

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Melissa McCracken was twelve years old when she discovered that the way she experiences the world is different from most people. As a synesthete, McCracken has the amazing ability to visualize sounds, letters, and numbers in an array of colors-a gift that lends itself to incredibly dynamic and moving oil paintings.

What was it like growing up with synesthesia, and what exactly does it mean to be born with this ability?
It's such a funny thing because I never really knew I was different. For so long, I thought it was a normal occurrence-like the concept of entering a coffee shop and smelling the coffee; you just assume everyone can smell it. The color portion of my brain is arbitrarily triggered when I listen to music or see letters and numbers. It's the same sort of color stimulation as someone telling you to think of the color blue. Seeing the letter A or the number 4 essentially tells me to think of blue.

When did you first discover that not everyone experiences the world the same way as you?
I was twelve, and I asked my brother what his color was for the letter C. He brushed me off, saying, "Oh yeah, my letter C is yellow, too." I never really thought much of it after that. But when I got older, I was choosing a ringtone and trying to match it to the color of my phone. I told a friend about my predicament, and he said he had no idea what I was talking about.

It's interesting how natural I assumed it was. Visuals are so often associated with music that I didn't second-guess it. I mean, we have music videos, light shows at concerts, and even album artwork. It just seems natural to have a personal "music video" in my head. When I see color, it's contained in a filter. It's not a hallucination, so it doesn't interfere with my visual field. It's similar to how memory works-you can visualize it and you can see it, but it doesn't come into your visual line of sight.

Does every synesthete experience synesthesia the same way?
Synesthesia is technically any sort of stimulation or sensory mix-up. I met another girl who has synesthesia, and she experiences voice to shape and taste to pitch, so she'd choose her snacks based on the pitch of the food that she was craving. She also said that her dad had a triangular voice. I can totally relate to what she's experiencing, but it's difficult to actually understand what she means. It's a very personal type of experience with each form of synesthesia that people have. I've met people with the same form that I have, and they can listen to the same song as me and see completely different colors.

What is most challenging about having synesthesia? Did it ever hinder you from relating to other kids your age?
It was very normal-so normal that I didn't even think about it. If anything, I think it might have benefited me. In math, it helped with formulas, as I would remember by color-coding things that I had to know for a test. If I was missing green, I would think, "Maybe that's a three that I'm missing" because I would see the pattern of colors in my head and would be able to apply it.

Were you afraid to tell people when you first realized that not everyone experiences stimuli the same way as you?
The only time it feels weird is if someone asks me what I do for a living. Then I have to explain that I'm an artist, but that I work and create a little differently than others. I used to try to verbally explain it to people, but it got to the point where I began to say, "Well, I'll just show you instead." That's when I started painting; it seemed like a much more effective way to communicate what I was experiencing.

I saw you went to school for psychology before you decided to pursue art. Does your interest in the mind stem from a desire to know more about your own experiences?
My three favorite things growing up were psychology, art, and music, and so they all converged at one point in my career. Psychology is one of those sciences that allows you to do work that has a personal and communicative aspect to it, which is an art form in itself. It's something that I'm thinking about going back to school for because I really enjoyed it.

Since you didn't go to school for art, are you completely self-taught?
I started to pursue a minor in studio art as an undergrad at William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri. I ended up not completing it because life happened and steered me toward a psychology degree and other classes. I was in art classes all throughout high school, but once I started pursuing it as a career, I realized there's so much material
online to teach you and you can find things so easily. I'm such a hands-on learner that I have to make mistakes in order for me to understand what I did wrong.

Even though you didn't pursue an art degree, did you always know it was something you would continue coming back to throughout your life?
That was the way I looked at it. When I was little, if I got grounded it was always from arts and crafts. Whenever there was a project in school, I was always the one who wanted to do the visual side of it. Art was very much embedded in who I was. I did want to go to art school, but then I kind of had a freak-out moment when I told myself it was impractical. It was always something that felt so natural, though, and made it easy to eventually shift into a career as an artist.

What is your process like for starting a new piece? Do you listen to a particular song or have a pattern or colors in mind before you start?
I've always loved music, but I was never very talented at it. When I listened to a song that was really inspiring, I wanted to have my own interpretation of it. Sometimes I'll listen to a song and be able to paint it immediately, and sometimes I'll have to mull it over and find all of the details in it. In every aspect of my life, I've never been much of a planner, so to listen to a song and say, "OK, these are the colors, and this is the idea" doesn't work. I have to just go for it. This results in a lot of throwaways. I keep working outward, applying layer on top of layer.

Do you have a particular style of music you prefer to listen to that produces the most vibrant color or pattern experience for you?
There are some genres that are nicer-looking than others. Country tends to be a simpler form of music, which lends to a simpler picture, so I tend to not go down that route. I love acoustic music, too, but that makes for a less stimulating picture as well. I love to paint funk music and alternative electric, like Radiohead. That kind of music is always really interesting. Also, I think jazz is good because it has such a soothing look with subtle intricacies. The instruments they're playing are so developed that it doesn't sound overwhelming.

Does each piece that you produce correlate to a particularsong? Do you sometimes listento more than one song for one piece?
Usually, I stick to one song. One time I painted an entire Bon Iver album titled For Emma, Forever Ago. The only reason I chose to do the full album was because this one in particular has such a cohesive sound from start to finish. It flows so nicely. Most often, though, I'll choose sections of songs because they change so much that I can only cover so much ground before the picture becomes too convoluted.

