Early 20th-Century Painters Took a Radical Approach to Color

The Impressionist movement of the latter nineteenth century proved a catalyst for changing not only how we thought about color, but also how we thought about art in a much wider sense. It was a truly radical movement, upsetting traditional artistic conventions and emboldening artists to push their field’s boundaries ever further. The ideas propagated by the French Impressionists spread quickly throughout Europe, and the decades that followed Impression’s inception saw a raft of new, related movements, including Post-Impressionism, Expressionism and fFauvism, swiftly follow. Often, these new movements enjoyed only brief lives, but each one left a distinctive mark on the face of the brave new, technicolor world.

Painters not only experimented with pure and intense colors but also wrote about the spiritual and symbolic meaning of color

In the wake of Impressionism, color became much more than just a necessary aspect of painting (and an inferior one at that, according to classical standards); it developed into a powerful expressive tool. Many early-twentieth-century artists, especially from French and German avant-garde groups, such as Les Fauves and Der Blaue Reiter, freed of the concept that the goal of art was to reproduce reality as beautifully and accurately as possible, made color a driving force and distinct subject matter of their work.

As with Impressionism, the term “Fauvism” was coined as a slight by an art critic. Like many of his peers, Louis Vauxcelles objected to the new work shown by Henri Matisse and André Derain at their 1905 salon d’automne exhibition in Paris. Comparing their seemingly incomprehensible modern art to a Renaissance statue that shared the exhibition space, he disparaged Matisse and Derain with the memorable phrase, “Donatello parmi les fauves,” or “Donatello among the wild beasts.” The Fauvists were directly inspired by color theory, particularly the effects of complementary colors. Taking up where Van Gogh and Seurat had left off, they celebrated pure, bright pigments, and, beginning a move toward abstraction, they simplified their subjects, lending the colors themselves even more importance. Fauvism was not a long-lasting movement, as many of the artists involved in its conception soon turned to other things, including the largely monochrome Cubism. Matisse, however, celebrated color throughout his life.

In Germany, just a few years later, Der Blaue Reiter, a group of painters including 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 color. The results were important new interpretations of what Goethe and other writers had begun discussing 100 years earlier: the idea that color signified more than its physical form, and that individual colors might point to distinct meanings.

It is in this century that we first begin to see books illustrated with colored photography

The aims and innovations of both groups eventually resulted in the creation of the Bauhaus, a group or school of which both Kandinsky and Klee were members; it embraced new materials and technologies and combined these with a new philosophy of aesthetics, in which color theory played a big part. Their aim was for minimalism, clarity and functionality.

As the western world continued to become wealthier, and products and paints became increasingly available in wider ranges, the first half of the twentieth century saw an abundance of books published on the use of color in interior decoration and architecture. It is in this century that we first begin to see books illustrated with colored photography. The Polish-born British photographer Carl Hentschel had recently invented the new photographic three-color printing process that would radically change the look, style and quality of illustrated books. Hentschel’s method of photographic printing effectively replaced the messy, wasteful and complicated process of woodblock 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 collections of fairy tales and folklore, the new method was at first only cautiously used in books concerned with color theory. Authors such as the German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald still opted for pasted-in hand-colored color chips in his instructive publications in the 1910s and ’20s.

In the twentieth century, we still see a number of charts and lists that wouldn’t look too out of place in books from centuries past. On the one hand, there were the more experimental schemas, for example Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s beautiful color analyses. On the other hand, various organizations were attempting to standardize colors for use in manufacturing and industry, and for this purpose a number of expensive color charts were produced, including one by the newly founded British Colour Council. Smaller and cheaper versions of color charts were also produced as advertising materials by private companies, in a continuation of the tradition of lists of colors and pigments printed in nineteenth-century books on color. The paint charts you can pick up today in most shops that sell architectural paint or artists’ materials have their origin in the early twentieth century, when advertising became much more aggressive and color printing became cheaper.

It is interesting that the exponential rise of consumer culture was occurring during a time of intense spirituality, manifesting not only in the intellectual works of Der Blaue Reiter and Bauhaus, but also in a heightened interest in the paranormal or supernatural, and the popularity of esoteric religious movements such as theosophy. Charles Webster Leadbeater, a key proponent of the latter, made the connection between color and intangible qualities, which Goethe had been considering in 1799 with his Temperamenten-Rose (see page 45), even more literal. Leadbeater’s beliefs led him to publish a book that explained the interpretation of auras—colorful emanations of inner qualities— for which purpose he included in his book a table of 25 colors and their specific meanings.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, the western world began to turn away from its fascination with mysticism. Perhaps it seemed more important to focus on practical and material things. But the ideas promoted in the early twentieth century have left a legacy of some of the most fascinating works of art, design and literature the world has ever seen.

Examples of women publishing on color in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are rare. In the early twentieth century, coinciding with the rise of avant-garde groups, the opening of a number of art colleges for women and the advent of Modernism and Expressionism, women gained a stronger voice, both with their art and in publishing, although men still dramatically outweighed women in public visibility and the intellectual establishment in general. In the very early years of the twentieth century, the New York-born painter Emily Noyes Vanderpoel published an intriguing book on color: Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color (1902). Like other women color writers before her, such as Mary Gartside and Mary Philadelphia Merrifield, Vanderpoel was born into privileged circumstances and enjoyed a private education. She was an active member of several societies and organizations that supported women, including the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Litchfield Female Academy, Connecticut, where she lived for most of her life.

Vanderpoel appears to have been widowed young and lost her only son and daughter-in-law around the time of the publication of Color Problems, which may explain her sudden and intense publishing output. A chronological list of color literature at the end shows how widely Vanderpoel had read on the subject: beginning with Leonardo da Vinci, she further lists Goethe, Chevreul, Field, Jones, Rood, Wilkinson and Lacouture, among many others. A number of titles are German and French, and a particular interest in color vision and color in other cultures is apparent.

The weighting of text and images in Color Problems is almost equal (137 text pages and 117 plates). “Color cannot be fully appreciated by any written description, the text has been made as brief as possible, the plates full and elaborate,” Vanderpoel explained in her introduction. The plates include some predictable images of the optical range, color contrast, gradation and tables of complementary colors; others are more experimental. The book even included transparencies, some of them colored, to be used as overlays. Most plates are highly abstract, such as one illustrating color harmonies (below) that recalls the color blots of Gartside and George Barnard, while some plates illustrating color contrasts appear like precursors of Josef Albers’s color squares from Interaction of Color.

A number of freer compositions which she calls “color notes” resemble Turner’s color notations from his many sketchbooks—simple brushstrokes of no more than a handful of colors, largely based on the observation of nature. For example, “Color note from a bluebird —A harmony of cobalt and light red,” or “Color note from leaves on a tree—The sun glancing across the smooth leaves makes a cool gray, and shining through them makes a warm green. The shaded leaves are a deep green.”

The most remarkable plates in the book are dozens of “color analyses,” in which Vanderpoel breaks down an image, an object or a 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 noted below to the total of 100 squares. Vanderpoel’s way of visualising 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 twentieth century, but as yet the author is under-researched and Color Problems is now an extremely rare book.

Read more in Color: A Visual History from Newton to Modern Color Matching Guides, which is available from Smithsonian Books. Visit Smithsonian Books’ website to learn more about its publications and a full list of titles. 

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