At the Crossroads of the Senses - The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism

Inspired by Richard Wagner-s idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, and shapes. Polina Dimova-s At the Crossroads of the Senses traces this new sensory experience of synaesthesia-the physiological or figurative blending of senses-as a modernist phenomenon from its scientific description in the late nineteenth century to its prevalence in the early twentieth. Structured around twenty theses on synaesthesia, Dimova explores the integral relationship between modernist art, science, and technology, tracing not only how modernist artists perceptually internalized and absorbed technology and its effects but also how they appropriated it to achieve their own aesthetic, metaphysical, and social goals. Through case studies of prominent multimodal artists-Richard Strauss, Aubrey Beardsley, Aleksandr Skriabin, Wassily Kandinsky, Franti-ek Kupka, Andrei Bely, and Rainer Maria Rilke-At the Crossroads of the Senses reveals