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Artists’ Palettes and Colour Mixing
© 1999 & 2004 Don Pavey & Roy Osborne
Artists’ Palettes and Colour Mixing
© 2004 Don Pavey and Roy Osborne. All rights reserved.
PART 2
Palettes from Impressionism to Computers
From the Mid Nineteenth Century to the Present Day
2.1. Late­Modern Palettes
Recent discoveries in physics and paint technology, together with
new concepts in psychophysics and psychology, have undoubtedly
increased the artist’s scope in the use of colour. A ‘palette of
colours’ is just as likely nowadays to mean a bank of artificial
lights, or a row of cans on a shelf, as the traditional, hand­held
colour­mixing surface.
Twentieth­century Developments
The twentieth century saw the introduction of important new
additions – mostly from coal­tar dyes – to the artists’ palette.
Indanthrone Blue (synthesised 1901) provided an important new
deep­blue dye. Naphthol Red (1914) proved to be more saturated
in colour and permanent than alizarine (synthetic madder) or
Alizarin Crimson, and is now commonly used as an inexpensive
substitute for Cadmium Red. Phthalocyanine Blue was originally
marketed as Monastral Blue, following its accidental discovery at
Scottish Dyers Limited in 1927. It subsequently became widely
adopted as the standard or Process Cyan used extensively in
commercial three­colour (trichromatic) printing; it consists
chemically of copper phthalocyanine. Chlorine is added to make
Monastral Green.
Quinacridone Red or Magenta, another coal­tar derivative
(introduced in the 1950s) was another valuable addition to the
artist’s palette, and was subsequently became the Process Magenta
of the commercial printer. Largely displacing the traditional lead­
and zinc­based whites, Titanium White was first formulated in the
1920s and (since the 1940s) has been used widely as a relatively
inexpensive artists’ and decorators’ pigment valued for its high
opacity and non­yellowing performance.
Polymer Painting
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Artists’ Palettes and Colour Mixing
© 1999 & 2004 Don Pavey & Roy Osborne
Modern polymer paint consists of three main ingredients: a
quantity of powdered pigment, a liquid medium (consisting of a
synthetic plastic or monomer), and a solvent (usually water). All
three are mixed by high­speed agitation. Technically speaking, an
emulsion is a suspension of one liquid in another, while a colloid is
a suspension of a solid in a liquid. Polymer paints, though often
referred to as ‘emulsion paints’, essentially consist of both.
When polymer paint is squeezed from a tube and spread onto a
surface, the water evaporates fairly quickly, thereby permitting the
liquid monomer to ‘dry’, that is, to solidify into a tough and
flexible polymer film within which the pigment is safely
embedded. (This process is technically referred to as
‘condensation polymerisation’.) A monomer consists of numerous
single molecules able to join together to form complex groups of
between 200 and 2,000 molecules. The process is normally not
reversible, so that once the paint is dry – and unlike the gum
arabic used in watercolour paints – it cannot be dissolved or
transformed back into a liquid.
Two polymers have proven to be particularly useful for use in
artists’ paints: the acrylics and the vinyls. Acrylic resin (a
polymerised form of methyl methacrylate) tends to be clearer and
more expensive than vinyl resins (usually consisting of
polymerised vinyl acetate or PVA), that are used extensively for
water­based household paints. Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is used
for tough and flexible plastic sheeting, and can be dyed various
colours during manufacture. Such paints are distributed under a
variety of trade names, including Rhoplex (introduced as early as
1933), Liquitex, Aquatec, Magna, Hyplar and New Temp (all
made in the USA), Cryla, Acron and Keepsafe (made in the UK)
and Chromacryl (made in Australia).
Plastic polymer paints tend to be easier than oil or watercolour to
use, and can be applied to almost any surface that is free from dust
and grease. They usually dry (or solidify) in much less than an
hour, after which they can be painted over without re­dissolving
the existing paint­layer. Polymer paints can be used thickly as an
impasto or thinly, to achieve effects similar to watercolour glazes.
It is also easy to manipulate polymer paint with the use of masking
tape, to obtain sharp, incisive colour­boundaries, and to add
various gels that alter the consistency and the transparency of the
paint­layer.
As far as can be predicted, acrylic paints should prove to be highly
durable as an art medium, and relatively free from deterioration by
such factors as dampness or cracking. The pigment is embedded in
a tough, clear film that should remain chemically unchanged for
centuries. Once dry, acrylic paint applied to canvas can be rolled
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Artists’ Palettes and Colour Mixing
© 1999 & 2004 Don Pavey & Roy Osborne
up with little fear of damage. A minor disadvantage can be that,
partly because they are water­based media, acrylic and vinyl
paints tend to change colour as they dry, usually by darkening
(and/or dulling) to a greater or lesser degree. Their vividness can
be regained to some extent by varnishing (especially with gloss
varnish), which can usually be done safely within a week of
completion of the painting.
Polymer paint as an art medium was first employed in the mid
1950s by the North American artist Helen Frankenthaler, and was
subsequently adopted by various East­Coast painters, notably by
the Washington Color Painters, a group which included Morris
Louis, Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland and Tom Downing.
Alkyd Painting
The first useful synthetic plastic was Charles Goodyear’s
development of vulcanised rubber in 1839. Parkes invented clear
Celluloid from cotton fibre in 1854, followed by Leo Baekland’s
development of Bakelite, the first commercially useful plastic, in
1909. Soon after this came the introduction of casein (1919), alkyd
resin (1926), acrylic resin (1933), PVA (1936), PVC (1939),
polyester resin (1942) and epoxy resin (1947). Though none of
these media are ‘resins’ in the traditional sense of the term, they
exhibit qualities similar to natural tree­resins, and hence the term
was extended in its meaning. Of the artificial resins particularly
suitable for painting, the alkyd resin (also known as glyptal resin,
which is related to polyester) has proved useful enough to largely
displace traditional seed­oil paint­media.
What might be considered a distinct disadvantage of traditional
oil­paint is that it takes a considerable period of time to dry,
especially when applied thickly. This can be remedied to some
extent by adding to the oil (or diluent used to thin the oil) a small
amount of a so­called dryer or siccative. Such additives or
catalysts consist of oxidising agents that speed up absorption of
oxygen from the air. Of the common dryers available, cobalt oxide
is recommended, rather than litharge, which consists of a
poisonous compound of lead. Litharge was known since ancient
Roman times as a paint­drier, and was recommended for the
purpose by Pliny in his Natural History.
It was not until the 1950s (by such artists as Jackson Pollock and
then Frank Stella) that alkyd household paints were first used by
fine artists. Alkyd resin ‘dries’ by the process of polymerisation,
rather than oxidation. Alkyd paint media, such as Liquin
(manufactured by Winsor & Newton), can also be used in their
own right (though there is a tendency for such paints to harden in
the tube) or else as a drier in combination with traditional
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Artists’ Palettes and Colour Mixing
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natural­oil media. Remarkably, such artificial resins are usually
dry enough to paint over within 24 hours, or 48 hours at most. By
comparison, using ‘cold­pressed’ linseed oil, one might have to
wait weeks for a thick layer of paint to be touch dry or even longer
for it to harden throughout.
Alkyd resin is highly transparent and resists the yellowing
tendency of man natural oils. In other respects, it can be thinned
with turpentine and can be used to exploit the same painting
effects as oil paints, to include blending, scumbling and glazing.
As with all polymer paints, alkyd media cannot be re­dissolved
once dry, hence the artist must be careful not to let such paints or
resins dry on the brush.
The artist and colour theorist Roy Osborne has employed three
basic palettes.
The first is a general­purpose palette that combines three primary
colours and three secondary colours with white (for tinting). The
three ideal pigment­primary colours – magenta­red, yellow and
cyan­blue – are called the ‘process colours’ by printers. They offer
the greatest range of derived colour mixtures from any
three­colour pigment system (especially when using transparent
paints or inks). Their only limitation is an inability to obtain bright
greens and oranges. To overcome this it is useful also to have the
secondary colours – orange­red, green and blue­violet – also
available on the palette. An additional advantage is that each
colour can be rapidly darkened or dulled by adding to it a small
amount of its complementary colour, so that cyan­blue can be
darkened, for example, by mixing with it a small amount of its
complementary orange­red.
