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ONE
THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
THE SCIENTIST IN THE STUDIO
"The starting point is the study of color and
its effects on men."
-- Wassily Kandinsky (1912),
Concerning the
Spiritual in Art
"Then the man in the blue suit reaches into his
pocket and takes out a large sheet of paper, which he carefully
unfolds and hands to me. It is covered with Picasso's handwriting
-- less spasmodic, more studied than usual. At first sight, it
resembles a poem. Twenty or so verses are assembled in a column,
surrounded by broad white margins. Each verse is prolonged with a
dash, occasionally a very long one. But it is not a poem; it is
Picasso's most recent order for colors ....
"For once, all the anonymous heroes of Picasso's
palette trooped forth from the shadows, with Permanent White at
their head. Each had distinguished himself in some great battle
-- the blue period, the rose period, cubism, 'Guernica' ... Each
could say: 'I too, I was there ...' And Picasso, reviewing his
old comrades-in-arms, gives to each of them a sweep of his pen, a
long dash that seems a fraternal salute: 'Welcome Persian red!
Welcome emerald green! Cerulean blue, ivory black, cobalt violet,
clear and deep, welcome! Welcome!'"
-- Brassai (1964),
Picasso and Company
"I believe that in the future, people will start
painting pictures in one single color, and nothing else but
color." The French artist Yves Klein made this remark in
1954, before embarking on a "monochrome" period in which
each work was composed from just a single glorious hue. This
adventure culminated in Klein's collaboration with Paris paint
retailer Edouard Adam in 1955 to make a new blue paint of
unnerving vibrancy. In 1957 Klein launched his manifesto with an
exhibition, "Proclamation of the Blue Epoch," that
contained eleven paintings in his new blue.
By saying that Yves Klein's monochrome art was the
offspring of chemical technology, I mean something more than that
his paint was a modern chemical product. The very concept of this
art was technologically inspired. Klein did not just want to show
us pure color; he wanted to display the glory of new color, to
revel in its materiality. His striking oranges and yellows are
synthetic colors, inventions of the twentieth century. Klein's
blue was ultramarine, but not the natural, mineral-based
ultramarine of the Middle Ages: it was a product of the chemical
industry, and Klein and Adam experimented for a year to turn it
into a paint with the mesmerizing quality the artist was seeking.
By patenting this new color, Klein was not simply protecting his
commercial interests but also hallmarking the authenticity of a
creative idea. One could say that the patent was a part of his
art.
Yves Klein's use of color became possible only when
chemical technology had reached a certain level of maturity. But
this was nothing new. For as long as painters have fashioned
their visions and dreams into images, they have relied on
technical knowledge and skill to supply their materials. With the
blossoming of the chemical sciences in the early nineteenth
century it became impossible to overlook this fact: chemistry was
laid out there on the artist's palette. And the artist rejoiced
in it: "Praise be to the palette for the delights it offers
... It is itself a 'work,' more beautiful, indeed, than many a
work," said Wassily Kandinsky in 1913. The Impressionist
Camille Pissarro made the point forcefully in his Palette with a
Landscape (1878), a pastoral scene constructed directly on his
palette by pulling down the bright colors dotted around its
edges.
The Impressionists and their descendants -- van Gogh,
Matisse, Gauguin, Kandinsky -- explored the new chromatic
dimensions opened up by chemistry with a vitality that has
arguably not been equaled since. Their audiences were shocked not
only by the breaking of the rules -- the deviation from
"naturalistic" coloration -- but by the sight of colors
never before seen on canvas: glowing oranges, velvety purples,
vibrant new greens. Van Gogh dispatched his brother to acquire
some of the brightest, most striking of the new pigments available
and wrought them into disturbing compositions whose strident tones
are almost painful to behold. Many people were dumbfounded or
outraged by this new visual language: the conservative French
painter Jean-Georges Vibert rebuked the Impressionists for
painting "only with intense colors."
It was a complaint that echoes back through the ages,
to be heard whenever chemistry (or foreign trade, which also
broadens a culture's repertoire of materials) has made new or
superior colors available to painters. When Titian, Henry James's
"prince of colorists," took advantage of having the
first pick of the pigments brought to the thriving ports of Venice
to cover his canvases with sumptuous reds, blues, pinks, and
violets, Michelangelo remarked sniffily that it was a pity the
Venetians were not taught to draw better. Pliny bemoaned the
influx of bright new pigments from the East to corrupt the austere
coloring scheme that Rome inherited from classical Greece:
"Now India contributes the ooze of her rivers and the blood
of dragons and of elephants."
