Colour-Music: The Art of Mobile Color/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
A MOBILE COLOUR ART
Hitherto there has been no pure colour art, that is to say, no art dealing solely with colour for its own sake as music deals with sound.
Colour has held a secondary position in all the arts into which it enters, or has only been used jointly with other means of appealing to the senses or the emotions—and it has always been more or less associated with form. We are accustomed to see colour, if it is used at all, combined with form, and employed chiefly to emphasize and explain form, or to add interest and beauty to it, as, for instance, in painting and architecture, in decoration, and in other arts, and we can hardly realize its existence apart from form.
But though, in the case of sound, the great art of music has been created, no such art with colour for its main object has yet been built up. There is, however, no reason why this should continue to be so, or why a great colour art analogous to the art of music should not be developed.
Colour-Music, or the Art of Mobile Colour, is the art which fills this gap, and which after some years of the experimental stage now seems to call for further statement of its claims for consideration. That the development of a pure colour art of this kind has been so long delayed in the history of the world has probably been due, in great measure, to the fact that, although colour is capable of providing almost as much pleasure and interest as sound, and, as I shall hope to show, has quite as great, or even greater, power of appealing to the emotions, it is a far more difficult matter to devise an instrument suitable for the production of colour, and for placing it under the control of an executant, than to construct one for the production of musical sound.
It is, in fact, hard to imagine, and still more so to design, any such colour instrument; whereas in the earliest periods a reed or a conch shell has been easily converted into a means of producing music, and almost every race has devised its own musical instruments at an early stage of its civilization.
The non-existence of a pure colour art has from time to time been more or less recognized and commented upon, but, owing probably to the difficulties just referred to, nothing has come of it.
Within the last twenty or thirty years, however, a desire to study and enjoy colour for its own sake has sprung up, and the art of painting has tended somewhat to devote itself to the production of pictures in which colour is the chief factor, and Whistler and others, with some appreciation of musical analogies, have gone as far as to call their pictorial works "harmonies" and "symphonies." But in most pictures colour has necessarily remained subservient, to some extent, to their subjects, and in any case a picture cannot give more than one colour scheme, or the solution of a very few problems in colour within the boundaries of its frame. Once painted, moreover, that scheme, harmony, symphony, or whatever the artist may call it, remains fixed and unaltered. At most it is a chord or two of colour, or a single colour-phrase, even though much may be sacrificed in expression of the subject of the picture, or even in truth to nature, to make that chord or phrase harmonious and interesting.
But the desire for a more developed colour art is at the root of these attempts to force painting to do almost more than it can legitimately or successfully attempt, and to sacrifice subject and much else to obtaining beautiful quality in colour, and an attractive colour scheme. Something, no doubt, has been gained, and the demand of the impressionist for interesting and beautiful colour at all costs is in great measure a just one; but the result of the attempt to make painting do what it is only possible for a mobile colour art to achieve has been to cause it to abandon many of its means of appealing to the artistic faculties which we cannot afford to lose, to narrow its scope, and weaken its position.
On the other hand, an art like that of colour music devoted solely to colour gives us what the finest impressionist or expressionist—even Turner and the greatest artists—can never give.
Experiment has moreover shown it to be certain that such an art has the power of appealing to the emotions to an extent which it is difficult for those to realize who have never seen it, and is capable of giving some- what similar æsthetic and emotional enjoyment to that given by music, but appealing to and developing a different sense.
It may be said, with a show of reason, that pleasure and mental refreshment are not sufficient foundations for a new form of art; to which it may be replied that, even though the art of music rests mainly upon them, it is not contended that they are entirely so. The other practical advantages of a pure colour art will be dealt with later on.
Let us first see whether there is not only room for an art of this kind, but a great need for it, whether its absence under certain conditions of life does not account for some present-day tendencies towards artistic degeneration, and whether it is not worthy of our serious consideration as an influence in civilization. I propose also to show that it is not merely possible—a mere theoretical dream—but how, after some years of experiment, it has been brought into actual existence and is being further developed, and to give some description of the forms it has at present taken.
The instruments used and the results arrived at will also be described, various criticisms and objections will be replied to, and the future possibilities of the new art will be briefly foreshadowed.