For so­called ‘pointillist’ paintings, it is the light reflected from
the painting that mixes in the eye of the viewer – hence the rules
of colour­mixing follow the additive rather than the subtractive
principle. The primary colours of light are orange­red, green and
blue­violet (usually referred to simply as red, green, and blue), and
these form the basis of the pointillist­painters’ palette. Other
colours can be added, including white for tinting, but the principle
is that adjacent orange­red and green dots appear dull­yellow from
a distance, orange­red and blue­violet dots appear purplish, and
green and blue­violet dots appear blue. A combination of all three
additive primary colours (which would appear white if overlapped
as projected light­beams, or as phosphors on an illuminated
television screen) appear as ‘dark white’ or grey in a pointillist
painting.
A third useful palette is the one inherited from antiquity, and
written about extensively by Don Pavey in his book Colour and
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Artists’ Palettes and Colour Mixing
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Humanism (2003). Sometimes called simply the ‘four­earth
palette’ or, in Greek, the tetrachromikon, it consists of white,
yellow ochre, red ochre and black. The combination is particularly
effective for obtaining all varieties of flesh­tint, including
shadows. Since all four colours are permanent and lightfast,
mixtures can be used to paint sculpted figures as well as well as
figures paintings. The black was commonly vine­charcoal,
exhibiting a bluish tinge, so that a combination of black and white
offers an acceptable sky blue, while black and yellow ochre give a
dull foliage­green.
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Roy Osborne’s palette 1: Titanium White, Quinacridone Magenta,
Cadmium Red Medium, Cadmium Yellow Light, Permanent
Green, Phthalocyanine Blue, Cobalt Violet.
Reference: Roy Osborne, Color Influencing Form (2004).
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Roy Osborne’s palette 2: Titanium White, Cadmium Red Medium,
Permanent Green, Cobalt Violet.
Reference: Roy Osborne, Lights and Pigments (1980).
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Roy Osborne’s palette 3: Titanium White, Yellow Ochre, Red
Ochre (Indian Red), Payne’s Grey.
Reference: Don Pavey, Colour and Humanism (2003).
Post­Modernism
Ettore Sottsass (1917­ ). An Austrian­born designer, working in
Italy, Sottsass became one of the most outstanding, stylish and
witty designers of the late twentieth century. In the 1960s he
became interested in developments in Pop Art, including an
irreverent New­Wave approach to colour, which he manifested in
oddly geometrical furniture designs for the Alchymia Studio and
for the Memphis Group (founded 1981). As a father­figure of
Post­Modernism, he became a master of the art of playing subtle
tricks by opposing complementary and contrasting colours,
sometimes intense, sometimes muted, but always with unexpected
piquancy.
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Ettore Sottsass’ palette: White, vivid yellow, red, green and blue,
plus grey and black.
Reference: Ettore Sottsass, Photographing Design and Desire
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Artists’ Palettes and Colour Mixing
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(1997).
Op Art
Optical or ‘Op’ Art exploits various visual ambiguities of form and
colour, usually in an abstract context. Arising out of an extensive
study of ‘optical illusions’ by the nineteenth­century French
chemist Michel­Eugène Chevreul, the perceptual study of colour
was revived at the Weimar Bauhaus, most notably (in this context)
by Josef Albers, who later channelled his investigations into his
teaching at Yale University (1950­60). Some of the most
remarkable examples of his students’ work were published as a
boxed portfolio of screen­prints, entitled Interaction of Color, in
1963. Richard Anuszkiewicz is perhaps the most notable of
Albers’ students to be inspired by such researches, and in Europe
Op Art was developed independently by Sydney Harry (1912­89),
Victor Vasarély and Bridget Riley.
Bridget Riley (1931­ ). English painter who developed her own
variation on the theme of Op Art initially using disorientating,
geometrical patterns using black, white and ‘warm’ and ‘cool’
greys. For several years after 1966 her works continued to include
startling optical effects induced by precise, parallel lines of colour,
repeated in such a way that the composition offers no specific
point of focus on which the eye can rest. A degree of flicker
occurs, arising out of contrasts of complementary colours (at first)
in precise and geometrical configurations, often presented on a
scale large enough to fill the viewer’s visual field. Sydney Harry’s
paintings commonly exploit combinations of the additive­primary
colours (red, green and blue) and his colour­palette was adopted
by Riley in works of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Working
primarily in gouache paint on paper (with assistants enlarging and
reproducing her designs in oil on canvas), Riley’s palette later
widens to include selected groups of other colours, such as those
impressed upon her during a visit to Egypt, and other paintings
employ more muted and harmonious colour contrasts.
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Bridget Riley’s palette: Titanium White, Cadmium Red, Viridian
Green, Phthalocyanine Blue, Cobalt Blue, French Ultramarine,
Ivory Black.
Reference: Robert Kudielka, ed., The Eye’s Mind. Bridget Riley:
Collected Writings 1965­1999 (1999).
Victor Vasarèly (1908­97). A prolific Hungarian­French painter
and designer, influenced by mid­twentieth­century abstract and
Constructivist painting. Combining positive­negative ambiguity of
space, often with illusions of distorted, three­dimensional forms,
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Artists’ Palettes and Colour Mixing
© 1999 & 2004 Don Pavey & Roy Osborne
Vasarély utilised scales and gradients of colour in algorithmic
harmonies that contrast sharply with one another, offsetting one
group of colour­parameters against another, to give an impression
of a kind of space­warp leading to a polychromatic ‘fifth
dimension’. Six scales are graded from black to white in 12 or 13
nuances of each of his selected, basic colours. He also designed a
set of geometrical, coloured tiles that could be assembled into
patterns resembling examples of his paintings.
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Victor Vasarèly’s palette (about 1970): Titanium White, grey,
Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Red, Emerald Green, French
Ultramarine, Cobalt Violet.
Pop Art
James Rosenquist (1933­ ). North American painter who started
painting billboards while still a student at art school. This, and the
influence of Robert Rauschenberg, proved to be a dominant
influence on his later work, which typically consists of
over­scaled, pictorial imagery with collaged and overlaid
close­ups. Characteristically, he selects highly saturated, industrial
colours, also including luminous paints, Liquitex acrylics and
Day­Glo paints.
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James Rosenquist’s palette (about 1970): Zinc White, Mars Yellow
or Yellow Ochre, Hansa Yellow, Mars Red, Quinacridone
Magenta, Phthalocyanine Blue, Dioxazine Violet, Carbon Black.
Jasper Johns (1930­ ). North American painter and lithographer
who rapidly developed a distinctive manner of painting with
equally distinctive imagery (the American flag, targets and
numbers). He later attached actual objects to his paintings, and
was unusual in using hot­wax and encaustic painting techniques,
which helped to make obvious the manner in which an artwork
had been made.
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Jasper Johns’ palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon Yellow,
Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Red, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Raw
Umber, Burnt Umber, Quinacridone Magenta, Prussian Blue,
Cobalt Violet, Ivory Black.
Andy Warhol (1928­87). North American painter, printmaker and
filmmaker who initially worked as a commercial artist in New
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Artists’ Palettes and Colour Mixing
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York. He became noted for promoting such attitudes as: ‘I think
everybody should be a machine!’ He appeared to want his colours
to look machine­made also. In his ‘supermarket’, seemingly
mass­produced screen­prints of the 1960s, he often used crude
black halftone photographs over roughly and simply shaped
stencils printed in unnaturally garish colours, often those of
trichromatic process printing, and often displaying a strongly
decorative sense. Repetition of a screen­printed image was a
structural device commonly used by Warhol, who would freely
vary the added colours in the manner of falsely applied cosmetics.
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Andy Warhol’s palette (about 1970): Process Yellow (Hansa
Yellow), Orange, Red, Process Magenta (Quinacridone Magenta),
Green, Process Cyan (Phthalocyanine Blue), Black, Luminous
Pigments, Metal Foils.
Reference: Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975).
Roy Lichtenstein (1923­97). North American painter who worked
as an Abstract Expressionist artist until 1961, when he began to
explore and parody American comic­strips, cartoons, and
commercial and advertisement images. He exploded on a large
scale the effects of commercial screen­printing overlays and
stencilling grids of Ben Day dots, typically exploiting the printers’
primary process colours. A use of the black cartoon­influenced
outline also predominates many of his works.
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Lichtenstein’s palette: Titanium White, Hansa
Quinacridone Magenta, Phthalocyanine Blue, Black.
Yellow,
Abstract Expressionism
So­called
Abstract
Expressionism
was
an
energetic
mid­twentieth­century development in the visual arts of the United
States. It was inspired partly by the ‘automatic’ imagery of such
Surrealist émigrés as André Breton and André Masson, and partly
by the overtly gestural painting of the German­American painter
Hans Hofmann. The term embraces both the ‘lyrical abstraction’
of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, and the more obviously
animated ‘action painting’ of Jackson Pollock and Willem de
Kooning, all having in common a concern for the physical quality
or objectivity of the artists’ canvas and the paint applied to it.