Would you be able to create your work without having synesthesia? Would you still have pursued art as a career?
I always felt like art was so much of me. I would create small art pieces that I thought looked cool, but they weren't anything I ever planned on selling. I loved looking at art for the technical side of it, but it wasn't until I was using it as a form of communication that I got into my work so much more. I felt I had to get this part of me across to other people, and synesthesia helped me channel that.
For more info, visit melissasmccracken.com

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Shades of Sound: The Art of Melissa McCracken

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What do you get when you combine the power of music with an incredible gift? The art of synesthete, Melissa McCracken.

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https://www.pinterest.com/hedricl/color-projects-for-middle-school/

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https://www.healing-power-of-art.org/master-artists-and-their-relationship-with-color/

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Master Artists and Their Relationship With Color

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We learn great things about how master artists and their relationship with color in art. Read about their passions, obsessions and beliefs about color.

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Do you feel anxious in a yellow room? Does the color blue make you feel calm and relaxed? Artists and interior designers have long believed that color can dramatically affect moods, feelings, and emotions. "Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions," the artist Pablo Picasso once remarked.

Color is a powerful communication tool and can be used to signal action, influence mood, and even influence physiological reactions. Certain colors have been associated with physiological changes, including increased blood pressure, increased metabolism, and eyestrain.

This article discusses what color psychology means and how colors affect the mind and body. It also explores research on the effect of color and the psychological reactions people may experience.

Press Play to Learn More About How Colors Affect the Mind and Body

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What Is Color Psychology?

Color psychology is the study of how different colors affect human mood and behavior. It explores how colors can influence emotional responses, as well as how responses to color are affected by factors such as age and cultural background.

Different topics that are of interest in this area include:

The meanings of colors

How colors impact physiological responses

Emotional reactions to color

Factors that impact color preferences

Cultural differences in the meanings and associations of different colors

Whether colors can impact mental health

How colors can influence behaviors

Ways that colors can be utilized to promote well-being

How colors can be used to improve safety and design more optimal home and work environments

History of Color Psychology

The scientific exploration of color psychology is relatively new, but people have long been interested in the nature and impact of color. In ancient cultures, colors were often used to treat different conditions and influence emotions. They also played a role in different spiritual practices.

It was in 1666 that the English scientist Sir Isaac Newton discovered that when pure white light passes through a prism, it separates into all visible colors. Newton also found that each color is made up of a single wavelength and cannot be separated any further into other colors.

Further experiments demonstrated that light could be combined to form other colors. For example, red light mixed with yellow light creates an orange color. Some colors, such as green and magenta, cancel each other out when mixed, resulting in white light.

"Given the prevalence of color, one would expect color psychology to be a well-developed area," researchers Andrew Elliot and Markus Maier noted in a review of the existing research on the psychology of color. "Surprisingly, little theoretical or empirical work has been conducted to date on color's influence on psychological functioning, and the work that has been done has been driven mostly by practical concerns, not scientific rigor."

Much of the evidence in this emerging area is anecdotal at best, but researchers and experts have made a few important discoveries and observations about the psychology of color and its effect on moods, feelings, and behaviors.

The Psychological Effects of Color

Why is color such a powerful force in our lives? What effects can it have on our bodies and minds? While perceptions of color are somewhat subjective, some color effects have universal meanings.

Colors in the red area of the color spectrum are known as warm colors and include red, orange, and yellow. These warm colors evoke emotions ranging from feelings of warmth and comfort to feelings of anger and hostility.

Colors on the blue side of the spectrum are known as cool colors and include blue, purple, and green. These colors are often described as calm, but can also call to mind feelings of sadness or indifference.

Symbolic Color Meanings

One 2020 study that surveyed the emotional associations of 4,598 people from 30 different countries found that people commonly associate certain colors with specific emotions. According to the study results:

Black: 51% of respondents associated black with sadness

White: 43% of people associated white with relief

Red: 68% associated red with love

Blue: 35% linked blue to feelings of relief

Green: 39% linked green to contentment

Yellow: 52% felt that yellow means joy

Purple: 25% reported they associated purple with pleasure

Brown: 36% linked brown to disgust

Orange: 44% associated orange with joy

Pink: 50% linked pink with love

The study's researchers suggested that such results indicated that color-emotion associations appear to have universal qualities. These shared meanings may play an essential role in aiding communication.

Color Psychology as Therapy

Several ancient cultures, including the Egyptians and Chinese, practiced chromotherapy, or the use of colors to heal. Chromotherapy is sometimes referred to as light therapy or colorology.

Colorology is still used today as a holistic or alternative treatment. In this treatment:

Red is used to stimulate the body and mind and to increase circulation.

Yellow is thought to stimulate the nerves and purify the body.

Orange is used to heal the lungs and to increase energy levels.

Blue is believed to soothe illnesses and treat pain.

Indigo shades are thought to alleviate skin problems.

While more research is needed, a 2020 study suggested that chromotherapy may be an effective way to help combat feelings of compassion fatigue and post-traumatic stress in intensive care unit nurses.

Modern Research on Color Psychology

Most psychologists view color therapy with skepticism and point out that the supposed effects of color are often grossly exaggerated. Colors also have different meanings in different cultures.

However, existing research has found that color can impact people in a variety of surprising ways:

While-colored pills are associated with greater pain relief., while red pills are associated with having greater stimulant properties.

Red causes people to react with greater speed and force, something that might be helpful during athletic activities according to researchers.

Black-uniformed players are more likely to receive penalties in competitive sporting events.

Additional Research Is Still Needed

Interest in the subject of color psychology is growing, but there remain several unanswered questions. How do color associations develop? How powerful is the influence of these associations on real-world behavior?

Can color be used to increase worker productivity or workplace safety? What colors have an impact on consumer behavior? Do certain personality types prefer specific colors? As researchers continue to explore such questions, we may soon learn more about color's impact on human psychology.

Zena O'Connor, a faculty member in the Department of Architecture, Design, and Planning at the University of Sydney, suggests that people should be wary of many of the claims they see about the psychology of color.

