Colour and Music: Voices of the Unconscious

After welcoming presenters and discussants, Chairman Ekkehard Gattig briefly introduced the topic of this Special Panel, the last event in the Scientific Programme of the Congress. The original inspiration for its theme, he informed us, was the city of Nice itself, with its colours and sounds, its natural beauties and rich cultural tradition in both painting and music. Gattig described how for a long time the psychoanalytical study of art has connected individual works to the biography and individual psychopathology of the artist. For Gattig, however, this approach is inadequate to account for the effect that a work of art has on its viewer. The psychoanalytical study of art is now entering a new context of discussion as creativity consists of interactive, inter-subjective processes occurring among artists, the expressions of their psychic existences, and their audience.

In his important and thought-provoking presentation, José E. Fischbein reminded us how the psychoanalytical contributions to the study of the subject's singularity at the beginning of the twentieth century coincided with the pictorial movements which broke with realism and placed their emphasis on the artist's own internal experiences. These movements, which would lead up to abstraction and bring artistic figurability nearer to an increased subjectivity, include Klee's experimentations with lines and colours, Kandinsky's ‘art without an object’, Picasso's fragmentations and deconstructions of figures and Matisse's successful efforts to bring into harmony contrasting elements of colour, form and light.

The development of abstract painting in the work of Paul Klee, described as ‘a master in the art of making the invisible visible’, is the subject of Joachim F. Danckwardt's erudite presentation, which he illustrated with numerous slides. The emergence in 1914 of Klee's ‘magic squares’, where form is established with colour alone rather than lines (which only consist of dark/light contrasts and colour hue