Ad Reinhardt (1913­67). North American painter working with
simplified forms often on a large scale. His style developed from a
variant of Constructivism to a freer, Taschist use of colour and
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Artists’ Palettes and Colour Mixing
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form, before settling on broad, geometrical divisions of the whole
picture­area characterised by isoluminant effects in which the
colours chosen, which are usually dark and deep in colour, tend to
be very similar in tone.
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Ad Reinhardt’s palette (about 1955): White, crimson, grey, black.
Reference: Reinhardt, Art in Art is Art as Art (1966).
Jackson Pollock (1912­56). North American painter associated
with ‘Action Painting’. He worked towards a personal style of
abstraction and automatism, producing his first ‘dripped’ paintings
about 1948, later including colour­names in their titles. He
unusually used gloss, enamel, and household oil­ and alkyd­based
paints, pouring and dripping paint from cans, and painting with
sticks, trowels and knives, thereby giving a calligraphic finesse to
his work. His ground was often gesso on paper laid on the floor
and then mounted onto canvas. He also used a syringe to obtain
thin coloured lines. Mixtures of sand or glass were also added to
paints, on occasion, to create heavy impasto effects in images that
are
typically large
in scale
and almost
always
non­representational.
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Jackson Pollock’s palette: Titanium White, ochre browns,
gloss­enamel black.
Mark Rothko (Marcus Rothkowitz, 1903­70). Russian­North
American painter, who evolved slowly through personal variants
of Expressionism and Surrealism to a grand, simplified and iconic
form of colour abstraction. He used glazing and scumbling
techniques to obtain rich, uneven layers of paint applied to large
canvases displaying stacked and soft­edged blocks of colours.
After about 1958, his colours darken before, ultimately, colours
disappear in favour of simple, stark contrasts of black and white.
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Mark Rothko’s palette (about 1955): Flake White, Zinc White,
Cadmium Yellow, Lemon Yellow, Cadmium Red, Madder or
Alizarin Crimson, Red Ochre, Viridian Green, Cerulean Blue,
Prussian Blue, Cobalt Violet, French Ultramarine.
2.2. Modernist Palettes
Palettes of the Divided Mind
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Artists’ Palettes and Colour Mixing
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The twentieth century brought ‘mind­blowing’ contrasts in right­
and left­brain attitudes towards colour, from the overtly emotive
colour of the German Expressionists and Parisian Fauves to the
intellectual colour of Dada, Cubism, Neo­Plasticism and Futurism.
After about 1920, a probe into the assumed workings of the mind
was made by the Surrealists. Other subjective expressions, such as
the proto­Surrealism of Giorgio de’ Chirico and the Orphism of
Robert and Sonia Delaunay show a change of direction from
romantic and symbolic fantasy to abstraction.
Surrealism
André Breton was a French poet, psychologist and artist
responsible for the Surrealist Manifestos of 1924 and 1929. He
developed the notion of ‘automatism’, an unconscious
thought­process which aimed to be largely uncontrolled by reason,
and in which both the spontaneously drawn line and accidental
application of colour had roles to play. ‘The wild eye,’ he in 1936,
‘when in need of colours, refers simply to the rainbow. It is present
at the traditional exchange of signals that the navigation of the
mind appears to demand’. Form and colour both carry messages
from the Unconscious, which can be interpreted if one understands
Dreamwork, and its dramatisation of emotion, its secondary
elaboration, its displacements and condensations of ideas. The
subliminal power of black, white and grey was of special interest
to him. He recommended spreading black gouache over a sheet of
glossy white paper, for example, and taking an impression from it
while still wet, which was then to be used as the starting­point for
a new painting.
Salvador Dalí (1904­89). Influenced by the enigmatic realism of
Giorgio de’ Chirico, the Catalonian Surrealist painter Dalí tended
to use colours as visual reminders of objects charged with lost
memories of childhood, even (so he claimed) from experiences in
the womb, such as the iridescence of flesh. His trompe­l’oeil style
of painting appeared to exploit overtly Freudian symbols and
unexpected (often sexual) analogies between objects, forms and
figures.
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Salvador Dalí’s ‘psychoanalytic’ palette (1948): Flake White,
Lemon Yellow, Cadmium Yellow, Naples Yellow, ‘wax yellow’,
‘cheese yellow’, Vermilion, ‘oxblood red’, ‘phallic red’, ‘spinach
green’ ‘grasshopper­pink’, ‘excrement brown’, ‘midnight blue’,
‘bat black’.
René Magritte (1898­1967). Belgian painter associated with
Surrealism in Paris (1927­30) and thereafter working primarily in
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Brussels. Influenced by Giorgio de’ Chirico, he developed a
uniquely passionate yet strangely impersonal pictorial technique
intended to ‘subvert everyday experience’ and stun the viewer
with its bland realism while offering puzzling, contradictory and
often amusing, disturbing and erotic scenes and subjects.
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René Magritte’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon Yellow,
Cadmium Yellow, Vermilion, Madder or Alizarin Crimson, Red
Ochre, Viridian Green, Cerulean Blue, Prussian Blue, French
Ultramarine, Cobalt Violet, Black.
Paul Delvaux (1897­1994). Belgian painter who style developed
out of Post­Impressionism and Expressionism into Surrealism.
Inspired by Giorgio de’ Chirico, he had much in common (in style
and content) with René Magritte and Salvador Dalì. Often a sense
of nostalgia or sadness pervades his ‘anxious city’ scenes of
suspended animation – as with Chirico, a sense that something
unusual is in the process of unfolding.
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Paul Delvaux’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon Yellow,
Vermilion, Light Red, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna,
Burnt Sienna, Alizarin Crimson, Viridian Green, Emerald Green,
Cerulean Blue, French Ultramarine, Prussian Blue, Ivory Black.
Joan Miró (1893­1983) Spanish painter and sculptor. Miró’s style
evolved from detailed naturalism into Surrealism during the
1920s, later encompassing overt fantasy and symbolism. He
experimented with a wide range of art techniques, including
large­scale ceramic murals (with Artigas).
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Joan Miró’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon Yellow,
Cadmium Yellow, Vermilion, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Raw
Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Alizarin Crimson, Prussian blue, Cobalt
Violet, Ivory Black.
Max Ernst (1891­1976). The major German contributor to
Surrealism, Ernst studied psychiatry and philosophy in addition to
the fine arts, and was largely self­taught as a painter. In 1919 he
co­founded the Dada group in Cologne. Later he used colours to
conjure up bizarre imagery that might be both cosmic and
personal, by contrasting paint applied using accidental tricks with
precise ways of rendering, such as collage, frottage (rubbings) and
grattage (in which layers of dried paint are removed unevenly to
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provide a basis for creating fantastic and other­worldly images).
All these techniques involved an element of chance and ‘fortuitous
encounters’ of unlikely forms and colours (including paint
dripping from a swinging can).
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Max Ernst’s palette: Flake White, Cadmium Yellow, Yellow
Ochre, ‘cockatoo pink’, Red Ochre, Cadmium Red, Scheele’s
Green, ‘leaf green’, Prussian Blue, French Ultramarine, Charcoal
Black.
Reference: Max Ernst, Beyond Painting (1948).
Giorgio de’ Chirico (1888­1978) Italian painter, born in Greece,
who was profoundly influenced by the classical arts and
architecture of the Mediterranean. At first influenced by Swiss
Symbolism, in 1917 he co­founded ‘Pittura metafisica’ with Carlo
Carrà, and produced an extensive series of paintings which
profoundly influenced most of the Surrealists. ‘I am a classical
artist,’ he once said, and liked to see the world as ‘full of uncanny
signs’. Under the influence of the philosophers Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche and Freud, de’ Chirico developed a theory of
metaphysical insight. He gave a ‘surreal’ glow to his low­toned
but vibrant colouring. Vision, he thought, was more powerful with
closed eyes. The actual quality of his colours was superior to that
of many of his contemporaries because he distrusted modern,
manufactured pigments and adhered to traditional, studio
processes of paint­making.
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Giorgio de’ Chirico’s Metaphysical palette: Flake White, Yellow
Ochre, Red Ochre, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna, Burnt
Sienna, Green Earth, ‘midnight blue’, Ivory Black.