"Many of these claims lack substantiation in terms of empirical support, exhibit fundamental flaws (such as causal oversimplification and subjective validation), and may include factoids presented as facts," O'Connor explains. "In addition, such claims often refer to outdated research without referring to current research findings."

Recap

Color Can Influence Performance

Studies have also shown that certain colors can have an impact on performance. No one likes to see a graded test covered in red ink, but one study found that seeing the color red before taking an exam actually hurt test performance.﻿﻿

While the color red is often described as threatening, arousing or exciting, many previous studies on the impact of the color red have been largely inconclusive. The study found, however, that exposing students to the color red prior to an exam has been shown to have a negative impact on test performance.

In the first of the six experiments described in the study, 71 U.S. colleges students were presented with a participant number colored either red, green or black prior to taking a five-minute test.

Color and Consumer Purchases

Color psychology suggests that various shades can have various effects, from boosting our moods to causing anxiety. But could the color of the products you purchase ever say something about your personality? For example, could the color of the car you buy somehow relate to some underlying personality traits or quirks?

When buying items, your color preferences might say something about the image you are trying to project. Color preferences, from the clothes you wear to the car you drive, can sometimes make a statement about how we want other people to perceive us. Other factors, such as age and gender, can also influence our color choices.

White: As many of our readers have suggested, the color white can feel fresh and clean. The color is often used to evoke a sense of youth and modernity.

Black: Our readers often describe black as a "powerful" color, which might be the reason why black is the most popular color for luxury vehicles. People often describe the color as sexy, powerful, and mysterious.

Silver: It's the third most popular vehicle color and is linked to a sense of innovation and modernity. High-tech products are often silver, so the color is often seen as new, modern, and cutting-edge.

Red: Red is a bold, attention-getting color, so preferring this type of car might mean you want to project an image of power, action, and confidence.

Blue: People often describe blue as the color of stability and safety. Driving a blue car or SUV might indicate that you are dependable and trustworthy.

Yellow: According to the experts, driving a yellow vehicle might mean you are a happy person in general and perhaps a bit more willing than the average person to take risks.

Gray: The experts suggest that people who drive gray cars don't want to stand out and instead prefer something more subtle.

A person might prefer brighter, more attention-getting colors when they are younger, but find themselves drawn to more traditional colors as they grow older. The personality of the buyer can play an important role in color selection, but buyers are often heavily influenced by factors such as price as well as availability.

For example, purchasing a white vehicle might be less about wanting people to think that you are young and modern and more about the climate you live in; people who live in hot climates typically prefer light-colored vehicles over dark ones.

A Word From Verywell

Color can play an important role in conveying information, creating certain moods, and even influencing the decisions people make. Color preferences also exert an influence on the objects people choose to purchase, the clothes they wear, and the way they adorn their environments.

People often select objects in colors that evoke certain moods or feelings, such as selecting a car color that seems sporty, futuristic, sleek, or trustworthy. Room colors can also be used to evoke specific moods, such as painting a bedroom a soft green to create a peaceful mood.

So what's the bottom line? Experts have found that while color can have an influence on how we feel and act, these effects are subject to personal, cultural, and situational factors. More scientific research is needed to gain a better understanding of color psychology.

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Can Color Affect Your Mood and Behavior?

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Color is all around us, but what impact does it really have on our moods, emotions, and behaviors? Color psychology seeks to answer this question.

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Vassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866-1944). Fragment 2 for Composition VII, 1913. Oil on canvas, support: 34 1/2 x 39 1/4 inches (87.7 x 99.7 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Room of Contemporary Art Fund, 1947 (RCA1947:1).

Public Domain

Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

Fragment 2 for Composition VII is one of several preparatory studies Vassily Kandinsky made for the final painting Composition VII, 1913, which point to the artist's interest in the relationship between music and visual art. This focus dates to the late 1890s, when Kandinsky discovered the philosophy of architect and designer August Endell (German, 1871-1925) while studying art in Munich. Endell believed that art could emulate the effect of music on the senses, creating beauty without reference to anything recognizable in nature. By the time Kandinsky created Fragment 2 for Composition VII, he had already formed a network of like-minded artists who called themselves Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). This informal intellectual and philosophical group focused on metaphysical and symbolic issues in art, avowing that abstraction was the pathway to a utopian society and a new spiritual age. They chose the color blue as part of their name given its associations with transcendence, and the rider can be understood to symbolize energy, joy, positive action, and transformation. In his own work, Kandinsky focused heavily on pure color as a mode of communication. Throughout this painting, for example, light and dark shades of blue draw the viewer's eye to multiple abstract forms, leading the viewer to observe each element patiently and introspectively before experiencing the overall composition.

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Fragment 2 for Composition VII | Albright-Knox

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"Fragment 2 for Composition VII" is one of several preparatory studies Vassily Kandinsky made for the final painting "Composition VII," 1913, which point to the artist's interest in the relationship between music and visual art. This focus dates to the late 1890s, when Kandinsky discovered the philosophy of architect and designer August Endell (German, 1871-1925) while studying art in Munich.

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https://www.bluegalleryonline.com/wp-content/uploads/Melissa-McCracken.pdf

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Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which information meant to stimulate one of your senses stimulates several of your senses. People who have synesthesia are called synesthetes.

The word "synesthesia" comes from the Greek words: "synth" (which means "together") and "ethesia" (which means "perception). Synesthetes can often "see" music as colors when they hear it, and "taste" textures like "round" or "pointy" when they eat foods.

Researchers are still unsure about how common synesthesia is. One 2006 study proposed that it occurs in 2 to 4 percent of the population.

