Synaesthesia and artistic experimentation in Alexandr Scriabin’s works
Synaesthesia and artistic experimentation in Alexandr Scriabin’s works

Summary/Abstract: The belief that painting could emulate music and the reverse, that music could emulate painting, inspired a part of the most progressive visual arts of the 20th century. The artists who made use of synaesthesia created an astounding correspondence between colour and sound, colour and idea, drawing varied and unexpected analogies to convey sensations, intimations and emotions. The aim of this research is to present some of the trends resulted from these correlations between music and painting of the beginning of the 20th century, a period when the artists aimed to create an impersonal and conventional music in an attempt to reach the objectivity, rationalism and constructivism, focusing on the works of Wassily Kandinsky and Alexandr Scriabin. For many of the artists of the beginning of the past century, music represented the new idea of transposition into visual arts. It was no longer the content to reproduce the visible world, but, for a change, the painters strived to put into their canvasses the emotional intensity, the structural integrity and the aesthetic purity generally attributed to music.

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