- Email: [email protected]
Colour: a collaboration of materials and mind
Perspectives
Royal Academy of Arts, London
Exhibition Colour: a collaboration of materials and mind
The National Gallery, London
Making Colour National Gallery, London, UK, until Sept 7, 2014 http://www.nationalgallery.org. uk/whats-on/exhibitions/ making-colour
It seems hard to credit the National Gallery’s claim that Making Colour is “the first exhibition of its kind in the UK”, but I can’t think of any precedent. How can this be, given that colour is the stuff and substance of every painting in every gallery anywhere? Mostly, we like our art organised by personalities, periods, themes—all perfectly valid points of entry, but all sidestepping the obvious consideration that painting is constructed from raw materials. So there is something provocative about this exhibition’s juxtaposition of reverent depictions of madonnas and saints with the lumps of coloured rock from which they were made. The irony is that such distinctions between art and craft, material and meaning, have largely been invisible to artists. In his private letters, Vincent van Gogh waxes lyrical not about life
Sassoferrato, The Virgin in Prayer (1640–50), oil on canvas (73x57·7cm)
122
and philosophy so much as about emerald green and cadmium yellow. His voluble friend Paul Gauguin complains from Tahiti not about his sexual relations with local women but about the difficulty of procuring pigments. Cennino Cennini’s painting manual from the late Middle Ages is short on metaphysics and allegory, but big on tips for where to get your paints.
“But colour is ultimately not in the substance—it is in the mind.” The curators have chosen to display the works chromatically: after the glorious 19th-century colour wheel of Michel-Eugène Chevreul, we step through the spectrum room by room. While this makes each room a microchronology to itself, we also appreciate that each hue has its own story. Blue is dominated by ultramarine, made from the mineral lapis lazuli, of which the only source for centuries was the remote mines of Badakhshan in Afghanistan. Its exorbitant cost meant it was reserved for the holiest parts of an altarpiece: the robes of the Virgin. Green was often problematic— Renaissance experiments that mixed verdigris with resins have left Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s Apollo and Daphne with discoloured black foliage. Purple was virtually absent, until 19th-century chemists made it from cobalt, and William Perkin’s mauve dye in 1856 kickstarted the chemicals industry. A key reason to focus on colour and materiality is not just for the sensuous satisfactions but because it roots art in time and place. What materials did the painter have available? What did they cost? How were they prepared? Not only do these practical questions often feed into decisions about style and composition, but they also connect the business of making art to networks of patronage and trade, and to
technological advance. Andrea del Sarto was contractually obliged to render the robes of his Madonna of the Harpies (1517) in ultramarine costing “at least five broad florins the ounce”. Titian would have struggled to create such blazing images if he hadn’t had first pick of the rare pigments imported through Venice from the East. Joseph Mallord William Turner, meanwhile, sought both scientific advice and materials from the colourman George Field in order to use the new synthetic pigments. Making Colour is strong on the practical links between painting and other colour technologies such as dyeing and ceramic glazing. But colour is ultimately not in the substance—it is in the mind. The exhibition reminds us of this in a brilliant final coup in which visitors are invited to take part in an experiment on colour perception devised by neuroscientists Anya Hurlbert and Bradley Pearce from the University of Newcastle. You are presented with two copies of a Cézanne still life— one painted, one printed—and asked to make judgments about colour descriptions, matching, and lighting preferences using state-of-the-art LED lamps that can create essentially any illumination spectrum. The researchers hope to gather demographic information on whether colour constancy depends on age and sex. Their investigations of how colours can be perceived differently under lighting conditions that have different spectra while looking identical to the eye might identify problems with the way colourperception deficiencies are currently diagnosed. Be sure, meanwhile, that you don’t miss the demonstration of “colour memory”—how the mind creates colour from monochrome. I am still flabbergasted by it.
Philip Ball www.thelancet.com Vol 384 July 12, 2014
Royal Academy of Arts, London
Exhibition Colour: a collaboration of materials and mind
The National Gallery, London
Making Colour National Gallery, London, UK, until Sept 7, 2014 http://www.nationalgallery.org. uk/whats-on/exhibitions/ making-colour
It seems hard to credit the National Gallery’s claim that Making Colour is “the first exhibition of its kind in the UK”, but I can’t think of any precedent. How can this be, given that colour is the stuff and substance of every painting in every gallery anywhere? Mostly, we like our art organised by personalities, periods, themes—all perfectly valid points of entry, but all sidestepping the obvious consideration that painting is constructed from raw materials. So there is something provocative about this exhibition’s juxtaposition of reverent depictions of madonnas and saints with the lumps of coloured rock from which they were made. The irony is that such distinctions between art and craft, material and meaning, have largely been invisible to artists. In his private letters, Vincent van Gogh waxes lyrical not about life
Sassoferrato, The Virgin in Prayer (1640–50), oil on canvas (73x57·7cm)
122
and philosophy so much as about emerald green and cadmium yellow. His voluble friend Paul Gauguin complains from Tahiti not about his sexual relations with local women but about the difficulty of procuring pigments. Cennino Cennini’s painting manual from the late Middle Ages is short on metaphysics and allegory, but big on tips for where to get your paints.
“But colour is ultimately not in the substance—it is in the mind.” The curators have chosen to display the works chromatically: after the glorious 19th-century colour wheel of Michel-Eugène Chevreul, we step through the spectrum room by room. While this makes each room a microchronology to itself, we also appreciate that each hue has its own story. Blue is dominated by ultramarine, made from the mineral lapis lazuli, of which the only source for centuries was the remote mines of Badakhshan in Afghanistan. Its exorbitant cost meant it was reserved for the holiest parts of an altarpiece: the robes of the Virgin. Green was often problematic— Renaissance experiments that mixed verdigris with resins have left Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s Apollo and Daphne with discoloured black foliage. Purple was virtually absent, until 19th-century chemists made it from cobalt, and William Perkin’s mauve dye in 1856 kickstarted the chemicals industry. A key reason to focus on colour and materiality is not just for the sensuous satisfactions but because it roots art in time and place. What materials did the painter have available? What did they cost? How were they prepared? Not only do these practical questions often feed into decisions about style and composition, but they also connect the business of making art to networks of patronage and trade, and to
technological advance. Andrea del Sarto was contractually obliged to render the robes of his Madonna of the Harpies (1517) in ultramarine costing “at least five broad florins the ounce”. Titian would have struggled to create such blazing images if he hadn’t had first pick of the rare pigments imported through Venice from the East. Joseph Mallord William Turner, meanwhile, sought both scientific advice and materials from the colourman George Field in order to use the new synthetic pigments. Making Colour is strong on the practical links between painting and other colour technologies such as dyeing and ceramic glazing. But colour is ultimately not in the substance—it is in the mind. The exhibition reminds us of this in a brilliant final coup in which visitors are invited to take part in an experiment on colour perception devised by neuroscientists Anya Hurlbert and Bradley Pearce from the University of Newcastle. You are presented with two copies of a Cézanne still life— one painted, one printed—and asked to make judgments about colour descriptions, matching, and lighting preferences using state-of-the-art LED lamps that can create essentially any illumination spectrum. The researchers hope to gather demographic information on whether colour constancy depends on age and sex. Their investigations of how colours can be perceived differently under lighting conditions that have different spectra while looking identical to the eye might identify problems with the way colourperception deficiencies are currently diagnosed. Be sure, meanwhile, that you don’t miss the demonstration of “colour memory”—how the mind creates colour from monochrome. I am still flabbergasted by it.
Philip Ball www.thelancet.com Vol 384 July 12, 2014