If you have synesthesia, you might notice that your senses tend to intertwine, giving your perceptions of the world an additional dimension. Perhaps every time you bite into a food, you also feel its geometric shape: round, sharp, or square.

Maybe when you're feeling emotional over a person you love, you can close your eyes and see certain colors playing at your field of vision.

You may be reading these words with a series of accompanying voices in your head, characterizing each sentence with an identity of its own as you would a person you were speaking to on the street.

All these experiences are examples of synesthesia.

People who experience synesthesia are usually born with it or develop it very early in childhood. It's for it to develop later. Research indicates that synesthesia can be genetically inherited.

Each one of your five senses stimulate a different area of your brain. Looking at a bright neon yellow wall, for example, will light up the primary visual cortex, at the rear of your brain. If you have synesthesia, you may also feel like you can taste the color of the wall while you look at it.

So not only will your primary visual cortex be stimulated by the color, your parietal lobe, which tells you what something tastes like, is stimulated, too. That's why researchers believe that people who have synesthesia have a high level of interconnectedness between the parts of the brain that are tied to sensory stimulus.

Some substances can cause you to temporarily experience synesthesia. The use of psychedelic drugs can heighten and connect your sensory experiences. Mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD have been studied for their ability to induce this phenomenon. But other stimulants, like cannabis, alcohol, and even caffeine, have also been shown to cause temporary synesthesia.

There are multiple types of synesthesia, all with different symptoms. Grapheme-color synesthesia, where you connect letters and days of the week with colors, may be the most well-known. But there's also sound-to-color synesthesia, number-form synesthesia, and many others. You may have only one type of synesthesia, or a combination of a few kinds.

People who have any type of synesthesia tend to have these common symptoms:

involuntary perceptions that cross over between senses (tasting shapes, hearing colors, etc.)

sensory triggers that consistently and predictably cause interplay between senses (e.g., every time you see the letter A, you see it in red)

ability to describe their unusual perceptions to other people

If you have synesthesia, you may be more likely to be left-handed and have a strong interest in visual arts or music. It would appear that synesthesia is more common in women than in men.

There's no treatment for synesthesia. Anecdotally, many people seem to enjoy perceiving the world in a different way than the general population.

On the other hand, some synesthetes feel that their condition isolates them from others. They may have trouble explaining their sensory experiences because they are very different. Finding communities of other synesthetes online may help ease this feeling of isolation.

Speaking with a mental health professional may also help you to see the value synesthesia can add to your life. Instead of having a dominant side of your brain - right or left - you may find that both sides of your brain harmonize nicely as you pursue work you're passionate about.

You can take a free online assessment to see if you have synesthesia, but this should be approached with caution. You can also ask yourself a few questions to begin the diagnosis process if you believe you experience the condition.

When you envision the letter "A", does your mind assign a color to the letter? Go through the entire alphabet, envisioning each letter, observing the color it appears to you in your mind and writing it down. Repeat the exercise an hour or two later. Do the individual letters appear to be mostly the same color every time you envision them? If they are, you could have synesthesia.

Put on classical music and close your eyes. Choose a song that you aren't familiar with before you relax and see what comes into your field of vision. What color is the music? Do the instruments each seem to have a different color? Do you have a strong visual component alongside what you're hearing? If you do, you could have synesthesia.

You can live a full and normal life with synesthesia. Lots of famous and successful people experience this phenomenon. Examples include:

Kanye West

Pharrell Williams

Mary J. Blige

Tori Amos

Duke Ellington

Lorde

Vladimir Nabokov (acclaimed writer; wrote in his autobiography of his "colored hearing")

Painters Vincent van Gogh and Joan Mitchell are also speculated to have had synesthesia.

Hearing in color and reading colors into words on a page adds a level of dimension to life that many of us can only dream of.

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Synesthesia: Definition, Examples, Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment

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Synesthesia is often described as a "crossing of the senses." It's a neurological condition in which information meant to stimulate one of your senses stimulates several of them. You may associate colors with letters, or smells with music. Researchers believe it occurs in only 2 to 4 percent of the population.

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Significance

Do our subjective experiences when listening to music show evidence of universality? And if so, what is the nature of these experiences? With data-driven methodological and statistical approaches, we examined the feelings evoked by 2,168 music excerpts in the United States and China. We uncovered 13 distinct types of experiences that people across 2 different cultures report in listening to music of different kinds. Categories such as "awe" drive the experience of music more so than broad affective features like valence. However, emotions that scientists have long treated as discrete can be blended together. Our results provide answers to long-standing questions about the nature of the subjective experiences associated with music.

Abstract

What is the nature of the feelings evoked by music? We investigated how people represent the subjective experiences associated with Western and Chinese music and the form in which these representational processes are preserved across different cultural groups. US ( n = 1,591) and Chinese ( n = 1,258) participants listened to 2,168 music samples and reported on the specific feelings (e.g., "angry," "dreamy") or broad affective features (e.g., valence, arousal) that they made individuals feel. Using large-scale statistical tools, we uncovered 13 distinct types of subjective experience associated with music in both cultures. Specific feelings such as "triumphant" were better preserved across the 2 cultures than levels of valence and arousal, contrasting with theoretical claims that valence and arousal are building blocks of subjective experience. This held true even for music selected on the basis of its valence and arousal levels and for traditional Chinese music. Furthermore, the feelings associated with music were found to occupy continuous gradients, contradicting discrete emotion theories. Our findings, visualized within an interactive map ( https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/∼acowen/music.html) reveal a complex, high-dimensional space of subjective experience associated with music in multiple cultures. These findings can inform inquiries ranging from the etiology of affective disorders to the neurological basis of emotion.

