What color is music?

Given the revival of interest in abstract painting by younger artists over the past decade, it was inevitable -- and surely welcome -- that we would see a major museum exhibition like “Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900.” The show looks back at a principal foundation for the emergence of abstract art a century ago. It opened recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art and travels in June to the cosponsoring Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

Synaesthesia is a condition in which one type of sensory stimulation evokes another. Hear a trumpet blast, and you see crimson. Look at blue sky, and the taste of salt arrives on your tongue. Smell a skunk and feel a tingling in your feet.

“Visual Music” considers the union of visual and aural senses -- as when hearing a specific sound produces the visualization of a color, or vice versa. This cross-fertilization was critical to the development of abstraction. The idea that a painting could be nonfigurative, without representing the visible things of the world, seems pretty tame today, but 100 years ago it was revolutionary. Music offered an artistic template by which abstract painting could seem reasonable.

After all, what worldly object does B-flat represent? Or an A-minor chord?

How about a symphony?

Any answer you might come up with could just as well apply to the swirling, shattered discs of red, orange, green and blue in American artist Morgan Russell’s gorgeous little 1914 canvas “Cosmic Synchromy,” where the flickering juxtapositions of hot and cool colors push and pull the forms through space. It would fit the tempestuous clouds of pure pigment and jagged brush marks of Wassily Kandinsky’s magisterial 1914 painting “Fugue,” which is a linchpin in his spiritually inclined struggle to find the “inner sound” of visual imagery.

The same goes for the speckled magma of roiling colors in “Painterly-Musical Construction,” the exceptional little 1918 painting on paper by violinist and composer Mikhail Matiushin. He worked with one of the greatest pioneers of pure abstraction, Kazimir Malevich, on the revolutionary Russian avant-garde opera “Victory Over the Sun.”

All three paintings are in MOCA’s show. They congregate happily among a host of other first-rate pictures, which date from the 1910s through the 1930s.

“Today,” Russell wrote in 1916, pre-figuring something that has been commented upon repeatedly in intervening decades, “the chaotic sounds and lights in our daily experience are intenser than those in art. Therefore, art must be raised to the highest intensity if it is to dominate life and give us a sense of order.” The use of abstract shapes and pure colors was being advanced by Russell as an effective way for art to compete in the raucous commercial atmosphere of America, then (as now) overrun with Gilded Age robber barons and their spawn.

Mediums for understanding

In Europe the aim was somewhat different. The move toward abstraction was guided by a secular search for spiritual expression.

If you want to know why European artists took this spiritual route, just read the newspapers today. Osama bin Laden has said Al Qaeda is carrying out God’s plan against evil in America. George W. Bush has said the United States is carrying out God’s plan against evil in the Middle East. Europe had been soaked in the blood of religious warfare for centuries.

Back at the brink of World War I, the new abstraction took hold more broadly and more deeply among European artists than it did among Americans because of the new power of European faith in secularism. Secularism was modern, and spiritual expression by artists required the invention of worldly modern forms.

Artists on both sides of the Atlantic proposed that sensory stimulation made up art’s fundamental core. Anyone could respond to pure color, organic shape and geometric structure. The proposition spoke of an idealized belief in essential unity among diverse people, and it suggested -- perhaps naively -- that universal understanding was possible across vast social divides.

There were topical causes for the embrace of abstraction. “Universal understanding” was certainly a useful belief to profess for, say, a Russian artist like Kandinsky at work in Munich, as Europe was cracking apart into the Great War. And so it was for a painter like Russell living in New York, when a flood of international immigration was washing over the city.

Leave defective history behind; hope lies in the new. Victory over the sun!

As Russell’s friend and colleague Los Angeles painter Stanton Macdonald-Wright put it, “Painting certainly need not lag behind music.” Intellect -- the rational, analytic construction of thought as a means for social understanding and negotiation -- was failing Western society on an unprecedented scale. Sensation moved into the foreground. For visual artists, the immediacy of sensory experience found its plainest analog in music.

MOCA’s exhibition wants to trace the evolution of this idea in the 20th century. Hirshhorn curators Kerry Brougher and Judith K. Zilczer and MOCA Director Jeremy Strick have divided the roughly 80 works into three big chunks, which loosely overlap.

Abstract painting in the first half of the 20th century formed the path-breaking phase. Next, avant-garde film introduced the essential musical element of time into the visual equation, starting in the 1920s. Finally, environmental installations -- sometimes incorporating new technology, such as digital video -- make up the small contemporary section.

The show opens with a makeshift theater projecting a continuous, 42-minute program of inventive abstract films. They range from Hans Richter’s 1921 exploration of syncopated rhythm to Hy Hirsh’s stereoscopic 1953 film, propelled by African drumming.

