Source: National Gallery
Colour is an important aspect of they way we view objects
and link concepts in the world. As a visual format, colour is also important in
art, and has been for centuries. What the National Gallery’s exhibition Making Colour does, then, is to
historicise this use of colour in art across the world and across the ages.
It’s easy to view art from a different time and place with the same eye – an
eye which experiences the Pantone Matching System almost daily on mugs, or
absentmindedly plays with the digitised colour scale on Snapchat. But creating
and reproducing colour is bound up in physical processes, technology; the hand
as well as the eye. Making colour takes skill.
Instead of lying flat on a canvas, colour really does take centre
stage in this exhibition, gaining new political, economic and technological
dimensions. Making Colour is divided
into different sections, beginning with the theories of colour developed by
scientists like Isaac Newton and Ignaz Schiffermüller before moving through
different individual colours: blue, green, red, yellow, orange, purple, gold,
silver. These colours are inextricably linked to their origins and processes of
collection and manufacture into pigments: a lump of lapis lazuli nestles beside
Monet’s Lavacourt Under Snow and a
petri dish of cochineal.
Even more strikingly, the exhibition suggests that our
visual conceptions of myth, religion and history are bound up in the politics
of colour. The Madonna is depicted in blue because ultramarine was so rare and
difficult to extract that it became more precious than gold. It is less flashy,
more modest – suitable for the mother of Christ. However, in paintings such as
Sassoferrato’s The Virgin in Prayer,
this ultramarine is rich and smooth and decadent, with a visual depth that upstages
the gold leaf of earlier Italian religious art. Similarly, purple came to be
the colour of royalty because of its difficulty to produce, highlighted by the
paintings of Queen Victoria and her family in the synthetic, accidentally
discovered mauveine.
Some of the pieces on show were flooded with colour, their
bold tones foregrounding colour as a kind of subject for the work. Edgar Degas’
Combing the Hair is bright with fiery
reds and oranges, the girl’s reclining pose and long hair fashioned as one long
sweep that becomes the background. A section of Roger Hiorns’ Seizure glitters on the wall,
accompanied by a photograph of the whole object, a disused flat crystallised
with copper sulphate. In other cases, colour is part of the subtlety of
creating a work, revealing the techniques behind it. For example, one of the
information videos shows that green was often used as a base for white skintones,
to make them appear more natural. In some examples, the paint laid on top has
deteriorated, leaving the face with an eerie green tinge. Another video
demonstrates the making of oil and egg tempera paints. Once again, the
seemingly abstract notion of colour becomes physical, existing as insects and
minerals and powders and pigments to be mixed and crushed.
Colour in this context, then, is not only aesthetic, but
also scientific. A flake of the surface of a painting can be trapped within
resin and left to dry, and then the resulting transparent block placed under a
microscope. Using this method, the different individual layers and colours can
be viewed as a cross-section, while other, more advanced technology can
identify the specific pigments in a painting. This stripping away of the
ingredients of a painting, just for a moment, allows a glimpse of it without
its aura; it becomes its layers of paint, its brushstrokes, its combination of
colours. For a moment it is not otherworldly – it is skilled human handiwork.
As is to be expected, though, there is slight disjointedness
between the art and the science in this exhibition. Viewed on a wall from a
certain distance, fleeting images of impressionism and luscious painted velvet possess a kind of magic. However, placed
on dark walls next to a description of the exact shade of green in the leaves, Making Colour sometimes falls short of what
it sets out to do. The biggest problem seems to be that the text and the
history surrounding the works fails to bring the disparate works together.
While it is interesting, even necessary in an exhibition like this, to span a
large temporal and spatial period, it often seems as if the paintings are
visibly too spaced out in the gallery, and there is little real interaction
between works, when this could have been very enlightening in itself. Perhaps a
few more paintings would have helped to bridge this gap, or some more
considered attempts at integration. Nevertheless, Making Colour encourages discussion about aspects of art often
forgotten or overshadowed. When I think back to what I saw in the National
Gallery on that rainy summer Tuesday, I remember the bright azurite sheen of a
skirt, the yellow of a desco da parto,
and the sparkling minerals from whence they came.
No comments:
Post a Comment