A Semantic Space Approach to Subjective Experience

Music can evoke intense subjective experiences that people represent with concepts such as "awe," "joy," and "anger" ( 1⇓ - 3). Within any realm-social interactions, the appreciation of art, or the daily fluctuations of mood, for example-subjective experiences are varied, blended, and complex ( 11). To account for such complexity, we have offered a semantic space approach that structures subjective experiences in terms of 3 properties: their conceptualization, dimensionality, and distribution.

The conceptualization of subjective experience concerns the nature of the concepts that most precisely characterize our feelings. This question is central to affective science ( 11). When people hear a moving or ebullient piece of music, do particular feelings-e.g., "sad," "fearful," "dreamy"-constitute the foundation of their experience? Or are such feelings constructed from more general affective features such as valence (pleasant vs. unpleasant) and arousal ( 9, 11⇓ ⇓ ⇓ - 15)? The answers to these questions not only illuminate the nature of how music elicits subjective experiences, but also can inform claims about how the brain represents our feelings ( 8, 15), how infants learn to recognize feelings in themselves and others ( 16), the extent to which representations of subjective experience are universal across cultures ( 4⇓ ⇓ - 7), and the etiology of affective disorders ( 17, 18).

The dimensionality of subjective experience concerns the range of feelings that people experience. How many distinct feelings do we experience in response to music? Which of the feelings associated with music are dependent on the cultural background of the listener, and which are consistent across cultural groups?

Finally, there is the question of distribution: How are the feelings that music evokes distributed: Are they discrete clusters of states, or can they be blended together ( 11, 19)?

Together, the conceptualization, dimensionality, and distribution of subjective experience capture what we refer to as a semantic space of subjective experience. Studies drawing upon this conceptual framework have renewed our understanding of the feelings elicited by videos of real-world events ( 12) and attributed to facial expressions and vocal utterances ( 10, 20, 21).

A Methodological Approach to Subjective Experience

Characterizing the semantic space of any response modality requires a departure from past approaches. The vast majority of research on subjective experience has focused on a small number of emotions (often just 4 to 6) ( 11). These experiences are typically elicited using a limited number of stimuli-often only 1 or 2-preselected to elicit more prototypical emotional responses, which are measured by asking participants to choose among 4 to 6 emotion categories or to report ratings of valence and arousal (and on occasion other appraisals) ( 11, 18). These methods preclude advances in understanding how people conceptualize subjective experience in terms of both categories and affective features (conceptualization), the range of feelings people experience (dimensionality), and the nature of the boundaries between specific feelings (distribution) ( 9⇓ ⇓ - 12).

With respect to the conceptualization of subjective experience, the use of small stimulus sets precludes comparing competing models of experience-for example, whether it is driven by specific feelings such as "amusement" or broad affective features such as valence. This is because with few stimuli that vary in many ways, many alternative conceptualizations become equivalent (that is, competing model features become collinear) ( 22). For example, categories such as "amusing" and more general features such as "valence" become statistically inseparable when studying just 1 or 2 positive emotion stimuli.

With respect to the dimensionality of subjective experience, the focus on a narrow range of states-usually 6-precludes examining how subjective responses may vary along a much wider array of dimensions ( 9⇓ ⇓ - 12). Does music only evoke the 6 emotions that are most widely studied? Or does music evoke a more complex array of feelings?

With respect to the distribution of subjective experience, the study of only prototypical exemplars of particular emotions makes it difficult to account for potential blends in subjective experience ( 9, 11, 12), which are likely to be associated with music ( 1⇓ - 3, 10).

Understanding the nature of subjective experience therefore requires collecting responses to a vast array of rich and diverse stimuli, using multiple-response formats, targeting a wide variety of potentially distinct feelings, and including more than just prototypical elicitors or exemplars associated with each feeling. A recent investigation guided by these considerations analyzed US participants' responses to thousands of evocative videos of real-world scenes including landscapes, artwork, sports, animals, and injuries. With data-driven statistical techniques, it was found that self-report captures over 2 dozen dimensions, or kinds of subjective experience evoked by videos ( 12). The taxonomy of subjective experience is far richer than anticipated by traditional theories of emotion ( 11). However, because videos impart detailed semantic information (e.g., images of baby faces, spiders, or nature scenes), the extent to which participants' responses represented distinct subjective experiences versus distinct classifications of semantic content is unclear. Moreover, the study of subjective experience within a single culture leaves open the question of the extent to which the conceptualization, dimensionality, and distribution of subjective experience is preserved across cultures. In the present study, we move beyond earlier work by examining the subjective experiences elicited by instrumental music, which is largely free of semantic content (although not necessarily of learned semantic associations, as we will discuss), and by comparing reports of subjective experience across the United States and China. We do so to understand more abstract representations of subjective experience and how they may be preserved across multiple cultures.

The Feelings Associated with Music

Although it is abstract and nonrepresentational, instrumental music evokes rich subjective experiences. In response to music, people report feeling chills, shivers down their spine, laughter, tears, goose bumps, lumps in their throat, and rushes of adrenaline ( 23⇓ ⇓ ⇓ - 27). However, we have yet to fully understand the different varieties of subjective experience associated with different kinds of music [or the distinctions between experienced and perceived feelings in music, which are difficult to capture ( 1, 28); see Discussion for implications for the present study]. Well-replicated studies have found that people within a cultural group can, with 70% or greater accuracy, label the feelings associated with small assortments of musical selections with 6 or fewer emotion categories-most notably, "anger," "happiness," "fear," "sadness," "surprise," and "tenderness" ( 1)-or along scales of valence and arousal ( 29).

Less is understood, however, about the broader structure of subjective experiences associated with music. Many studies have contrasted models that sort the feelings associated with music into 6 discrete emotion categories with models that represent these feelings as levels of valence and arousal ( 29, 30). However, because these are 2 among many possible ways that the feelings associated with music may be structured ( 11), the focus on these 2 models has precluded a richer understanding of the conceptualization, dimensionality, and distribution of the subjective experiences associated with music.