Along the way are masterworks by Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Harry Smith and others. Projected on the enormous back wall of MOCA’s big “pyramid” gallery, they are spectacular and engrossing.

Next come galleries for early Modern abstract painting, outfitted with “listening stations” for contemporaneous developments in music. (Art critic Peter Frank chose the musical selections.) Putting films before paintings inverts the chronology, but it works theatrically because contemporary audiences are more comfortable looking at films than at paintings. Starting with movies helps make the subsequent paintings legible.

This section includes exceptional selections by European painters, including Frantisek Kupka and Paul Klee, and Americans Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Helen Torr and Georgia O’Keeffe. Alfred Stieglitz’s famous black-and-white photographs of clouds are a pleasant (and provocative) surprise.

Some inclusions are tangential. Francis Picabia’s 1912 Cubist rendition of a dancing couple or Man Ray’s 1916 silhouetted abstraction of an orchestra illustrate artists’ general interest in music rather than something specifically synaesthetic. Chief among the disappointments is the omission of Piet Mondrian, whose “Broadway Boogie Woogie” (1942-1943) attempted a pictorial embodiment of urban jazz.

Cinematic fuel

Another great section of the show features a film-projection room for the mind-bending optical dazzlement produced by the late Los Angeles brothers John and James Whitney and by optical-computer whiz John Whitney Jr. The brothers’ classic “Five Film Exercises” (1943-1944) were produced with a quirky mechanical device that allowed for the simultaneous composition of pictures and music. Later, the fusion of hand-painting and computerized animation created James Whitney’s gorgeous “Yantra” (1957). It’s a joy (and rare) to see these and other Whitney films in sizable projections, as it is for the alluring films of their near contemporary, Jordan Belson.

Along about here in the exhibition, though, I began to wonder whatever happened to synaesthesia -- the show’s organizing idea, that one type of sensory stimulation evokes another. As a phenomenon, synaesthesia takes place in the viewer, not in the work of art. The original impetus was that our sensory experience of color and shape might produce a perception of sound and vice versa, not that complementary formal aspects of music and visual imagery might be combined by an artist.

That’s merely a compositional technique. Renaissance music and painting share formal qualities, as do Baroque painting and music. The show starts off strong but unravels rather quickly.

Synaesthesia was a blast for the acid-tripping 1960s, when the Joshua Light Show was producing oh-wow stage effects for Janis Joplin and Frank Zappa. (If you go to “Visual Music,” be sure to bring your bong.) But it doesn’t seem to be much of a concern for most artists -- especially lately.

Back to Baroque

Contemporary artists, like their ‘60s forebears in popular culture, sometimes employ music and visual abstraction in unison. Mostly, though, this work is in the theatrical tradition of son et lumiere -- sound and light shows. Their legacy predates Modern art and can be traced to the Baroque era.

Son et lumiere certainly describes the most compelling of the final installation works, all made since 1995. Jennifer Steinkamp’s magnificent “SWELL,” which blends spectral electronic imagery and music (by Bryan Brown), messes with our spatial perceptions of the room we both inhabit.

Australian artist Nike Savvas projects pulsing light (and blows smoke) on the floors, walls and ceiling to create a “walk-in abstract painting,” which sardonically compares an art museum gallery to a discotheque or strip joint. In a collaborative work by Cindy Bernard and Joseph Hammer, the disjunction between projected fields of shifting monochromatic color and electronic sound keeps the eyes, ears and mind racing in a futile effort to tie the perpetually slipping elements together.

Son et lumiere theatrical productions are typically concerned with the qualities of the place where they are presented, and these four artists do that in abstract rather than representational terms. “Visual Music,” in fact, might even be divisible into two kinds of 20th century abstraction with sonic connections. One is a small yet pivotal body of historical works that strained for synaesthetic effects at the moment abstract art was being born. The other is a much larger body of son et lumiere extravaganzas.

Maybe part of the confusion stems from considering synaesthesia an artistic idea, as “Visual Music” largely does, when it is also an involuntary neurological condition, experienced by a small percentage of the population. That uniqueness, that quality of distinctive difference from the perceptual norm, has long been a coveted self-perception within the art world. “Visual Music” basks in its glow.

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‘Visual Music’

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: Thursdays through Mondays

Ends: May 22

Price: $5 to $8, free on Thursdays

Contact: (213) 626-6222; www.moca.org

Also

What: “Percussion Music”

Where: SolwayJones, 5377 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

When: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays

Ends: March 19

Contact: (323) 937-7354

Christopher Knight is The Times’ visual arts critic.