The Bauhaus & Abstraction
Ben Nicholson (1894­1982). English painter, initially drawn to
landscape painting, before evolving (about 1933) a personal
approach to abstraction influenced by Henry Moore in London and
Jean Arp and Piet Mondrian in Paris. Sometimes working in low
relief, and in the absence of colour, and when colour is included, it
is often used flatly and in order to distinguish one design­element
from another. His colours can also suggest space in the sense of
blues appearing to recede, while reds or brighter colours appear to
advance. Many of his later abstract paintings have an affinity in
both shape and colour with the European landscapes that inspired
them.
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Ben Nicholson’s palette: Flake White, Lemon Yellow, Yellow
Ochre, Vermilion, Cerulean Blue, Cobalt Violet, Ivory Black.
The Bauhaus (1919­33) was a German art school directed in
Weimar and Dessau by the architect Walter Gropius. An unusually
large number of influential artists and designers taught there,
including Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Lyonel Feininger, Johannes
Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Gerhard Marcks, László
Moholy­Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer and Mies van der Rohe.
Johannes Itten (1888­1967). Itten’s teaching at the Weimar
Bauhaus (1919­1923) had been influenced by his own teacher,
Adolf Hölzel, who was one of the first educators to emphasise art
as a medium of individual expression (rather than academic
competence). Itten believed that, with experiment, thought and
intuition, each colour scheme could be made appropriate to a
particular purpose; it could, for example, express spring, summer,
autumn or winter.
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Johannes Itten’s palette: Titanium White, Flake White, Cadmium
Yellow, Cadmium Red, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna,
Burnt Sienna, Light Red, Viridian Green, French Ultramarine.
Reference: Johannes Itten, The Art of Color (1973).
László Moholy­Nagy was a Hungarian born artist invited to teach
at the Bauhaus in 1923 as a replacement for Johannes Itten, and
who promoted typography, photography and projected coloured
light­displays. He developed a form of Constructivism influenced
by El Lissitzky and Aleksandr Rodchenko, somewhat in reaction
to the Expressionism of the previous generation. After the closure
of the Bauhaus, he set up the New Bauhaus in Chicago (1937­38),
which was highly influential in introducing its ideas into post­war
art education. He is notable for his experimentation with new
media.
Josef Albers (1888­1976). Following his study with Johannes Itten
at the Bauhaus, Albers was to become an influential teacher there.
Though not noted as a colourist at that time, from the late­1940s
he produced a remarkable series of colour studies (entitled
Homage to the Square) that examined the simultaneous contrast of
colours placed edge to edge. Paints were applied to masonite
(hardboard) with a palette knife, and usually unmixed from a vast
assortment of manufactured paints. He noted the role played by
subtle combinations of two main hues in a design and the unusual
mood­effects induced by them. For Albers, colour practice
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preceded colour theory. His major publication, the Interaction of
Colour, amply documents the thoroughness of the perceptual
investigations of Albers and his students at Yale University
(1950­60).
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Josef Albers’ palette: A random selection of coloured papers and
commercial and artists’ paints. These include Flake White, Zinc
White, Lemon Yellow, Cadmium Yellow, Raw Sienna, Burnt
Sienna, Raw Umber, Burnt Sienna, Vermilion, Venetian Red,
Alizarin Crimson, Viridian Green, Cerulean Blue, Prussian Blue,
French Ultramarine, Mars Violet, Cobalt Violet, Ferrous Violet
Deep, Payne’s Grey.
Reference: Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (1963).
Paul Klee (1879­1940). ‘Colour and I are one’, announced the
German­Swiss painter Klee, following the memorable impression
that Tunisia had made upon him during a visit in 1914. Early
influences include Paul Cézanne and Robert Delaunay. Klee was
one of the outstanding colourists of the twentieth century, initially
(like Turner) exploiting the watercolour technique to obtain
elaborate glazes and gradations of colour. Commonly, small
selections (of 3 or 4 colours) were overlaid to obtain numerous
colour variations within each single picture. One of his concerns
was how sets of colours can express moods, from the ‘vague’ and
‘serene’ to ‘full­blooded’ and ‘explosive’. The key, he thought,
‘lies deep down in our heads, and what springs from this source
…must be taken seriously only if it unites with the proper creative
means to form a work of art’. In other words, to a large extend, the
creation of a work of art (using line, tonality, and colour) is
evident in its final form.
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Paul Klee’s palette (about 1935): Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon
Yellow, Cadmium Yellow, Raw Umber, Burnt Sienna, Vermilion,
Venetian Red, Madder or Alizarin Crimson, Viridian Green,
Cobalt Blue, Prussian Blue, Cobalt Violet.
Reference: Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925).
Wassily Kandinsky (1866­1944). A Russian Expressionist painter,
working principally in Germany, who was one of the first of his
generation to move into artistic abstraction. Kandinsky
acknowledged colour as having ‘an existence of its own’, often
expressing the spiritual, and able to create a ‘personal tension’ that
he measured in terms of ‘warm’ and ‘cold’, nearness and distance,
centrifugal and centripetal energies, and the lightness or darkness
of colour itself. He wrote of his experience of synaesthesia, a
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condition in which specific colours were equated with specific
musical or instrumental sounds. The evocative impact of different
colours in relation to form is elaborated in various theories
included in Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1911).
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Wassily Kandinsky’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Zinc
Yellow, Chrome Yellow, Cadmium Yellow (Light & Deep),
Yellow Ochre, Raw Umber, Cadmium Red, Burnt Sienna, Red
Earth, Vermilion, Venetian Red, Alizarin Crimson, Green Earth,
Viridian Green, Prussian Blue, French Ultramarine, Cobalt Violet,
Ivory Black.
Reference: Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art
(1911/14).
Orphism
Robert Delaunay (1885­1941). French painter, influenced briefly
by Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne. Delaunay’s path to
abstraction, which paralleled that of his wife, Sonia Delaunay,
involved experimentation with placing vivid, contrasting colours
against one another in non­geometric squares, triangles and
circles. For the Delaunays, contrasts of complementary colours
had the intensely vibrant effect not only of keeping the eye
moving across a design but also of conjuring up one’s personal
‘essence’. The method of painting which achieved this effect was
called Orphism by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (after Orpheus,
the god of music) since it appeared to link abstract colour effects
with those of music. Robert Delaunay also called his work
simultanéisme, after the famous treatise on colour of 1839 by
Michel­Eugène Chevreul, who was one of the first to observe and
methodically document the optical experience of simultaneous
colour contrast.
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Robert Delaunay’s palette: Flake White, Lemon Yellow, Cadmium
Yellow Light, Cadmium Yellow Deep, Yellow Ochre, Vermilion,
Madder or Alizarin Crimson, Sap Green, Viridian Green, Cerulean
Blue, Prussian Blue, French Ultramarine, Cobalt Violet.
Reference: Robert & Sonia Delaunay & Arthur Cohen, ed., The
New Art of Color (1978).
Futurism
Umberto Boccioni (1882­1916). Italian painter and sculptor,
influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Boccioni believed
that physical objects had personalities of their own, revealed by
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certain lines of force that permeate all form and colour. Rejecting
traditional Italian academic painting, he supported the Futurist
Manifesto of 1910, announcing that the accomplishments of the
Futurists would outshine all the Italian arts of the past. Boccioni
was influenced by the optical disintegration of Seurat’s
Neo­Impressionism, believing that the traditional use of colour
was no longer able to reflect the real ‘Truth’ of the modern world:
this could be done only by painters who aimed at expressing the
state of the soul, using vibrant colour contrasts and atmospheric
colour harmonies.
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Umberto Boccioni’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon
Yellow, Cadmium Yellow, Light Red, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna,
Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Vermilion, Venetian Red, Alizarin
Crimson, Emerald Green, Viridian Green, Cerulean Blue, Prussian
Blue, French Ultramarine, Cobalt Violet, Ivory Black.
Neo­Plasticism
Theo van Doesburg (Christian Küpper, 1883­1931). Dutch painter,
writer and architect. Founder and prominent member of the De
Stijl group. A largely self­taught painter, influenced by Wassily
Kandinsky, Russian Constructivism and the work of the Dutch
Modern architect J.J.P. Oud.
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Theo van Doesburg’s palette: Flake White, Cadmium Yellow,
Cadmium Red, Emerald Green, Cobalt Blue, Ivory Black.
Reference: Van Doesburg, Principles of Neo­Plastic Art (1925).