One exception to the focus on 6 emotions or valence and arousal is a study by Zentner et al. ( 3), in which factor analysis was applied to participants' self-reports of how often they had felt 89 feelings in their past experiences of listening to music from their preferred genre. This study identified 9 potentially distinct dimensions of subjective experience. However, the methods used in this study were retrospective and consequently subject to memory biases-for example, the potential confusion between the feelings associated with music and those associated with the contexts in which the music was heard. It was also subject to the limitations of factor analysis, which does not consider the reliability with which responses are associated with individual stimuli (SI Appendix, SI Discussion and Movie S1). This raises the question of how many kinds of subjective experience can reliably be associated with actual music excerpts in controlled or randomized contexts.

Moreover, a limited number of studies have examined the feelings associated with music in multiple cultures ( 5), which is critical to endeavors to understand potential universals, and their likely neurophysiological underpinnings, in responses to music ( 31). One study focused on 3 emotion categories (happiness, sadness, and fear) and found that they were associated with similar music in Westerners and participants from a remote African population, the Mafa of the Mandara Mountains in Cameroon ( 32). In contrast, more recent studies have uncovered cultural differences in feelings of pleasantness versus unpleasantness associated with music ( 33, 34). For example, the Tsimané of the Amazon rainforest do not perceive dissonance as unpleasant ( 34).

Overall, then, we have a limited understanding of the structure that people across cultures rely on to represent the feelings associated with music. To what extent do categories or broader affective features capture cultural universals in the feelings associated with music? What is the range of feelings that music conveys? Are the boundaries between the feelings associated with music discrete or continuous? Together, the conceptualization, dimensionality, and distribution of feelings associated with music comprise a taxonomy of its experiential effects, the foundation for investigations of how and why music moves us.

Experiment 1. Uncovering the Feelings Associated with Music

In our primary investigation, we derive a semantic space of subjective experience reliably associated with a broad range of Western music across 2 rather different cultures. We do so by examining several hundred thousand judgments from participants in the United States ( n = 1,011) and China ( n = 895) (for discussion of cultural differences, see SI Appendix, SI Discussion, and refs. 35 and 36). Each participant heard subsets of 1,841 nonlyrical music samples that were gathered in an open-ended format. We applied data-driven statistical modeling techniques to these judgments to characterize the semantic space of subjective experience associated with music in each culture. By comparing the feelings associated with music in participants from China and the United States, we can ascertain the extent to which the conceptualization, dimensionality, and distribution of subjective experiences are preserved across these 2 different cultures.

At stake in the study of the semantic space of subjective experience are answers to questions of central theoretical import ( 9, 11). In terms of the conceptualization of subjective experience, with what consistency across cultures are responses to music represented using specific categories of subjective experience, such as awe and fear, and information about broad affective features, such as valence and arousal? With respect to the dimensionality of subjective experience, how many distinct varieties of feelings associated with music are preserved across cultures? In terms of the distribution of subjective experiences across cultures, do feelings occupy discrete clusters-families of related states such as anxiety and fear-or do they lie along continuous gradients?

To answer these questions, we collected judgments from participants in the United States and China employing the richest stimulus set of Western music samples ever studied, both in terms of the variety of different feeling states and affective features conveyed and in terms of the diversity of exemplars associated with each feeling, ideal for deriving a semantic space of subjective experience.

Participants from the United States were recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants from China were recruited from a multi-institutional participant pool by X.F. To collect a library of music, 111 US participants (41 women, mean age = 32) were each asked to contribute 5-s music samples conveying each of a wide range of subjective experiences drawn from studies of the feelings associated with music and the voice ( 1⇓ - 3, 20). The categories were "amusing," "angry," "annoying," "anxious/tense," "awe-inspiring/amazing," "beautiful," "bittersweet," "calm/relaxing/serene," "compassionate/sympathetic," "dreamy," "eerie/mysterious," "energizing/pump-up," "entrancing," "erotic/desirous," "euphoric/ecstatic," "exciting," "goose bumps," "indignant/defiant," "joyful/cheerful," "nauseating/revolting," "painful," "proud/strong," "romantic/loving," "sad/depressing," "scary/fearful," "tender/longing," "transcendent/mystical," and "triumphant/heroic." These methods enabled us to investigate a broad range of feelings associated with music. (See SI Appendix, Methods S1, for details and SI Appendix, Table S2, for references for each category and Chinese translations.)

After assembling a diverse library of 1,841 music samples, we recruited participants from the United States ( n = 1,011, 527 women, mean age = 35.5) and China ( n = 895, 556 women, mean age = 30.4) to judge the music samples in 1 of 2 response formats (see SI Appendix, Fig. S1 for depiction of surveys). One group of participants was asked to choose the feelings evoked by each music sample from the 28 categories listed above.

A second group of participants rated each music sample on 11 scales measuring broad affective features. The scales were culled from dimensional and componential theoretical accounts of appraisal processes proposed to underlie emotional experience and expression ( 13, 37), including arousal, attention, certainty, commitment, dominance, enjoyment, familiarity, identity, obstruction, safety, and valence. (Note that these labels are shorthand for the questions to which raters responded. See SI Appendix, Methods S2 and Table S2, for wording of each question and corresponding references.) Participants judged each music sample on 9-point Likert scales (1 = negative levels/none of the quality, 5 = neutral/moderate levels, 9 = extremely high levels).

Based on past estimates of reliability of observer judgment, for each music sample we collected an average of 12 responses from separate participants in each of the 2 response formats in each culture. This amounted to a total of 375,230 judgments of all music samples (59,277 forced-choice categorical judgments and 315,953 9-point scale judgments; see SI Appendix, Methods S2).

