(PERFORMANCE ART). (WOMEN INVENTORS). GREENEWALT, Mary Hallock. Nourathar: The Fine Art of Color Light Playing.

The Birth of a New Fine Art

(PERFORMANCE ART). (WOMEN INVENTORS). GREENEWALT, Mary Hallock. Nourathar: The Fine Art of Color Light Playing. (Philadelphia: Westbrook Publishing House, 1946) x, 412 pp. (260 x 182 mm.) First Edition. Publisher’s silver cloth boards with gilt decoration and lettering on upper cover and spine. Without the complete dust jacket, but with two detached flaps laid in. With frontispiece portrait, 11 plates, and numerous black and white illustrations.  Corners slightly bumped, a handful of pages with a faint crease, otherwise fine.

A fascinating work on the color-light performance dubbed "Nourathar," conceived, constructed, and performed by the inventor and musician Mary Hallock Greenewalt.

From the Arabic words meaning "essence of light," Nourathar is a type of performance art "utilizing light as a means of human expression." Greenewalt dubbed her invention "the sixth fine art," joining the ranks of Music, Poetry, Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Performed in theaters, auditoriums, and other spaces that were outfitted to the artist's specifications, Nourathar was played upon a specialized color-light organ called the Sarabet (named after Greenewalt's mother), and set to music. Written in Greenewalt's distinctive flowery prose, the present work is a kind of super-text book for this ambitious new art form, describing every facet of its conception, apparatus, practice, technique, and method of composition by the woman who spent decades devising and refining it. "I offer a fine art on a platter full fledged. I have brought it to operable conclusion through boundless effort, sorrow a-plenty, years many and, of course being a woman, tears of blood and myrrh. I await confidently the incense."

It was extremely important to Greenewalt that she be regarded not just as an artist, but as an inventor, and to receive full credit for her ideas. Litigious in nature and keenly aware that her gender put her at a disadvantage in the world of business and technology, Greenewalt could frequently be found in court defending patent rights. Reproductions of her patents can be found throughout the present work, and she frequently refers to her inventions as "children" that she has brought into the world.

Born in Beirut to a Lebanese mother and an American father, Mary Hallock Greenewalt (1871-1950) was an accomplished concert pianist who toured the States and was especially known for her emotional interpretations of Chopin. Greenewalt began exploring the possibilities of color and light around 1909, and is even credited as a forerunner of motion pictures, having experimented with painted films early in her light-music trials. (1004)