Piet Mondrian (1872­1944). Following many years of
experimentation, Mondrian, the principal painter of the Dutch De
Stijl movement, eventually limited himself to the painters’
primary colours in combination with white, black and grey. He
simultaneously limited his formal language to squares and
rectangles and the horizontal (feminine) principle and the vertical
(masculine) principle. Influenced by the philosopher
Schoenmaeker and the metaphysical teachings of Theosophy, he
sought pictorial symbols for ‘universal’ as opposed to ‘particular’
reality. In his strictly abstract Neo­Plasticism, he sought a visual
equivalent to the perfect harmony of life, symbolised in his
paintings by red (the body), yellow (the mind) and blue (the spirit).
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Piet Mondrian’s palette: Flake White, Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium
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Red, French Ultramarine, Ivory Black.
Reference: Piet Mondrian, Neoplasticism (1920).
Cubism
Marcel Duchamp (1887­1968). A French artist­philosopher and
chess­player, Duchamp wanted painting ‘to serve the mind’ rather
than simply to appeal to the emotions. Though his subjects were
often intended to shock, owing partly to covertly sexual themes,
his early palette was restricted to hardly more than four colours,
like those of the intellectual, classical painters of the past. Hence,
his earlier pictures were influenced by the ‘earth palette’ of early
Cubism, shifting later from what he called the ‘retinal’ to the
cerebral, inventing numerous visual puns and mixed­media
devices that inadvertently anticipate Op Art.
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Marcel Duchamp’s Cubist palette: Flake White, Yellow Ochre,
Red Ochre, Green Earth, Black.
Duchamp’s subsequent palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon
Yellow, Vermilion, Light Red, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Raw
Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Alizarin Crimson, Emerald Green, Cerulean
Blue, Prussian Blue, French Ultramarine, Ivory Black.
Juan Gris (José González, 1887­1927). Shortly after moving from
Madrid to Paris (in 1906), Gris came under the influence of recent
innovations in the art of Picasso, using colour soberly and
symbolically with the vision and tight visual unity of an engineer
and intellectual. He defined the forms in his paintings with
hard­edged gradations and a typically earthy coloration derived
from ochres and other colours mixed with black.
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Juan Gris’ palette (about 1920): Zinc White, Cadmium Yellow,
Vermilion, Raw Sienna, Raw Umber, Green Earth, Cobalt Blue,
Cobalt Violet, Ivory Black.
Fernand Léger (1881­1955). French painter. The mechanical
nature of much of Léger’s work may reflect his early training as an
architect and architectural draftsman. He used the heightened
colours of common objects, stressing colour for its own sake, and
exploiting subtle mixtures from a restricted colour palette.
Whereas Robert and Sonia Delaunay placed vivid colours edge to
edge, so that simultaneous colour contrasts would be induced
along each colour boundary, Léger typically isolated each block of
colour with distinct, black outlines, to preserve what he called ‘a
very red red, and a very blue blue’.
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Fernand Léger’s palette (about 1935): Flake White, Cadmium
Yellow, Cadmium Orange, Vermilion, Venetian Red, Deep
Madder, Emerald Green, Veronese Green, French Ultramarine,
Ivory Black.
Pablo Picasso (1881­1973). One of the most prolific and greatest
artists of the twentieth century. The Spanish painter Picasso
admitted that he painted to unload himself of feelings and visions.
Colours are like facial features, he once wrote: ‘they follow the
changes of the emotions’. His early Cubist works stressed the
subtle mixtures obtainable from a restricted, earth­colour palette,
and in an early self­portrait (in Philadelphia Museum of Art) he
depicts himself holding a small rectangular palette solely
displaying the classical four­colour palette.
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Pablo Picasso’s Cubist palette: Flake White, Zinc White,
Cadmium Yellow, Red Ochre, Yellow Ochre, Raw Sienna, Burnt
Sienna, Vermilion, Viridian Green, Cerulean Blue, Prussian Blue,
Charcoal Black.
2.3. Palettes of the Chromatic Era
School of Paris
Maurice Utrillo (1883­1955). The epitome of le peintre maudit,
the Parisian artist Utrillo employed a classical palette dominated
by earth colours in a somewhat expressionist manner. His so­called
‘white period’ (to 1916), characterised by close tonal relationships,
exhibits much of his most sensitive work, with his colours tending
to brighten (and his scenes to become more populated) throughout
the 1920s. Typically, he stressed white against rich dark hues and
overlays of intense mid­to­light tones.
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Maurice Utrillo’s palette: Zinc White, Chrome Yellow, Cadmium
Yellow, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Vermilion, Venetian Red,
Crimson Lake, Chrome Green, Emerald Green, Veronese Green,
Cobalt Blue, Vine Black.
Georges Rouault (1871­1958). French painter. Rouault’s early
training in Parisian stained­glass workshops undoubtedly
influenced his later use of painted colour and contour which picks
up not only the inherent luminosity but also many of the themes of
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Christian stained­glass windows. His solemn religious works were
contrasted with lively depictions of clowns, judges and
street­women.
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Georges Rouault’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon
Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna,
Burnt Sienna, Light Red, Vermilion, Alizarin Crimson, Emerald
Green, Viridian Green, Cerulean Blue, Prussian Blue, French
Ultramarine, Ivory Black.
Pierre Bonnard (1867­1947). French painter. Influenced initially
by Paul Gauguin and other Symbolist artists, he developed a freely
improvised use of colour, always based on natural phenomena, but
interpreted in a personal, colouristic manner. He was a member of
the Nabis group of artists in Paris, and like Edouard Vuillard
eventually evolved a Post­Impressionistic style for the depiction of
intimate, domestic interiors. An important characteristic of his
colour use was the constant closeness of tones, which, although
contradicting the strong tonal contrasts for example of bright
skylight penetrating a real window frame, maintained a sense of
realism while exploiting subdued and subtle ranges of colours. A
dark yellow might for instance be placed next to a light blue of the
same tonality, thereby establishing remarkable colour luminosity.
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Pierre Bonnard’s palette: Flake White, Cadmium Yellow Deep,
Yellow Ochre, Chrome Orange, Red Earth, Burnt Umber, Alizarin
Crimson, Green Earth, Viridian Green, Prussian Blue, Cobalt
Violet, Lamp Black.
Fauvism
Georges Braque (1882­1963). French painter. Braque had known
Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz in Le Havre, before moving to Paris
in 1900. He was stimulated to employ their vivid and often
unmixed colours after seeing the so­called Fauvist selection of
paintings at the Salon d’Automne of 1905. For the following two
years he passed through a brief phase of Expressionism before
coming under the influence of the work of Paul Cézanne, and later
meeting Pablo Picasso, after which he contributed significantly to
original developments in Cubism. His ‘spectral’ palette was then
set aside in favour of the classical, four­earth palette (white,
Yellow Ochre, Red Ochre and black) with the addition of Green
Earth.
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George Braque’s Fauvist palette (about 1906): Flake White,
Chrome Yellow, Cadmium Yellow Deep, Yellow Ochre, Chrome
Orange, Alizarin Crimson, Green Earth, Viridian Green, Prussian
Blue.
André Derain (1880­1954). French painter. Perhaps the mostly
conspicuously talented of the Fauvist group, working in Paris at
the beginning of the twentieth century, Derain’s brief years of
colour brilliance were later eclipsed by a move to a form of
restrained and academic realism. His early use of colour was
influenced by Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse. A
self­portrait of 1920­21 shows him holding a small, oval palette
containing a relatively small colour range. As a daring young
Fauve, however, he freed his colours from their traditionally
descriptive role, and used vivid primaries as in ‘primitive’ art,
often intensifying the deeper colours by mixing them with white.
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André Derain’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Chrome Yellow,
Cadmium Yellow, Strontium Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Mars Yellow,
Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Indian Red, Saturn Red, Venetian Red,
Indian Red, Vermilion, Carmine, Rose Madder, Viridian Green,
Sap Green, Cobalt Green, Cerulean Blue, Prussian Blue, French
Ultramarine, Cobalt Violet, Ivory Black.
Raoul Dufy (1877­1953). French painter. Following from the
influence of Vincent van Gogh, Dufy joined the Fauve group in
Paris in 1905 and developed a variant notable for its bold use of
painterly areas of colour and animated but precise and elegant
contours. His principal colours were chosen near to the primary
hues; and used them in a flurry of free brush strokes to record his
reaction to exciting visual experiences and celebrations. In later
life, he was also a prolific and inventive designer of colourful
textiles.
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Raoul Dufy’s palette: Zinc White, Cadmium Yellow Light,
Cadmium Yellow Deep, Mars Yellow, Persian Yellow, Persian
Yellow, Cadmium Red, Vermilion, Mars Orange, Rose, Carmine,
Madder, Veronese Green (Green Earth), Viridian Green, Cerulean
Blue, Cobalt Blue, Prussian Blue, French Ultramarine,
Mars/Cobalt Violet, Ivory Black.