Results

Discussion

Music is a universal and vital part of social life across cultures ( 4, 5). Central to its meaning, and likely to its cultural significance, is its well-documented power to evoke rich subjective experiences ( 1⇓ - 3, 23⇓ ⇓ ⇓ - 27, 33). What is less well understood is the taxonomy of feelings evoked by music-that is, how these feelings are arranged within a semantic space-and the extent to which such a taxonomy of subjective experience is preserved across cultures.

With quantitative and conceptual approaches ( 9, 11, 12), we examined the shared semantic space of subjective experience associated with Western and Chinese music by participants from the United States and China. Our focus was to test hypotheses related to 3 properties of this semantic space: its conceptualization, focusing on how specific feelings and broad affective features contribute to the feelings associated with music; its dimensionality, or number of distinct kinds of feelings associated with music; and its distribution of states, focusing on the nature of the boundaries between categories of subjective experience.

Guided by this conceptual framework, 2,777 US and Chinese participants judged over 2,000 samples from modern and classical Western music as well as traditional Chinese music. Judgments were made either in terms of which category of subjective experience, from a list of 28, was evoked, or along scales that captured 11 affective features proposed by appraisal and componential theories to underlie emotional experience. Applying large-scale statistical inference techniques, we compared the preservation of the recognition of 28 categories and 11 scales of affect across 2 different cultures, modeled the latent space that captured the shared variance in judgments between cultures, and interrogated the boundaries between the 13 categories that were found to underlie this latent space.

With respect to the dimensionality of the semantic space of subjective experience, many studies have targeted 6 or fewer categories of emotion and relied on either interrater agreement rates ( 1, 29, 43) or factor analysis ( 3, 14, 37) to characterize subjective experience ( 11). With data-driven statistical techniques applied to a vast array of stimuli, we uncovered 13 distinct dimensions of subjective experience that were associated with music in China and the United States: "amusing," "annoying," "anxious/tense," "beautiful," "calm/relaxing/serene," "dreamy," "energizing/pump-up," "erotic/desirous," "indignant/defiant," "joyful/cheerful," "sad/depressing," "scary/fearful," and "triumphant/heroic" ( Fig. 3B). It is noteworthy that the subjective experiences reliably associated with music not only include commonly studied emotional experiences ("fear," "sadness," "joy"), but also less commonly studied subjective experiences, including traditionally understudied positive emotions ("amusement," "awe," "calmness," "triumph") ( 11, 16). It will be important to examine whether these feelings associated with music emerge in cultures beyond the United States and China. Germane to the more general study of aesthetic experience will be the study of whether the feelings elicited by other kinds of aesthetic stimuli-painting, poetry, drama, dance, sculpture-are distributed in semantic spaces similar to the one revealed for music. Understanding the rich variety of feelings associated with music may be particularly useful for studies of the physiological and neural representations of distinct subjective experiences and the emerging literature of neuroaesthetics ( 8, 15).

Inspection of the music that evokes each dimension ( https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/∼acowen/music.html) seems to point to distinctive acoustic and perceptual underpinnings. For example, "indignant/defiant" music tends to involve a "growl-like" timbre, consistent with observed similarities between aggressive music and threatening vocal expressions in various species ( 44). "Scary/fearful" music tends to involve harmonic dissonance, an example of how some feelings may be associated with specific harmonic ( 45) and melodic intervals, potentially in a manner that mirrors emotional vocalization ( 46). Further study is required to determine how the rich array of subjective experiences uncovered here map onto a wide array of acoustic and perceptual features of music, perhaps in complex, nonlinear fashion.

Our second interest was to examine the distribution of feelings within a semantic space of subjective experience-in particular, boundaries between categories of subjective experience. In contrast to discrete theories of emotion ( 47), we found that the feelings associated with music were not characterized by discrete clusters of states, but by smooth gradients between categories of subjective experience. Music occupies gradients from "amusement" to "joy," "sadness" to "calmness," and "fear" to "tension" to "triumph," among many others ( Figs. 4 and 5). These findings support a shift from the predominant scientific focus on how discrete patterns of expression, physiology, and neural activation distinguish discrete emotional states ( 15, 22) toward the investigation of how the variability and blending together of subjective experience may be represented in continuously varying patterns of expression, physiology, and neural activation.

Our final focus was to examine a critical issue related to the conceptualization of subjective experience: whether the feelings associated with music are explained at a more basic, cross-cultural level by categorical labels or scales of affect. It has been posited that, in subjective experience, valence and arousal can be thought of as core, low-level interpretive processes from which more specific feelings are constructed ( 13, 14, 38). In contrast to this claim, we found that associations of music with specific feelings such as amusement and triumph were better preserved across cultures than associations with valence and arousal ( Fig. 1). Furthermore, judgments of these affective features were better predicted by category judgments from the other culture than by the same affective feature judgments from the other culture ( Fig. 1B), even in music samples gathered on the basis of valence and arousal associations ( Fig. 5). These results suggest that categories of subjective experience such as "amusement" and "desire" may be more directly associated with music, whereas judgments of broader affective features may be inferred in a more culture-specific manner from these categories. These findings contrast with the claim that valence and arousal are basic building blocks of subjective experience ( 13, 14, 17, 38), instead suggesting that they are higher-order inferences ( 11).

One might argue, however, that people have less conscious access to valence and arousal levels than to more specific categories of feeling states, causing reports of valence and arousal to be more subject to bias and therefore less predictive. However, given how well valence and arousal judgments within each culture were predicted by category judgments ( Figs. 1 and 5), it seems that the valence and arousal judgments were reliable and quite precise-even if the meanings that they were precise in capturing were culture-specific. Perhaps, then, participants' valence and arousal ratings capture something distinct from "real" valence and arousal levels to which people do not have conscious access. But falling back on this hypothesis seems to undermine the original motivation behind the constructs of valence and arousal, which emerged in self-report data ( 14).

