On the education of the senses: synaesthetic perception from the ‘democratic art’ of chromolithography to modernism

Abstract

This paper explores the emergence of art education in the USA in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the issue of colour perception, it traces the aesthetic tropes shared between discussions of educating students' colour sensibilities and the concurrent clinical and literary experiments with synaesthesia. It then makes the case that early twentieth-century works of ‘visual music’ often combine the notion of synaesthesia with a pedagogical impulse to uplift the senses of the viewer. The paper thus follows two parallel trends in the nineteenth century (art education and experiments with synaesthesia) that converge in the twentieth century. This multi-threaded history is crucial for understanding the ways in which the sensual effects of colour were theorized and promoted in popular and modernist media – from the cinema to abstract painting – at the turn of the last century.