Maurice de Vlaminck (1876­1958). A largely self­taught Parisian
painter with a passionate love of colour and strong aversion to
academic tradition. Vlaminck once expressed the desire ‘to burn
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down the École des Beaux­Arts with my vermilions’. Influenced
by Vincent van Gogh, and later by Paul Cézanne, he become a
forceful member of the Fauve group in Paris, applying thick and
intensely vivid brushstrokes of colour crudely to his canvases, in
his excitement commonly applying paints directly from the tube.
He latterly emphasised a darkness of contour which enhanced the
intensity of his colours in landscape, and added a dashing and
dramatic intensity to his work.
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Maurice de Vlaminck’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon
Yellow, Cadmium Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Vermilion, Red Earth,
Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Alizarin Crimson or Madder Lake,
Viridian Green, Green Earth, Cobalt Blue, French Ultramarine,
Cobalt Violet, Ivory Black.
Henri Matisse (1869­1954). A slow developer who, at the age of
35, found himself briefly the leader of the artistic avant­garde in
Paris. He was significantly influenced, and liberated, by painting
sessions shared with Paul Signac and Henri­Edmond Cross, and
eventually enlarged their Pointillist dots into his own bold
brushstrokes of vivid (and often unmixed) colours. Matisse
maintained that he always selected colours that would follow his
intuition and composed them in such a way as to stimulate intense
feelings in the observer, endeavouring also to balance pure and
vivid colours in such a way as to arrive at an art of exciting
serenity and resolution. Like those of Dufy, his paintings often
display a daring spontaneity of colour and contour and a rejection
of the highlight­and­shadow tradition of European academic
painting.
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Henri Matisse’s palette: Flake White, Chrome Yellow, Cadmium
Yellow, Cadmium Orange, Yellow Ochre, Scarlet Lake, Vermilion,
Emerald Green, Viridian Green, French Ultramarine, Cobalt
Violet, Ivory Black.
Reference: Henri Matisse, Notes of a Painter (1909).
German Expressionism
Ernst Kirchner (1880­1938). German painter. The most prominent
member of Die Brücke group in Dresden Kirchner developed a
vigorous manner of applying colour, most often to figures,
portraits and self­portraits, and occasionally to figures in the
landscape.
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Ernst Kirchner’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon Yellow,
Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Light Red,
Vermilion, Alizarin Crimson, Emerald Green, Viridian Green,
Cerulean Blue, Prussian Blue, French Ultramarine, Ivory Black.
Franz Marc (1880­1916). German painter, working in Munich.
Co­editor (with Wassily Kandinsky) of the Blaue Reiter Almanac.
Under the influence of Robert Delaunay and others, he moved, in
his short career, from academic realism to the semi­abstract and
colourful depiction of animal forms.
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Franz Marc’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon Yellow,
Red Earth, Vermilion, Madder or Alizarin Crimson, Emerald
Green, Viridian Green, Cerulean Blue, Prussian Blue, French
Ultramarine, Cobalt Violet, Ivory Black.
Emile Nolde (Emil Hansen, 1867­1956). German­Danish painter.
A student of Adolf Hölzel in Munich. Following the early
influence of Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, Nolde came into
contact with Die Brücke group of expressionist painters in
Dresden, whom he was to influence, in turn. His colours were
intended to unleash the cosmic power of the world of nature; and
to achieve this, he tended to contrast heightened primary and
secondary colours. In 1913 he travelled to New Guinea and studied
the art of the region. In later years, he produced a series of
remarkably fresh and spontaneous watercolour paintings, in
addition to colourful portraits, masks and landscapes.
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Emil Nolde’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon Yellow,
Naples Yellow, Cadmium Yellow Deep, Raw Umber, Burnt
Umber, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Light Red, Vermilion, Alizarin
Crimson, Carmine, Emerald Green, Viridian Green, Cobalt Blue,
Prussian Blue, Cobalt Violet, Ivory Black.
Edvard Munch (1863­1944). The principal Scandinavian painter of
his generation, Munch later caused scandals in Oslo and Berlin by
the rawness and emotional intensity of his work, the subject­matter
of which was largely autobiographical. He made the mood of his
colours ring out like sound and music; in his mind’s eye, he could
see blood­red as a scream and a soft­beige as a whisper. His
paintings link Post­Impressionist colouring with Symbolist
obsession and the gestural application of paint that later
characterises German and French Expressionism.
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Edvard Munch’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon Yellow,
Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Light Red,
Vermilion, Alizarin Crimson, Emerald Green, Viridian Green,
Peacock Blue, Prussian Blue, French Ultramarine, Cobalt Violet,
Ivory Black.
2.4. Colours of Nature and the Imagination
Important advances in chemistry at the outset of the nineteenth
century extended the artists’ palette notably with a range of blue
and yellow pigments. In 1802, Louis­Jacques Thénard introduced
refined Cobalt Blue (also known as Thénard’s Blue) and, in 1828,
Jean­Baptiste Guimet won a prize of 6,000 francs offered by the
French government to the first person successfully to synthesise an
artificial form of Genuine (or mineral) Ultramarine, later known as
French Ultramarine. Chevreul’s teacher Vauquelin had isolated the
element chromium in 1797, and this led to the introduction of
Chrome Yellow pigment in 1809, a useful and inexpensive
addition to the artists’ palette despite its chemical instability. In
1818, Stromeyer and Hermann discovered cadmium, which was
subsequently used to manufacture a useful range of vivid and
permanent reds, orange and yellows.
Regarding dyestuffs, the most important advance came in 1856,
when William Henry Perkin, as a young student of chemistry,
accidentally discovered the first artificially made aniline dye.
Perkin’s coal­based aniline purple or mauvine became a highly
fashionable colour in the following decade – which in fashionable
circles became referred to as ‘the mauve decade’ – and it appears
as a purple lake in selected Victorian paintings. Mauvine was to be
the first of several million synthetic organic dyes to be synthesised
from coal­tar, such dyes typically containing carbon, hydrogen and
nitrogen atoms.
Once the molecular structure of one natural vegetable dye had
been artificially synthesised, many others followed, including
Griess’ synthesis of the first diazo dyes in 1858. The term azo
indicates the presence of nitrogen, and diazo indicates that the dye
contains the divalent group N:N. In 1865, a young German
chemist, Friedrich Kekulé, visualised the pattern of the benzene
ring as a six­sided, double­bonded, closed chain of carbon atoms,
and thereafter the secrets of organic chemistry were more clearly
understood. Alizarine (dihydroxy­anthraquinone), an artificial
synthesis of madder, was synthesised by Liebermann in 1869, and
synthetic indigo was introduced by Baeyer in 1878 – a
development enthusiastically embraced by the scientist and textile
manufacturer, but which represented serious set­back for those
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whose livelihood had depended on the cultivation of natural
dye­sources.
There were pitfalls for the artist also, since many of the new
colours, and in particular the aniline lakes, caused deterioration in
paintings owing to their fugitive and unstable chemical structure.
So­called Emerald Green (a copper arsenate) turned brownish (as
had Copper Resinate in earlier centuries) and under some
conditions it became black, as did the Chrome Yellows and
Oranges, and even artificial Vermilion.
The French Impressionist painters omitted from their palettes the
brown earths of the academic painters (which, ironically, are
highly permanent) and introduced a fuller palette including the
newer ‘spectral’ or ‘Oriental’ colours. They aimed at depicting the
luminosity of daylight itself, with its colourful casts and
reflections, especially in the open air. The Neo­Impressionist
group was later to acknowledge an interest in the study of the
spectrum, and the additive mixture of light (recently clarified by
James Clerk Maxwell and set out in Ogden Rood’s Modern
Chromatics of 1879) in addition to the artists’ pigment­primaries,
which were still held with suspicion even well into the middle of
the century. Auguste Laugel, in L’Optique et les arts (1869)
includes a six­pointed colour­star in which shows that the principle
of complementary­colour pairing was reliably understood: yellow
is opposite violet, orange is opposite blue, and crimson­red is
opposite green. The same arrangement is illustrated by Charles
Blanc in his Grammiare des arts du dessin of 1867, which also
contains an analysis of colour usage by the French Romantic
colourist, Eugène Delacroix.
