of total naturalism, of the unbelievably and
monstrously lifelike.”3 In contrast, it was a
writer contemporary with Degas, Joris-Karl
Huysmans, whose artistic commitments at
this point were suspended between a radical
naturalism and a more Symbolist aesthetic,
who perhaps best got to the heart of what
makes this sculpture, and its sophisticated
sculptural experimentation with effects of
illusionistic lifelikeness, such an endless
source of fascination and unease. In his
review of the 1881 Impressionist exhibition,
he began by noting how “the terrible realism of this statuette produces an evident
malaise” in the minds of a public accustomed “to the cold inanimate whiteness”
of sculpture they knew. He then went on
to make a strong claim for its peculiarly
captivating power: “At once refined and
barbarous with its industrious costume, and
its colored flesh which palpitates, furrowed
by the labor of the muscles, this statuette is
the only truly modern attempt I know of
in sculpture.”4 It was as if by pushing to the
limit the apparent incompatibility of illusory lifelikeness and sculptural artifice that
a convincingly real figure might be realized
in modern sculpture—one that blurred
the boundary separating forms thought
appropriate to the art of sculpture and those
associated with the material conditions of
proletarian existence.
alexander potts is Max Loehr Collegiate
Professor in the Department of History of Art at
the University of Michigan [Tappan Hall, 855 South
University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1357].
notes
1. Recent studies on lifelikeness and figuration in sculpture include Roberta Panzanelli, Eike D. Schmidt, and
Kenneth D. S. Lapatin, eds., The Color of Life: Polychromy
in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present (Los Angeles:
Getty Research Institute, 2008); Caroline van Eck, Art,
Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image
to the Excessive Object (Boston: De Gruyter, 2016); and
Bernhard Mendes Bürgi et al., Charles Ray: Sculpture,
1997–2014 (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag,
2014).
2. Van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence.
3. William Tucker, The Language of Sculpture (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1974), 158.
4. Joris-Karl Huysmans, quoted in The New Painting:
Impressionism 1874–1886; Documentation, vol. 1, Reviews,
ed. Ruth Berson (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of
San Francisco, 1996), 348–49.
LAURA ANNE KALBA
Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce,
Technology, and Art
University Park: Penn State University Press,
2017. 288 pp.; 108 color ills., 11 b/w. $84.95
In his review of the Salon of 1868, Émile Zola
regretted the absence of Claude Monet’s
recent paintings of gardens. Praising the artist’s selection of modern subjects, the critic
nonetheless emphasized one of the more notable formal aspects of these works: their color.
“The flower beds,” he wrote, “dotted with
bright reds of geraniums and the flat white of
chrysanthemums, stand out against the yellow
sand of the path.”1 Almost certainly referring
here to the extraordinary Adolphe Monet in
the Garden of Le Coteau at Sainte-Adresse of
1867, Zola’s description fails to distinguish
between the bright colors of the painting and
that of the flowers. The artist’s modern subject
is, among other things, the garden itself. As
the critic says, “Monet has a special affection
for nature that the human hand has dressed
in a modern style.” That “modern style”
had much to do with color. As both Monet
and Zola probably knew, the flowers in Le
Coteau would have been “bedded-out,” a new
technique that deliberately packed together
different flowers—geraniums were especially
popular—for their vivid effects of colorful
harmonies and contrasts. This iconography of
color, and its correlation to the chemical pigments on the canvas, is precisely what made
Impressionist paintings so modern.
As Laura Anne Kalba demonstrates
in her ambitious and beautifully illustrated
book, Color in the Age of Impressionism:
Commerce, Technology, and Art, this horticultural interest in color effects is only one
part of a larger transformation in the visual
culture of color in the nineteenth century. In
dyes and textiles, in real and artificial flowers, in chemical paint, in fireworks, and in
chromolithographic posters, the century witnessed a “color revolution” (p. 84). The existence of a later phase of this revolution in the
commercial realm of the twentieth century
has long been noted, and cultural historians
have more recently established its origins
in the nineteenth century.2 At the same
time, art historians have increasingly placed
the artistic use of color within the broader
theoretical, scientific, and philosophical
developments of the period.3 Kalba’s book
176 The Art Bulletin September 2019
thus contributes to an expanding discourse
on color and art, but it is the first to propose
a full-blown cultural history of color as the
appropriate ground for our understanding of
the emergence of Impressionism.
