Early 20th-century painters took a radical approach to color | Smithsonian Voices

The Impressionist movement of the late 19th century proved to be a catalyst that changed not only our idea of ​​color, but also our idea of ​​art in a much broader sense. It was a truly radical movement that challenged traditional artistic conventions and encouraged artists to push the boundaries of their field ever further. The ideas advocated by the French Impressionists quickly spread throughout Europe, and in the decades following the emergence of the Impressionists, a number of new, related movements quickly followed, including Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, and Fauvism. Often these new movements had short lives, but each one left a distinctive mark on the face of the brave new Technicolor world.

During the Impressionist era, color became much more than a necessary aspect of painting (and an inferior one by classical standards); it became a powerful means of expression. Many early 20th-century artists, particularly from French and German avant-garde groups such as Les Fauves and Der Blaue Reiter, broke free of the notion that the goal of art was to render reality as beautifully and accurately as possible, and made color a driving force and clear theme of their work.

As with Impressionism, the term “Fauvism” was coined by an art critic as an insult. Like many of his colleagues, Louis Vauxcelles objected to the new works shown by Henri Matisse and André Derain at their 1905 exhibition at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. Comparing their seemingly incomprehensible modern art to a Renaissance statue sharing the exhibition space, he disparaged Matisse and Derain with the memorable phrase “Donatello parmi les fauves,” or “Donatello among the wild beasts.” The Fauvists took direct inspiration from color theory, particularly the effects of complementary colors. They picked up where Van Gogh and Seurat left off, celebrating pure, bright pigments. Beginning a move toward abstraction, they simplified their subjects and gave even more meaning to the colors themselves. Fauvism was not a long-lasting movement, as many of the artists involved in its creation soon moved on to other things, including the largely monochrome Cubism. Matisse, however, celebrated color throughout his life.

In Germany, just a few years later, the Blue Rider group, which included Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Paul Klee, not only experimented with pure and intense colors, but also wrote about the spiritual and symbolic meaning of colors. The results were important reinterpretations of what Goethe and other writers had begun to discuss 100 years earlier: the idea that color means more than its physical form and that individual colors can indicate different meanings.

The goals and innovations of both groups eventually led to the founding of the Bauhaus, a group or school to which both Kandinsky and Klee belonged. It embraced new materials and technologies and combined them with a new philosophy of aesthetics in which color theory played a major role. Its goal was minimalism, clarity and functionality.

As the Western world became more affluent and products and colors became more widely available, a wealth of books on the use of color in interior design and architecture were published in the first half of the 20th century. It was during this century that we first began to see books containing color photographs. Polish-born British photographer Carl Hentschel had recently invented the new three-color photographic printing process that would radically change the look, style and quality of illustrated books. Hentschel’s method of photographic printing effectively replaced the dirty, wasteful and complicated process of woodcut or metal plate printing in color. While this accurate and exciting new way of copying artists’ works led to the rise of the gift book, often in the form of lavishly illustrated travel books and fairy tale and folklore collections, the new method was initially used only cautiously in books on color theory. Authors such as the German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald opted for glued-in, hand-colored color chips in his instructive publications in the 1910s and 1920s.

In the 20th century we still find numerous charts and lists that would not be too out of place in books from centuries past. On the one hand there were the more experimental schemes, for example the beautiful colour analyses of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel. On the other hand various organisations were trying to standardise colours for use in manufacturing and industry and numerous expensive colour charts were produced for this purpose, including one by the newly formed British Colour Council. Smaller and cheaper versions of colour charts were also produced by private companies as promotional material, continuing the tradition of colour and pigment lists printed in 19th century colour books. The colour charts you can get today in most shops selling building paints or art supplies have their origins in the early 20th century when advertising became much more aggressive and colour printing became cheaper.

It is interesting that the exponential rise of consumer culture occurred during a time of intense spirituality, manifested not only in the intellectual works of the Blaue Reiter and the Bauhaus, but also in an increased interest in the paranormal or supernatural and the popularity of esoteric religious movements such as Theosophy. Charles Webster Leadbeater, a major proponent of Theosophy, took even more literally the connection between color and intangible qualities that Goethe had explored in his 1799 Rose of Temperaments (see page 45). Leadbeater’s beliefs led him to publish a book explaining the interpretation of auras – colorful emanations of inner qualities. To this end, he included a table of 25 colors and their specific meanings in his book.

With the outbreak of World War II, the Western world began to turn away from its fascination with mysticism. Perhaps it seemed more important to focus on practical and material things. Yet the ideas promoted in the early 20th century have left behind some of the most fascinating works of art, design and literature the world has ever seen.

Examples of women publishing on color in the 18th and 19th centuries are rare. In the early 20th century, coinciding with the rise of avant-garde groups, the opening of a number of art schools for women, and the emergence of modernism and expressionism, women were gaining a voice both in their art and in publishing, although men still clearly predominated in the public and intellectual establishment as a whole. In the early years of the 20th century, New York-born painter Emily Noyes Vanderpoel published a fascinating book on color: Colour problems: A practical handbook for the layman who deals with colours (1902). Like other women writers of color before her, such as Mary Gartside and Mary Philadelphia Merrifield, Vanderpoel was born into privilege and privately educated. She was an active member of several clubs and organizations that supported women, including the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Litchfield Female Academy in Connecticut, where she spent most of her life.

Vanderpoel appears to have been widowed at a young age, losing her only son and daughter-in-law around the time of the publication of Color problemswhich may explain her sudden and intense publishing activity. A chronological list of the colour literature at the end shows how much Vanderpoel had read on the subject: starting with Leonardo da Vinci, she lists Goethe, Chevreul, Field, Jones, Rood, Wilkinson and Lacouture, among others. Several titles are German and French, and a particular interest in colour vision and colour in other cultures is evident.

The weighting of text and images in Color problems is almost the same (137 pages of text and 117 plates). “Color cannot be fully appreciated by any written description, the text was kept as brief as possible, the plates comprehensive and detailed,” Vanderpoel explained in her introduction. The plates include some predictable images of optical range, color contrast, gradations, and tables of complementary colors; others are more experimental. The book even included transparencies, some colored, that could be used as overlays. Most of the plates are very abstract, such as one illustrating color harmonies (below), which is reminiscent of the color splashes of Gartside and George Barnard, while some of the color contrast plates seem like precursors to Josef Albers’ color squares from Interaction of Color.

A series of freer compositions she calls “color notes” resemble Turner’s color notations from his many sketchbooks – simple brushstrokes with no more than a handful of colors, based largely on observation of nature. For example, “Color Note from a Bluebird – A harmony of cobalt and bright red” or “Color Note from Leaves on a Tree – The sun sweeping across the smooth leaves creates a cool gray, and shining through it creates a warm green. The shaded leaves are a deep green.”

The book’s most notable illustrations are dozens of “color analyses,” in which Vanderpoel breaks down an image, object, or design pattern into its chromatic components and presents the resulting color key on a 10 x 10 square grid, with the proportional distribution of each color across the total number of 100 squares indicated below. Vanderpoel’s way of visualizing color order and layout was measured, methodical, mathematical, and abstract, but also surprisingly simple. It is likely that these images had some influence on the development of abstract art and design in the 20th century, but the author is little studied and Color problems is now an extremely rare book.

Read more in Color: A Visual History from Newton to Modern Color Matching Guides, available from Smithsonian Books. For more information about the publications and a complete list of titles, visit the Smithsonian Books website.

Extract from Color; Text © Alexandra Loske 2019; Design and layout © Octopus Publishing Group 2019