Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric R. Kandel Page 71

As artists started to move toward abstraction, they began to see analogies between their art and music. Although music has no content and uses abstract elements of sound and division of time, it moves us powerfully. Why, then, does pictorial art have to have content? This question was addressed by the French Poet Charles Baudelaire, who pioneered a new style of prose-poetry and wrote the famous volume of poetry Les Fleurs du mal (The flowers of Evil), in which he described the changing nature of beauty in modern life. Baudelaire argued that even though each of our sense responds to a restricted range of stimuli, all of the senses are connected at a deeper aesthetic level. It is therefore particularly interesting that the earlierst truly abstract painting was achieve by the pioneer of abstract music, Arnold Schoenberg. - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric R. Kandel Page 71