The title of this book is not, however, Impressionism in the Age of Color, and
with good reason. It is not really about
Impressionism, it is about color or, more
exactly, the visual culture of color of which
painting constituted only one part. While her
account develops close readings of color in
the work of Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Edgar Degas, James McNeill Whistler, and
Georges Seurat, Kalba is primarily concerned
to “reconstruct the history of modern visual
perception and signification from the bottom
up” (p. 4). She frames this in terms explicitly
drawn from the work of Michael Baxandall
and Jonathan Crary. “Impressionist art
emerged within an already restructured visual
field,” she asserts early on, “in which inexpensively produced and reproduced color functioned as the principal means by and through
which modes of visual signification and
expression were defined” (p. 5). The “visual
field” is ultimately the object of analysis, not
the paintings that simultaneously produce,
record, and critique it. Color in the Age of
Impressionism thus challenges certain aspects
of conventional, object-oriented art history,
and it offers one of the more compelling histories of modern visual culture. For that very
reason, however, Kalba’s argument about the
relation of the visual culture of color and the
art of its time could stand scrutiny. I cannot
here fully address the issues raised, but I aim
to signal some of the stakes.
At its core, Color in the Age of Impres­
sionism offers two intertwined accounts. One
is a history of the practical and theoretical
invention and management of color in modern, mostly commercial culture. The other
history is that of the artistic response to and
representation of this visual culture. These
two accounts are intended to synthesize.
Kalba repeatedly asserts that the color revolution in everyday life produced something like
a new way of seeing color, what Baxandall
would call a “cognitive style” or “period
eye.”4 For example, she states that “the art
and business of color chemistry played a
central role in shaping Impressionists’ new
ways of seeing and handling color” (p. 76).
Or, “the color revolution resulted in new,
distinctly modern ways of seeing” (p. 190).
These new ways of seeing are not reducible
merely to the capacity to recognize modern
colors like mauve or the bedding-out of
flowers, although that is part of it. Rather,
in Kalba’s presentation, the color revolution
restructured the ways people thought about
and experienced the visual forms of realism, fantasy, and abstraction. These visual
forms in turn can be understood, reasonably
enough, to play a significant role in the
development of the art of the late nineteenth
century. The trick is, in Baxandallian terms,
to demonstrate how cognitive style relates to
pictorial style. It requires, in one model, the
establishment of a plausible chain of concrete mediations between historical agents
and pictures. How, for example, did the use
of linear perspective by Florentine painters
play to the taste of merchants trained in the
complex assessment of the volume of barrels?
Or, in Kalba’s case, in what precise ways did
the modern artistic use of color emerge from
the “ways of seeing” prompted by new color
chemistry?
Kalba begins her analysis with the figure
most closely associated with color theory in
nineteenth-century France: Michel-Eugène
Chevreul. Employed by the Manufacture des
Gobelins, the famous producer of tapestries,
Chevreul developed an exhaustive catalogue
of 14,400 possible colors that would serve to
regulate the use of color in textile production.
He also explained the effect of “simultaneous
contrast,” in which the juxtaposition of complementary colors produced striking vividness.
Although most art historians have probably
seen his 1855 color wheel, it should be noted
that Chevreul’s theoretical endeavors were
motivated not by aesthetic or philosophical
concerns but rather by their practical applications in industry. The French textile trade
became increasingly fueled by a “noveltydriven consumer culture” that demanded a
greater and greater variety of color (p. 30).
Chemists eagerly complied: mauve appeared
in 1856, aniline red in 1859, synthetic madder
in 1868, indigo in 1877. (These achievements
mostly happened outside France.) In turn,
the proliferation of new chemical dyes produced “multiple and jarring colors,” or what
the French called bariolage (p. 32). Chevreul’s
regulated colors and calculated contrasts were
meant to deter this effect, but to no avail. All
the same, he succeeded in opening up a new
way of thinking about color. In his account,
“colors had no meaning above and beyond
the optical impression they provided”; this
Kalba relates to the “modernist sense of a
purely visual, self-sufficient nonreferential
sign” (p. 38).
Chapter 2 pivots to the “novelty and
color-driven world of horticulture and
gardening” (p. 44). Interestingly enough,
Chevreul returns as an advocate of what
Kalba calls “ocularcentric” gardening (p. 50).