At the same time as the rise of Impressionis (in the 1870s), a new
‘scientific’ four­colour theory was promoted that had no relation
to the ancient, tetrachrome palette – the palette of earth colours
that lent itself so well to the depiction of flesh colours. Ewald
Hering’s so­called ‘opponent­colour’ theory of human vision
stated that the three types of light­receiving cells of the retina
operated on a principle of pairings of red­and­green and
yellow­and blue, in addition to black­and­white. His theory
supplied material which gave grounds for further speculation and
experiment among painters. Though Seurat emphasised scientific
principles in his painting, he denied that he was a ‘lyrical’ painter:
‘I apply my method’, he said, ‘and that is all there is to it’. The
‘phenomena of the duration of the light impression on the retina’
resulted, according to Seurat, in a synthesis which might be
expressed by ‘the optical mixture of tones and colour …, that is, a
mixture of the lights [and shadows] in accordance with the laws of
contrast, sequence and irradiation’.
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In 1872, the English chemist Sir Arthur Church published a highly
reliable book on colour theory (Colour: An Elementary Handbook
for Students), seven years before the American physicist Ogden
Rood published his qualitative analyses of colour contrasts. Both
supported Sir David Brewster's theory of red­yellow­blue
paint­primary colours. Rood’s book (republished in German in
1880 and in French in 1881) was later referred to by Camille
Pissarro and even quoted by Paul Signac in his own explanation of
Neo­Impressionism, published in 1899. Theories relating colour to
music were also in vogue, and for Signac the liberation of using
dabs of prismatic colour is reflected in his statement that the
painter ‘composes with the seven notes of the colour scale as the
musician does with the scale of sound’. However, emphasis on the
intellectual and analytical was to become unpalatable to the
German and French Expressionists, who chose pigments that
enabled them to use colour with unprecedented spontaneity and
even to ‘howl and shriek’ in colour like the wild animals they were
likened to by the critics.
‘Seek the modern synthesis through scientific means’, said
Camille Pissarro, ‘which will be based on the theory of colours of
Monsieur Chevreul….’ Chevreul’s theory of colour induction, or
simultaneous contrast as he called it, stated that colours appeared
to alter in appearance according to their juxtaposition: a neutral
grey set against a green will appear tinged with red, for example;
and red placed next to blue will appear purplish, but against green
it will seem yellowish, and so on. This phenomenon had been
observed by Goethe, and others, before 1810, but not so
thoroughly investigated previously. Pissarro was similarly of the
opinion that ‘Every decided colour does certain violence to the
eye, and forces the organ to opposition’. Seurat’s notion that points
of ‘pure’ hues placed next to each other would be fused optically
in the distance between the spectator and the canvas derived from
these sources. Ten years after the publication of Chevreul’s major
treatise on the colour contrast effects, De la Loi du contraste
simultané des couleurs, his fellow countryman J.C.M. Sol
published La Palette théoretique (1849), which related optical
theory specifically to painting, and included a classification of
colour similar to that offered by the Portuguese researcher Diego
de Carvahlo e Sampayo in his Tratado das cores (1787). The latter
was a painstaking evaluation, in circular spots of watercolour, of
the many nuances that could be mixed from the six ‘primaries’
that had been adopted by Leonardo da Vinci: red, yellow, green,
blue, black and white. A considerable number of small, circular,
coloured dots were set out in plates in the first edition of
Chevreul’s theory of colour induction (1839). In this he may have
been influenced by the earlier diagrams of Carvalho e Sampayo
which in their turn were no doubt related to the rectangle of small
uncoloured circles representing the Newtonian spherical units of
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light, engraved in Louis­Bertrand Castel’s L’Optique des couleurs
of 1740. Even François d’Aguilon, writing in his Opticorum as
early as 1613, makes reference to optical illusions such as the
so­called compositio notionalis, in which patches of colour are so
small that they converge as ‘sensory impressions in the eye so that
for each combination of colours a uniform colour is received’.
Symbolism
Gustav Klimt (1862­1918). Austrian painter. Klimt was the
principal exponent of the Austrian Art Nouveau movement known
as the ‘Youth Style’ or Judendstil. In 1897 he was co­founder of
the Vienna Secession, and elected its first president. His work was
controversial for its content (and its nudity) in his lifetime, and is
characterised by rich colour and ornamentation, and occasional
use of gold leaf.
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Gustav Klimt’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon Yellow,
Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Light Red,
Vermilion, Alizarin Crimson, Emerald Green, Viridian Green,
Cerulean Blue, Prussian Blue, French Ultramarine, Ivory Black.
Jan Toorop (1858­1928). Born in Java, the Dutch painter Toorop
was profoundly influenced by a Javanese two­dimensional and
linear aesthetic in which his colours glow, luminously flooding a
mystic light over phantasmagorical scenes, stirred into strangely
rhythmical movements by mysterious, ritualistic activities. He was
also influenced by the decorative colour and line of the English
artists Aubrey Beardsley and William Morris, and the
Neo­Impressionism of Georges Seurat.
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Jan Toorops’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Chrome Yellow,
Red Ochre, Vermilion, Alizarin Crimson, Chrome Green, Cerulean
Blue, Prussian Blue, French Ultramarine, Ivory Black.
Odilon Redon (1840­1916). French painter and lithographer.
Redon’s work is characterised by its richness of colour and flights
of fantasy. After 1900 he worked primarily as a painter, producing
portraits and flower­paintings in addition to religious (including
Buddhist) themes in hypnotically intense colours.
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Odilon Redon’s’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon
Yellow, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna,
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Light Red, Vermilion, Alizarin Crimson, Emerald Green, Viridian
Green, Cerulean Blue, Prussian Blue, French Ultramarine, Ivory
Black.
Gustave Moreau (1826­98). French painter. Influenced by the
Romantic painter Théodore Chassériau, later developing a
personal, erotic and visionary form of religious, historical and
mythological Symbolism. His sources range from Byzantine to
Renaissance and Baroque painting. Examples of his watercolour
paintings come close to abstraction. Henri Matisse and Georges
Rouault were among his students.
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Gustave Moreau’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Lemon
Yellow, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna,
Light Red, Vermilion, Alizarin Crimson, Emerald Green, Viridian
Green, Cerulean Blue, Prussian Blue, French Ultramarine, Ivory
Black.
Post­Impressionism
Paul Signac (1863­1935). French painter. A close associate of
Georges Seurat, he subsequently explained the technique of
Pointillism (Neo­Impressionism) in detail in D’Eugène Delacroix
au Néo­Impressionnisme (1899), a book studied by Matisse and
Derain, in whose work Signac took an interest. His paintings, in
which (after 1900) obsessively small points of colour are enlarged
into colour­mosaics, create luminosity by balancing similar and
opposing hues to give an expression from soft to vibrant.
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Paul Signac’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Cadmium Yellow
Light, Cadmium Yellow Deep, Vermilion, Madder Lake, Viridian
Green, Cobalt Blue, Prussian Blue, French Ultramarine.
Reference: Floyd Ratliff, Paul Signac & Color in
Neo­Impressionism (1992).
Georges Seurat (1859­1891). A prolific French painter, despite his
early death. Seurat avidly studied the scientific theories promoted
by Michel­Eugène Chevreul and Ogden Rood, and found that even
subtle greys could be mixed optically (as seen from a distance) by
placing sets of complementary­coloured dots in close proximity.
One might argue that he wanted to capture not so much vividness
of colour in nature but the subtle luminosity of its deeply coloured
textures – hence Seurat’s favoured term for his own technique:
chromo­luminarism. In 1884, Signac claimed to have introduced
Seurat to a Pointillist or Divisionist palette consisting of 11
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‘spectral’ hues above a row of each of the same colours mixed
with white. In practice, such a palette would indeed give the
particularly high­key effect that we now associated with
late­Impressionist and Post­Impressionist landscape painting.
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Georges Seurat’s palette: Flake White, Cadmium Yellow Light,
Cadmium Yellow Medium, Cadmium Yellow Deep, Vermilion,
Madder Lake, Emerald Green and mixed greens, Cerulean Blue,
Prussian Blue, French Ultramarine, Cobalt Violet. Each colour was
mixed with white on the palette, prior to application to the canvas.
Reference: William Homer, Seurat & the Science of Painting
(1964).
