Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art

Refiguring Modernism

by Laura Anne Kalba

This study analyzes the impact of color-making technologies on the visual culture of nineteenth-century France, from the early commercialization of synthetic dyes to the Lumi�re brothers' perfection of the autochrome color photography process. Focusing on Impressionist art, Laura Anne Kalba examines the importance of dyes produced in the second half of the nineteenth century to the vision of artists such as Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet.

The proliferation of vibrant new colors in France during this time challenged popular understandings of realism, abstraction, and fantasy in the realms of fine art and popular culture. More than simply adding a touch of spectacle to everyday life, Kalba shows, these bright, varied colors came to define the development of a consumer culture increasingly based on the sensual appeal of color. Impressionism--emerging at a time when inexpensively produced color functioned as one of the principal means by and through which people understood modes of visual perception and signification--mirrored and mediated this change, shaping the ways in which people made sense of both modern life and modern art.

Demonstrating the central importance of color history and technologies to the study of visuality, Color in the Age of Impressionism adds a dynamic new layer to our understanding of visual and material culture.

Genres: Art, History

288 pages, Hardcover

First published April 21, 2017

Reviews

[Castles · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting journey into the 19th-century French culture, specifically about the usage of color and the developments in chemistry and Chevruel’s theory of color.

I read this book as a background study for my interest in Impressionism and wasn’t disappointed. It’s not highly academic, that is, it’s not super complicated or Anti-understandable, but it is rather peculiar so I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re really an art history / modern art enthusiast freak like me.

This is a book about how this 19th-century optic theory influenced the impressionists, fireworks, flowers, postcards and posters, and eventually even modern thinkers like Adorno and how Pantone made color the main subject rather than a representation and more...

If you are though, this book is great.

[Mills College Library]

701.85 K142 2017