Synesthete

When he was six, Ira Jean Belmont heard Schubert's Serenade and startled his mother by exclaiming, "It was beautiful, especially when I saw those green and blue and purple and all kinds of clouds passing by." His mother's surprise passed, but her son's sensitivity persisted. Whenever Belmont heard the clanging of church bells, the twittering of birds, the echoes of his own voice--multiple colors flashed before his eyes. In his 20s he took up portrait painting, but he kept mixing up sounds and colors. Finally, he submitted to the inevitable. Last week twelve of Belmont's fully orchestrated "Color-Music" paintings played full blast in Manhattan's Belmont Galleries (owned by his wife).

Belmont, a greyish, thin-lipped man in his 60s, calls his painting Color-Music Expressionism. "Inherent synesthetic perceptions" (granted, he explains, to only 5% of humanity) account for his seeing colors when he hears musical sounds. He has supplemented his natural gift with a complex mathematical scheme, based on the comparative vibrations of sounds and light rays.* A ray of red, for example, has about 477,000,000,000 vibrations per second. Its tonal equivalent, to Belmont, is the key of C. Similarly, the key of D is orange; E, yellow; F, yellow-green, etc. Thus, a dirge is painted in blues and violets, a scherzo in reds and oranges. For contrapuntal effects, color is simply played against color.

Included in Belmont's current show are canvases inspired by selections from Sibelius, Tchaikovsky and Wagner. To the unattuned 95%, one canvas is practically interchangeable with any other. Such gallerygoers wondered last week about paying only $3.50 for a record album of unmistakable music when Belmont's re-recordings are priced at $1,000 to $5,000.

* His book, The Modern Dilemma in Art, which damns van Gogh, Cezanne, et al. as "mediocrities," explains his theories exhaustively.

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