Abstract

The concepts of chromaticism in music and musicality in colour were vital for achieving what František Kupka called “compenetration” in his composition of “symmorphies” – symphonies of colour and sound in painting that seemed able to vibrate with major and minor chromatic modalities and to sing in major and minor keys. As this paper shall reveal, these concepts emerged from the fin-de-siècle in Paris where Kupka began to explore how his magnetic and mediumistic experiences resonated with Annie Besant’s Man and his Bodies, C. W. Leadbeater’s The Astral Plane and their jointly authored Thought-Forms, as illustrated by his double self-portraits, La Gamme jaune I and La Gamme jaune II. Conceiving the artist as an Astral and telepathic visionary able to penetrate and capture invisible realities, Kupka began to explore how their Astral Body could function as a musical instrument tuned to the harmonies of the universe while their Astral Vision could enable them to transcend the earth and survey the cosmos. Conceiving the artwork in terms of “concepts, syntheses, chords”, simultaneously Kupka aspired to fuse his painting with music in what he called “symmorphies”. “I am still groping in the dark”, he confessed in 1909, “but I believe I can find something between sight and hearing and I can produce a fugue in colours as Bach has done in music.” That this became fused with his astral visions of planetary rotations shall be illuminated by focusing upon Kupka’s series of symmorphies. 

About the speaker

FAE (FAY) BRAUER is Professor Emeritus of Art and Visual Culture at the University of East London Faculty of Architecture, Computing and Engineering (ACE); a member of its Centre for Cultural Studies Research and Centre for Creative and Cultural Practice, and until 2021, Director of Research, Impact and Innovation.  She is Honorary Professor of Art Theory at The University of New South Wales Art and Design, and Commissioning Editor for the Radical Cultural Studies Series with Rowman & Littlefield International. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), and holds Honours Degrees from the University of London, with MA and PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art.  

Her interdisciplinary scholarship encompasses the Anthropocene and Ecoaesthetics; Darwinian and Neo-Lamarckian evolution and eugenics, particularly their visual cultures; the body, sexualities and the fitness imperative; neurology, hysteria and trauma; magnetism, mesmerism, occultist sciences, Annie Besant, and vitalism, as well as the cultural politics of art institutions.

Her books include Vitalist Modernism: Art, Science, Energy and Creative Evolution; Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture;  Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre, The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms and Visual Culture, the first-prize-winning Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti and The Body in British Art, Science and Medicine during the Long Nineteenth-Century (forthcoming). Following some 40 book chapters, her latest is entitled “Composing Symmorphies: Chromatism, Astral Vision and the Music of the Spheres in František Kupka’s Cosmological Modernism”, Art, Music, and Mysticism at the Fin-de-Siècle: Seeing and Hearing the Beyond, eds. Corrinne Chong and Michelle Foot (New York and Oxford: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2024). Her most recent conference to be co-convened with Professor Emeritus, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, is Art, Occultism, and Science in the Time of Hilma af Klint.

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The SIG Chairs: the Rev. Prof. June Boyce-Tillman, Dr Lila Moore, Annalisa Burello.