The new parks and flower shops of Baron
Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s Paris were
designed to produce a “powerful chromatic
visual effect” (p. 57). In tandem with the new
gardens, artificial flowers bloomed. Color
was central to their appeal, but the fashion
industry was divided about the question of
the meaning or signification of color. Some
advocated a strict realism, le naturel, in
which artificial flowers resembled real flowers. More and more popular, however, were
fleurs de fantaisie in which “color was the
form,” and the representational relation to
actual flowers was abandoned (p. 65). As in
textiles and gardens, such flowers turned to
color as a pure and isolated effect.
The third chapter of the book is the
only one devoted to Impressionism. In the
work of Monet, Renoir, and Degas, Kalba
seeks to show how “Impressionism both
mirrored and mediated the large-scale visual
transformation of nineteenth-century color
technologies” (p. 69).
On the one hand, “Impressionists sought
to fix on canvas the bariolage of everyday life”
(p. 70). On the other hand, its “chemical
aesthetic” offered a “critical exploration of
177 reviews: young on kalba
modern industrial colors’ variety, vividness,
and inherently fugitive nature” (p. 70). The
interest in women’s fashion, in laundresses,
in millinery flowed from a recognition of the
distinctively new color world they exemplify.
They also mark the evanescence of this world.
Chemical colors fade. The fact that new synthetic paints also fade began to trouble artists
in the 1880s. Some artists consequently sought
to distinguish the historical or the natural
from the merely chemical.
In what would seem to be one such
reaction, Monet painted a series of pictures
of Rouen Cathedral in the early 1890s, equating his colored pigment to the sensation of
light playing against the stone surface of the
Gothic structure. Yet, as Kalba notes, the
artist would have produced these paintings
from the physical vantage point of shops
filled with the “synthetic colors of women’s
fashion” (p. 110). And in a telling coincidence, Monet’s brother Léon, who lived in
Rouen at the time, worked as a sales representative for Geigy, a Swiss artificial dye
company. Monet’s awareness of the chemical
color world and of bariolage is undeniable.
It nonetheless seems a leap to claim that the
Rouen paintings “reproduced the impression of chromatic abundance, variety, and
evanescence on display in department stores
and smaller magasins de nouveautés” (p. 110).
Unlike the bedding-out of flowers, Monet’s
subject here is downright antimodern, a fact
that undermines the very equation Kalba
proposes. To be fair, another turn in the
dialectic could have produced a very strong
reading of the contradictions of the synthetic
and organic in Impressionism. Future histories will have to mobilize the information in
Kalba’s book for a more sustained interpretation of such artistic production.
Chapter 4 arguably offers the most persuasive analysis of the relation of the culture
of color and artistic innovation. Focused
on the history of color in fireworks, Kalba’s
account ultimately turns on a brief but
compelling analysis of Whistler’s Nocturne
in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket of 1875.
Over the course of the century, color played
an ever more prominent role in firework
displays. While such exhibitions historically
relied on distinct political symbolism—in
which the Ruggieri company specialized—
they increasingly became féeriques, fantasies,
or the “visual experience of spectacles made
wondrous by color” (pp. 124–25). In other
words, as Kalba makes plain, “fireworks, and
their colors in particular, represented nothing” (p. 125). In choosing to paint a fireworks
display at the Cremorne Gardens in London,
Whistler “does not occlude its subject but
exploits it both formally and conceptually”
(p. 139). While the painter was said at the
time to have reached “the limit of intelligibility in painting”—this is Théodore Duret
in 1881—his iconography points back to the
role visual culture played in developing color
as an autonomous element “created for no
other purpose than to delight the eyes”
(p. 139). The differences between London and
Paris are less important to Kalba here than a
generalizing claim about modern culture and
art. The broader relation of representation
(or meaning or signification) and abstraction
thus emerges very strongly as a through line
in the book. The strength of Kalba’s analysis
rests on its reframing of the emergence of
abstraction within the consumer culture of
the time, but problems arise in her implicit
equation of the “meaninglessness” of color in
textiles, flowers, or fireworks and the artistic
turn to autonomous form (p. 140). An understanding of the emergence of abstraction as
preconditioned by the experience of the commodity form provides the ground for a plausible rethinking of modernist autonomy. But
to see abstraction and the commodity form as
identical is to deny the practice and intention
of most modernist artists.
The fifth and last chapter of Color in the
Age of Impressionism turns to chromolithography. Although color posters in fin-de-siècle
France are most prominent, Kalba interestingly demonstrates the pervasive use of color
in other forms such as the chromos, a kind
of colored trading card used for advertising.