That the invention and availability of new chemical
pigments influenced the use of color in art is indisputable. As
art historian
Ernst Gombrich
says, the artist "cannot transcribe what he sees; he can only
translate it into the terms of his medium. He, too, is strictly
tied to the range of tones which his medium will yield."
So it is surprising that little attention has been
given to the matter of how artists obtained their colors, as
opposed to how they used them. This neglect of the material
aspect of the artist's craft is perhaps a consequence of a
cultural tendency in the West to separate inspiration from
substance. Art historian John Gage confesses that 'one of the
least studied aspects of the history of art is art's tools."
Anthea Callen, a specialist on the techniques of the
Impressionists, makes a stronger criticism:
Ironically, people who write on art frequently
overlook the practical side of their craft, often concentrating
solely on stylistic, literary or formal qualities in their
discussion of painting. As a result, unnecessary errors and
misunderstandings have grown up in art history, only to be
reiterated by succeeding generations of writers. Any work of art
is determined first and foremost by the materials available to the
artist, and by the artist's ability to manipulate those materials.
Thus only when the limitations imposed by artists' materials and
social conditions are taken fully into account can aesthetic
preoccupations, and the place of art in history, be adequately
understood.
One might expect the "craft" aspects of art
to suffer less neglect when the use of color is under discussion,
for surely the nature of materials should then come naturally to
the fore. But it is not always so. Faber Birren admits in his
classic History of Color in Painting that "the choice of
colors for a palette or palettes is not in any way concerned with
chemistry, or with permanence, transparency, opacity, or any of
the material aspects of art." This extraordinary omission of
the substantial dimension of color is surely the precondition for
such absurdities as Birren's assigning cobalt blue to the palette
of Rubens and his contemporaries almost two centuries before its
inventions. In view of the attention that Birren gives to the
hues required for a "balanced palette," it is indeed odd
how little concerned he is with whether artists of different eras
had access to them.
PAINT AND THE PAINTER
Every painter must confront the question: What is
color for? Bridget Riley, one of the modern artists most
concerned with color relationships, has expressed the dilemma very
clearly:
For painters, colour is not only all those things
which we all see but also, most extraordinarily, the pigments
spread out on the palette, and there, quite uniquely, they are
simply and solely colour. This is the first important fact of the
painter's art to be grasped. These bright and shining pigments
will not, however, continue to lie there on the palette as
pristine colours in themselves but will be put to use -- for the
painter paints a picture, so the use of colour has to be
conditioned by this function of picture making ... The painter
has two quite distinct systems of colour to deal with -- one
provided by nature, the other required by art -- perceptual colour
and pictorial colour. Both will be present and the painter's work
depends upon the emphasis they place first upon the one and then
upon the other.
This is not a contemporary conundrum but one that has
confronted artists of all eras. And yet there is something
missing from Riley's formulation of the artist's situation.
Pigments are not "simply and solely colour" but
substances with specific properties and attributes, not least
among them cost. How is your desire for blue affected if you have
just paid more for it than for the equivalent weight in gold?
That yellow looks glorious, but what if its traces on your
fingertips could poison you at your supper table? This orange
tempts like distilled sunlight, but how do you know that it will
not have faded to dirty brown by next year? What, in short, is
your relationship with the materials?
Raw color supplies more than a physical medium from
which artists can construct their images. "Materials
influence form," said American artist Morris Louis in the
1950s; but influence is too weak a word when we are faced with the
explosive vibrancy of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne (1522-1523),
Ingres's Odalisque with a Slave (1839-1840), or Matisse's Red
Studio (1911). This is art that follows directly from the impact
of color, from possibilities delimited by the prevailing chemical
technology.
But although technology made Yves Klein's monochromes
possible for the first time, it would be meaningless to suggest
that Rubens did not paint them because those colors were not
available to him. It is equally absurd to suppose that, but for a
technical knowledge of anatomy and perspective and the chemical
prowess to extend the range of pigments, the ancient Egyptians
would have painted in the style of Titian. Use of color in art is
determined at least as much by the artist's personal inclinations
and cultural context as by the materials at hand.
So it would be a mistake to assume that the history
of color in art is an accumulation of possibilities proportional
to the accumulation of pigments. Every choice an artist makes is
an act of exclusion as well as inclusion. Before we can gain a
clear understanding of where technological considerations enter
the decision, we must appreciate the social and cultural factors
at work on the artist's attitudes. In the end, each artist makes
his or her own contract with the colors of the time.
Copyright © 2001 Philip Ball
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