LOS ANGELES.-Visual Music surveys the charged and profoundly generative relationship between art and music over the last 100 years. This major exhibition, co-organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, opens to the public at MOCA Grand Avenue (250 South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles) remains on view through May 22, 2005. Featuring masterpieces of modern and contemporary art, Visual Music offers for the first time in the United States a chronological exhibition of the relationship between abstraction, color, and music forms as varied as classical, jazz, rock, and electronic.

Rather than following a traditional progression of movements and styles, this exhibition presents successive explorations of the idea of synaesthesia. Artists from all over the world are inspired by the concept of synaesthesia, the experience of one sense evoking another, in this case exploring the union of the aural and visual senses. Visual Music explores this concept’s remarkable cross-pollination across time and medium and reveals how the multimedia installations produced today realize ambitions expressed by paintings made almost 100 years ago. Over 80 works, including important examples never before seen in the U.S., by over 40 internationally recognized artists of abstract painting, experimental cinema, and contemporary installation are featured. This exhibition is co-organized by MOCA Director Jeremy Strick; MOCA Assistant Director, Board Affairs Ari Wiseman; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC Director of Art and Programs and Chief Curator Kerry Brougher; and Hirshhorn Curator Emerita Judith K. Zilczer.

Paintings and Photographs - At the turn of the 20th century throughout Europe, artists’ desires to emulate musical qualities propelled crucial developments in abstract painting. Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), an accomplished musician, used color to associate tone with timbre, hue with pitch, and saturation with the volume of sound, as seen in his groundbreaking painting Fugue (1914). Artists such as Lithuanian composer and artist Mikalojus Čiurlionis (1875–1911), Swiss-born Paul Klee (1879–1940), and Czech-born František Kupka (1871–1957) further explored ways to evoke sound and emulate musical composition in painting. In the 1920s Klee developed a systematic approach linking musical counterpoint to color gradation and harmonic structure to color composition.

In America, modernists such as Arthur Dove (1880–1946), Marsden Hartley (1877–1943), and Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), embraced musical analogy in their search for a new visual language of abstraction. Dove’s growing enthusiasm for American popular music and his practice of listening to music in the studio coalesced in a series of "jazz paintings" in 1926 and 1927. Two Americans working in Paris were among the most outspoken advocates of musical analogy in painting. Known as synchromists, Morgan Russell (1886–1953) and Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973) developed an elaborate and sophisticated theory of painting based on dynamic spatial rhythm and color harmony.

Artists featured in this section are: Daniel Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, Mikalojus Čiurlionis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, František Kupka, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Mikhail Matiushin, Georgia O'Keeffe, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Morgan Russell, Alfred Stieglitz, Léopold Survage, Helen Torr, and Henry Valensi.