“In nature, light creates the colour. In the picture, colour creates the light,” said Hans Hofmann. Colour defines our perception of the world, and of art. So this exhibition’s proposal, reviewing the history of art through the story of colour, seems like a splendid idea.
Image: Main image poster exhibition. © Marcel Christ
“In nature, light creates the colour. In the picture, colour creates the light,” said Hans Hofmann. Colour defines our perception of the world, and of art. So this exhibition’s proposal, reviewing the history of art through the story of colour, seems like a splendid idea.
Spanning hundreds of years, from the early Renaissance to the Impressionist, “Making Colour” invites us to study the materials and techniques used to achieve certain pigments throughout the history of art. From minerals or chemicals to crushed insects…colour has come a long way.
Image: Moses Harris, ‘The Natural Systems of Colours’. © Royal Academy of Arts, London
“Without paint in tubes, there would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no Sisley or Pissarro,” said Renoir, perfectly illustrating the importance of technological innovation. And would there have been impressionism, without the 19th-century science of optics?
Apart from technological innovation, individual perception and social conventions have also played strong roles in the history of colour. And that’s why a part of the exhibition will put us to the test, demonstrating hoy we perceive and register colour and hoy the eye and the brain respond to it in astonishing ways.
The colour-themed rooms will take us from lapis lazuli to cobalt blue, bright cadmium red to yellow, orange, purple…Main stop: a stunning central room dedicated to silver and gold.
Image: Hillaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, ‘Combing the Hair (‘La Coiffure’), about 1896. © Hamilton Kerr Institute
Image: Replica of a section of Florentine late fourteen century painting. © Hamilton Kerr Institute
If you are looking to complement this exhibition, you can head over to Tate Modern’s Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, to admire the French legend’s ability to “cut directly into vivid color”, solving the eternal conflict between drawing and colour.
Making Colour exhibition
Dates: 18 June – 7 September 2014
Place: The National Gallery (Trafalgar Square, London). Sainsbury Wing Exhibition
Info: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/making-colour
For more insight on this exhibition, check out this video