In considering the evidence for universals in music-related feeling, it is likely that the cultural similarities that we observed were influenced by participants' past exposure to music. For example, the association of music with an "erotic/desirous" dimension may derive from previous exposure in both cultures to music played during romantic scenes in films. Such semantic associations may have influenced our findings. However, this is less likely to be the case for Westerners' responses to Chinese traditional music, a genre with which most Westerners have limited familiarity, yet for which valence and arousal judgments were still best predicted by category judgments from the other culture. These findings render it unlikely that the primacy of specific feelings over broad affective features could be fully explained by learned semantic associations. Nevertheless, given the influence of globalization, we avoid inferences about biologically ingrained universals.

In introducing quantitative approaches to study US and Chinese experiences of music, we hope to set the stage for a broader project documenting shared and culture-specific understandings of music around the world. Different experiences may emerge when studying musical traditions from other regions, such as Africa and South America. It will be particularly informative to study the semantic space of subjective experience associated with music in small-scale cultures with limited Western contact.

We also recognize that, although participants in the United States and China differ culturally on average, neither group is homogeneous. In deriving a semantic space that captures the similarities across countries in how participants represent their subjective experiences, we set aside variation in responses within each country, an important topic for further study. We also did not delve deeply into what past work suggests may be rich culture-specific understandings of music. For example, it has been found that when listening to Hindustani ragas known to have specific emotional connotations, Westerners can reliably identify the intended emotions, but do so with less granularity than Indian listeners ( 5). While some evidence was observed for culture-specific understandings of traditional Chinese music (SI Appendix, Fig. S6), the precise nature of these understandings-or, for that matter, understandings of music from more specific subcultures-is an interesting topic for further study.

Importantly, the present study did not focus on the distinctions between experienced and perceived feelings in music. Recent studies have found these constructs to be highly correlated, but not identical ( 48⇓ - 50). It would be interesting for future studies to interrogate the possible differences in structure between perceived and evoked feelings in music, perhaps incorporating physiological measures. Moreover, it could be argued that the brief, 5-s duration of our stimuli makes them unlikely to evoke certain feelings-to cause people to become fixated and entranced, evoke memories that give rise to nostalgia, engage physiological changes that evoke empowerment ( 51), or enable a deeper appreciation of their historical and artistic context, for example. Future studies could examine the structure of such responses using longer music samples.

Although the present study cannot determine the full range of subjective experiences that can be evoked by musical compositions or whether these responses are innate, it places a lower bound on the richness of the feelings reliably associated with music in 2 rather different cultures. Even brief, 5-s music samples are reliably associated with at least 13 distinct dimensions of subjective experience by participants within the United States and China. To understand how and why music evokes these feelings, future studies will need to move beyond the pervasive focus on simple models of subjective experience composed of 4 to 6 emotion categories or levels of valence and arousal ( 1, 29), given that these models confound many distinct variables ( 11). Studies of the human response to music-its universality ( 32⇓ - 34), acoustic underpinnings ( 1), and neural representation ( 8, 15)-should therefore incorporate a rich taxonomic structure of subjective experience. Similarly, technological endeavors to build machines that curate, compose, or alter music should incorporate the wide range of feelings uncovered here if they aim to reproduce the full complexity of human musical composition.

Finally, it is worth noting how the present findings dovetail with the implications of recent research on subjective responses to strongly evocative videos. Cowen and Keltner ( 12) found that, when people report their feelings in response to a wide range of evocative videos, they reliably distinguish among at least 27 varieties of subjective experience. In that study, specific feelings such as "awe" also emerged as more primary than broad affective features such as valence and arousal in determining the structure of subjective experience and were also found to be organized along continuous gradients. However, those results emerged within a single culture and may have been influenced by the semantic content of the videos. The present study examined subjective responses to a largely nonrepresentational stimulus modality across 2 different cultures. Together, these results converge on a taxonomy of subjective experience consisting of a rich array of distinct categories bridged by smooth gradients.

Questions regarding the structure of subjective experience bear upon central theoretical claims in affective science. They guide studies in fields ranging from neuroscience to machine learning. Our method of interrogating how subjective experiences associated with music are situated within a semantic space reveals a more complex taxonomy of feelings than is typical in existing accounts of how subjective experience is organized. By revealing that the feelings evoked by music span at least 13 distinct dimensions and are distributed along continuous gradients, we provide a road map for the study of how subjective experiences are associated with physiological responses, are represented in the brain, and can be predicted using machine learning.

Methods

Judgments were obtained using Amazon Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics. A total of 2,777 participants (1,591 from the United States, 1,258 from China) took part in the study. The experimental procedures were approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of California, Berkeley. All participants gave their informed consent. Data and analysis code can be requested at https://forms.gle/73Diih84zksjkASe9. See SI Appendix for details.

Footnotes

Author contributions: A.S.C., D.S., and D.K. designed research; A.S.C. and X.F. performed research; A.S.C. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; A.S.C. analyzed data; and A.S.C., X.F., D.S., and D.K. wrote the paper.

The authors declare no competing interest.

This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

This article contains supporting information online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1910704117/-/DCSupplemental.

View Abstract

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What music makes us feel: At least 13 dimensions organize subjective experiences associated with music across different cultures

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Do our subjective experiences when listening to music show evidence of universality? And if so, what is the nature of these experiences? With data-driven methodological and statistical approaches, we examined the feelings evoked by 2,168 music excerpts in the United States and China.