【填空题】The Man Who Heard His Painbox Hiss Ossien Ward 1.Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky is widely credited with making the world’s first truly abstract painting, but his artistic ambition went even further. He wanted to evoke sound through sight and create the painterly equivalent of a symphony that would stimulate not just the eyes but the ears as well. A new exhibition at the Tate Modern, Kandinsky: Path to Abstraction, shows not only how he removed all recognizable subjects and objects from Western art around 1911, but also how he achieved a new pictorial form of music. 2.Knadinsky is believed to have had synaesthesia, a harmless condition that allows a person to appreciate sounds, colours or words with two or more senses simultaneously. In his case, colours and painted marks triggered particular sounds or musical notes and vice versa. The involuntary ability to hear colour, see music, or even taste words results from an accidental cross-wiring in the brain that is found in one in 2,000 people, and in many more women than men. 3.Synaesthesia is a blend of the Greek words for together (syn) and sensation (aesthesis). The earliest recorded case comes from the Oxford academic and philosopher John Locke in 1690, who was bemused by “a studious blind man” claiming to experience the colour scarlet when he heard the sound of a trumpet. 4.The idea that music is linked to visual art goes back to ancient Greece, when Plato first talked of tone and harmony in relation to art. The spectrum of colors, like the language of musical notation, has long been arranged in stepped scales, so it is still unclear whether or not Beethoven, who called B minor the black key and D major the orange key, or Schuert, who saw E minor as “a maiden robed in white with a rose-red bow on her chest”, were real synaesthetes. 5.There is still debate whether Kandinsky was himself a natural synaesthete, or merely experimenting with this confusion of senses in combination with the colour theories of Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Rudolf Steiner, in order to further his vision for a new abstract art. 6.Sceptics have dismissed synaesthesia as nothing more than subjective invention, like a bad case of metaphor affliction——after all, anyone can feel blue, see red, eat a sharp cheese or wear a loud tie. Recently, however, a group of neuroscientists has been able to prove that synaesthetes do indeed “see” sound. A series of brain scans showed that, despite being blindfolded, sunaesthetes showed “visual activity” in the brain when listening to sounds. Now all that is left is to find the gene that may be responsible. 7.Despite the lack of medical proof for Kandinsky’s synaesthesia, the correlation between sound and colour was a lifelong preoccupation for the artist. He recalled hearing a strange hissing noise when mixing colours in his paintbox as a child, and later became an accomplished cello player, which he said represented one of the deepest blues of all instruments. Sean Rainbird, curator of the Tate’s forthcoming Kandinsky exhibition, says, “My feeling is that he was quite internalized.” To have painted the largest work he ever made, Composition VII, in just three days, shows that this language was quite internalized.” 8.Kandinsky discovered his synaesthesia at a performance of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin in Moscow: “I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.” In 1911, after studying and setting in Germany, he was similarly moved by a Schoenberg concert and finished painting Impression III (Konzert) two days later. The abstract artist and the atonal composer became friends, and Kandinsky even exhibited Schoenberg’s paintings in the first Blue Rider exhibition in Munich in the same year. 9.If Kandinsky had a favorite color, it must have been blue: “The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for pure and, finally, for the supernatural… The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.” Despite his theories that the universe was in thrall to supernatural vibrations, auras, and “thought-forms”, many of which came from arcane, quasi-religious movements such as theosophy, Kandinsky’s belief in the emotional potential of art is still convincing today. Our response to his work should mirror our appreciation of music and should come from within, not from its likenesses to the visible world: “Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many stings.” 10.Kandinsky achieved pure abstraction by replacing the castles and hilltop towers of his early landscapes with stabs of paint or, as he saw them, musical notes and chords that would visually,” sing” together. In this way, his swirling compositions were painted with polyphonic swathes of warm, high-pitched yellow that he might balance with a patch of cold, sonorous blue or a silent, black void. Rainbird describes how the artist used musical vocabulary “to break down the external walls of his own art”. 11.After 1910, he split his work into three categories: Impressions, Improvisations, and Compositions, often adding musical titles to individual pictures such as Fugue, Opposing Chords, or Funeral March. He also conceived three synaesthetic plays combining the arts of painting, music, theatre, and dance into Wagnerian total works of art or Gesamtkunstwerks, which were designed to unify all the senses. 12.Kandinsky undoubtedly led the European revival in synaesthesia but there are many other examples of sonic influence in modern art, from Munch’s The Scream and Whistler’s Nocturnes and Harmonies to Ezra Pound’s Cantos and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Yet Kandinsky’s curious gift of colour-bearing, which he successfully translated onto canvas as “visual music”, to use the term coined by the art critic Roger Fry in 1912, give the world another way of appreciating art that would be inherited by many more poets, abstract artists, and psychedelic rockers throughout the rest of the disharmonic 20th century. 13.Wassily Kandinsky continued painting until hos death, on December 13th, 1944. 14.Here then are Kandinsky’s guidelines so that you can experience synaesthesia for yourself: 15.Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and …stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to ‘work about’ into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want？” 16.“I applied streaks and blobs of color onto the canvas with palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could…” 3. Each of the following ten statements contains information given in one of the paragraphs (1-16) in the text. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. A. _______________Kandinsky remembered hearing his paintbox hiss when he was a child. B. ______________Kandinsky designed plays with different kinds of art forms, including painting, music, theatre, and dance. C. _____________ Plato was the first one who linked music to visual art, when he talked of tone and harmony in relation to art. D. ____________ Visual music, coined by Roger Fry, was used to refer to Kandinsky’s gift of colour-hearing. E. ____________ Influenced by theosophy, Kandinsky thought that the universe was ruled by supernatural vibrations, auras, and “thought-forms”. F. ____________ Kandinsky not only removed all recognizable subjects and objects from Western art around 1911, but also achieved a new pictorial form of music. G. ____________ The first record of synaesthesia was made by philosopher John Locke in 1690 H. _____________Neuroscientists don’t see synaesthesia as subjective intention, because they have proved that some people do see sound. I. ____________Kandinsky wanted to evoke sound through sight and create the painterly equivalent of a symphony that would stimulate not just the eyes but the ears as well. J. _____________Only one in 2,000 people has the gift of color-hearing, an ability which is processed by more women than men.
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