She also shows the origins of chromolithography in the mechanical reproduction of
works of art in the 1830s and after; so-called
oleographs sought to replicate in colored
form as precisely as possible the appearance
of paintings. Jules Chéret’s posters and the
accompanying affichomanie, or poster craze,
are a later phenomenon. Unlike previous
printed images, posters “did not attempt to
seduce viewers with subtle hues, but proudly
touted their yellows, blues, and reds, no
longer trying to replicate the visual effects of
another medium or any recognizable reality at all” (p. 151). Art critics and collectors
enthusiastically embraced these posters, even
as they ignored the closely related, but more
obviously commercial chromos. The difference in the reception, Kalba argues, resulted
from gender and nationalism. Collectors
were largely French men, and the discourse
that arose in defense of chromolithographic
posters led them into “actively dissimulating
how posters and poster collecting contributed
to the same fanciful, commercialized, international logic that underpinned the rest of the
color revolution” (p. 177). Unlike other parts
of the book, this chapter thus reverses the
logic of cultural dissemination, demonstrating
how beholders of the color revolution sought
to manage it and make it meaningful. One
misses this same agency in Kalba’s account of
Monet or Whistler, where neither artist seems
fully aware of how their artistic choices fit
within their own visual culture.
A long epilogue treats early color
photography—autochromes—and NeoImpressionist painting. Why this last part
of the book is sectioned off is not really
clear. Kalba’s conception of the “Age of
Impressionism” is quite expansive, and
Seurat certainly falls within it. Autochromes,
by contrast, are a later development and have
a more retrospective quality. Perfected by the
Lumière brothers in 1903, they consistently
represented the color world familiar from the
previous century: fashion, flowers, posters,
and landscapes. As such, color photography
“restates and magnifies the central aesthetic
and semiotic themes that first emerged in the
Age of Impressionism” (p. 189). Kalba argues
for a parallel in Seurat’s painting, which
offers a “critical reflection on Impressionism”
(p. 194). Nowhere is this more apparent than
in the Models, now in the Barnes Foundation
in Philadelphia. In various ways, the painting shows a self-awareness that marks “an
important first step toward artists’ appreciation of color as an autonomous element of
picture making” (p. 196). The juxtaposition
of Seurat with color photography does not
quite connect the two—Henri Matisse’s startling combination of millinery fashion and
autonomous color in his Femme au chapeau
of 1905 would be a more obvious choice—
but rather it serves to underline the shared
origins of their attitude toward color in the
visual culture of the mid-nineteenth century.
On the whole, Color in the Age of
Impressionism stands as an innovative and
178 The Art Bulletin September 2019
serious attempt to connect a rich study of
visual culture to a revisionist history detailing the emergence of certain modernist values. This is the implicit accomplishment of
the book. Its concern with a full-blown history of the visual culture of color “from the
bottom up,” though, remains to be fleshed
out. The priority given to France, for
instance, seems problematic at best given
how few chemical innovations in color
actually took place there. Perhaps more
pointedly, a history of visual culture such
as this should provide a deeper explanation
of how changes in the visual world, or in
vision itself, actually entered into meaningfully configured pictorial form. I am
thinking here of Whitney Davis’s General
Theory of Visual Culture and its instructive
account of the successions and recursions
between vision and visuality.5 Seeing color
is one thing—vision—and the cultural and
commercial drive toward “meaningless” or
abstract color presumes it can be experienced purely and simply. Seeing color as
fashionable, as evanescent, as chemical, or
as masculine, however, requires a move to
visuality. Demonstrating how such a move
occurs is the challenge of any history of
visual culture. That challenge remains fully
to be surmounted in this case. But in its
tight packing together of a cultural history
of color and a history of color in painting,
Kalba’s book makes the interaction of visual
culture and art history quite vivid.
marnin young is associate professor of art
history at Stern College for Women, Yeshiva University
[245 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10016].
Notes
1. Émile Zola, “Mon Salon: IV. Les actualistes,”
L'Événement Illustré, May 24, 1868, quoted in Charles
Stuckey, ed., Monet: A Retrospective (New York: Park Lane,
1985), 39.
2. Of note, see Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature,
Art, and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion Books,
2005); and Regina Lee Blaszczyck, The Color Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
3. See especially John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice
and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993).
4. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in FifteenthCentury Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972),
29–30.
5. Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
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