Vincent Van Gogh (1853­90). Despite an unpromising start, the
Dutch painter van Gogh eventually developed an astonishing
speed and precision in his forcefully expressive practice of
painting, colour mixing, and draughtsmanship. He stressed
contrasts of colours not so much to record a scene objectively (as
Impressionists had done) but in attempts to capture and record the
essence of what he saw and felt. He was of two minds in his
treatment of colour: on one hand, he explained (in letters to his
brother Theo) that he wanted to renounce reality and surrender
himself to a colouristic musical language; on the other, he
preferred to work with his colours like a ‘cobbler, rather than a
musician’. Van Gogh's oval palette (illustrated in a drawing of
1882) includes nine colours laid out in tonal sequence
(conventionally starting with white at the thumb­hole) to which
French Ultramarine and Carmine were added if necessary. His
Sunflower paintings have darkened with age, the artist apparently
being unable to afford Cadmium Yellow, and hence using unstable
Chrome Yellow instead. In his self­portrait of 1888 (Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam) he depicts himself holding a square palette.
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Vincent van Gogh’s palette: Flake White, Chrome Yellow, Yellow
Ochre, Chrome Orange, Raw Sienna, Red Ochre, Red Lake,
Vermilion, Alizarin Crimson/Madder, Lime/Chrome Green,
Emerald Green, Viridian Green, Cobalt Blue, Prussian Blue,
French ultramarine, Cobalt Violet, (Ivory) Black).
Paul Gauguin (1848­1903). With the French painter Gauguin,
perhaps more than any other artist of his generation, there is a
significant break with preceding centuries in that colour is used
imaginatively and idiosyncratically, rather than naturalistically or
to conform to conventions of colour symbolism. He established the
right of the artist to ‘dare anything’, including the right to employ
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personal or imaginative symbolism. He believed that his colours
had special power, and that in their arrangement over the plane of
a painting they were reflectors of a personal attitude to life. ‘There
are noble tones’, he wrote, ‘while others that are common, there
are tranquil, soothing harmonies, and others that excite one’.
Gauguin began his career as a self­taught painter in 1871,
influenced by Camille Pissarro and later by Emile Bernard.
Following his acceptance into the Symbolist group in Paris, he set
sail for Tahiti in 1891, after which his art becomes increasingly
exotic and original.
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Paul Gauguin’s palette (about 1896): Flake White, Zinc White,
Cadmium Yellow (Light & Deep), Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Raw
Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Red Lake, Vermilion, Alizarin Crimson,
Green Earth/Emerald Green, Viridian Green, Cobalt Blue,
Prussian Blue, French Ultramarine.
Paul Cézanne (1839­1906). The French artist Cézanne took a
schematic view of art, and contemplated colour with care in
relation to light and shade in depictions of formal planes and
volumes, and with reference to conventions of aerial perspective.
He identified blue with space, and red and yellow with
light­vibrations. In later life, he would prefer to paint on cloudy
days, since this reduced the tonal contrasts of a landscape while
enhancing contrasts of hue and chroma. He resisted a
recommendation from the young Symbolist painter Émile Bernard
to reduce his palette of about 19 colours, and paid particular
attention to their tonal quality and sequence. The extraordinary
achievement of Cézanne (as with Renoir) was his ability to mould
form with solid colour in such a way that it was as radiant as that
of the glaze­technique used, for example, by Titian. To a large
extent, he painted without drawing first, and took great pains to
ensure that each new colour harmonised with those already on the
canvas – hence his paintings were not ‘realistic’ as such. Advising
Bernard, Cézanne observed that the ‘unsurpassable’ works of the
Venetians ‘continually put you on the alert in an endless search for
a way that is only dimly understood but which leads surely and
naturally to an awareness of what your own way of expression
really is; and the day you find it, be convinced you will also find
easily and naturally the means used by the four or five great
Venetians’.
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Paul Cézanne’s palette: Flake White, Zinc White, Chrome Yellow,
Cadmium Yellow, Naples Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Red Ochre,
Vermilion, Genuine Madder Lake, Alizarin Crimson, Emerald
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Green, Viridian Green, Green Earth, Cobalt Blue, Prussian Blue,
French Ultramarine, Peach Black.
Impressionism
Auguste Renoir (1841­1919). In contrast to the ‘grey manner’ of
the academics, certain French painters of the mid­nineteenth
century – Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, for example –
continued to use the classical four­colour earth palette (red,
yellow, black and white). Manet’s peinture claire, for example,
had reversed the academic procedure which worked upwards from
the dark monochrome to the light passages, to create high­keyed
pictures by direct statement of the lights in oil­colour, and then
painting the half­tones and darks into this while still wet. Renoir’s
gradations of tinted greys, pink and yellowish­greys for the
highlights, and blue­ and buff­greys grading to black in the
shadows, have been described as ‘oyster and coral’ tints. Renoir,
who had at one time been criticised for his dark tones, was
probably the first painter to adopt a whole­heartedly ‘rainbow
palette’. He also expressed a special liking for the figure paintings
of Antoine Watteau and Francisco de Goya. For a short time
(while studying in Paris), he restricted his palette to Red and
Yellow Ochre, Green Earth and black. His early employment
painting copies of Sèvres ceramics no doubt had some influence
over the method he chose to overcome the darkness of his first oil
paintings. While other Impressionists were concerned with the
evanescent effects of light in a changing scene, he became more
interested in the sunlight that flooded solid forms with ambient
light. He had a greater interest in humanity than many of his
colleagues and was keen to paint family members and numerous
female models.
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Auguste Renoir’s palette: Flake White, Silver White, [?] Chrome
Lemon, Chrome Yellow, Naples Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Raw
Umber, Raw Sienna, Light Red, Red Earth, Burnt Umber,
Vermilion, Madder Lake, Emerald Green (Veronese Green),
Viridian Green, Cobalt Blue, Prussian Blue, French Ultramarine,
(Ivory) Black.
Claude Monet (1840­1926). Following early guidance from
Eugène Boudin and Johan Jongkind, the French painter Monet
turned his hand to landscape painting. After meetings in Paris with
Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric
Bazille, he adopted impasto brushwork, thereby breaking with the
tradition of building up highlights and shadows with oil­glazes.
Another highly significant influence was J.M.W. Turner, whose
paintings he saw on his first visit to London (with Pissarro) in
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1870­71. He absorbed guidance from John Ruskin’s The Elements
of Drawing and Ogden Rood’s Modern Chromatics (in its French
translation of 1881) in acute and objective study of colour in the
natural landscape. This culminated in various series of paintings,
often begun en plein air and then completed inside the studio. Like
other painters of his generation, he enjoyed the portability, as well
as the extended colour­range, of the ready made paints sealed
within tubes.
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Claude Monet’s palette (about 1880): Flake White, Zinc White,
Cadmium Yellow, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Light Red, Red
Earth, Vermilion, Alizarin Crimson, Emerald Green, Viridian
Green, Green Earth, Cobalt Blue, Prussian Blue, French
Ultramarine, Ivory Black.
Reference: Virginia Spate, Claude Monet: The Colour of Time
(2001).
James McNeill Whistler (1834­1903). North American­British
painter who studied art in Russia and France. According to the
English painter Vanessa Bell, who studied with Whistler in Paris,
his lessons were ‘chiefly about tone: he insisted upon thick paint
and made you try to get the right tone at once’. Whistler employed
his colour to evoke mood rather than an impression, and used the
analogy of musical expression to emphasise the abstract qualities
of his colouring, rather than allowing it to have any spurious
literary meaning. He made arrangements such as harmonies of
tone and colour as in Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling
Rocket (c. 1874, Detroit Institute of Arts), which was famously
criticised by Ruskin. He produced numerous prints, inspired in part
by his taste for Japanese art.
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James McNeill Whistler’s palette: Flake White, Yellow Ochre,
Vermilion, Indian Red (Venetian Red), Raw Umber, Raw Sienna,
Vermilion, Alizarin Crimson, Emerald Green, Viridian Green,
Cobalt Blue, Ivory Black.
Reference: Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890).
Camille Pissarro (1830­1903). French painter, born in the Virgin
Islands. Pissarro initially studied with Jean­Baptiste Corot,
producing small landscapes in subdued colours in the manner of
the French Barbizon School. He later came into contact with Paul
Cézanne and Claude Monet (about 1860), and was impressed with
the work of J.M.W. Turner when visiting London (with Monet) in
1870­71. He often painted thickly (using a palette knife), and
briefly experimented with Pointillism in the 1880s under the
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influence of Georges Seurat and texts on colour theory by M.E.
Chevreul and Ogden Rood.
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Camille Pissarro’s palette: Flake White, Chrome Yellow,
Cadmium Yellow, Raw Sienna, Chrome Orange, Vermilion, Rose
Madder, Viridian Green, Cobalt Blue, French Ultramarine, Cobalt
Violet, (Ivory) Black.