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 Lumière ...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.
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 Lumière 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.
A brainchild of art critic Roger Marx, the redesign of French coinage at the end of the nineteenth century aimed to endow citizens with miniature artworks, opening the putatively transactional realm ...of economics to the qualitative judgments and discursive practices of art criticism. Louis-Oscar Roty's now-iconic silver coin was far more compatible with the financial industry, where value is realized on and through paper, than its agricultural motif appears to suggest. Far from uniting the nation, art initially functioned as a destabilizing force, upturning long-standing beliefs about the ways images and objects hold value.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the flowers and gardens visible in France became increasingly defined by the imperatives of commodity capitalism, in particular by the perpetual quest ...for variety and novelty that characterized the fashion industry. Focusing on the important role that color played in this process, this article shows how floriculture disrupted not only the relationship between the natural and the artificial and the real and the imaginary but also contemporary aesthetic standards and practices of signification.
CHROMOLITHOGRAPHY Kalba, Laura Anne
Color in the Age of Impressionism,
07/2017
Book Chapter
As manifestations of the French capital’s buoyant commercial culture and dynamic street life, the large color posters designed by Jules Chéret, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and a coterie of other ...innovative commercial artists working in the 1880s and 1890s count among the most iconic symbols of fin-de-siècle Paris (figs. 68 and 69).¹ There are several reasons for this, not least the sheer ubiquity of posters in the urban landscape. Posted on the sides of buildings, construction partitions, public urinals, and omnibuses, inside of train stations, and on specially designed columns and kiosks throughout the city, these large full-color advertisements had an
FIREWORKS Kalba, Laura Anne
Color in the Age of Impressionism,
07/2017
Book Chapter
At Étienne Lacroix’s fireworks plant in Toulouse, the magic of color was visible not only in the form of candles, rockets, lances, and Bengal lights but also in the flower beds planted on the factory ...grounds, not too far from where workers carefully assembled these and other common nineteenth-century pyrotechnical devices, including Catherine wheels and illuminated fountains. For, in addition to being an innovative manipulator of colorful explosives, Lacroix, like Michel-Eugène Chevreul before him, was a gifted amateur horticulturalist. In 1888, he received an award from the Société d’horticulture de la Haute Garonne for his collection of chrysanthemums—resilient, fall-time
It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of color in shaping the critical reception of Impressionism. The unusual brightness of Impressionists’ palettes and visible materiality of their ...colors, which frankly asserted themselves as “real paint that came from tubes or pots,” immediately drew critics’ attention.¹ In this as well as other important regards, the response to Impressionism closely aligned itself with that generated by contemporary fashion, the growing chromatic variety and vibrancy of which Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and other members of the movement gleefully explored in their paintings. Take, for instance, Monet’s Women in the Garden (1866),
EPILOGUE Kalba, Laura Anne
Color in the Age of Impressionism,
07/2017
Book Chapter
Opposed to Neo-Impressionist artists’ push for a more scientific approach to art, Paul Gauguin summarily dismissed the group as “petty young chemists who accumulate little dots,” an activity he ...described as “leading directly to color photography.”¹ These two short statements aptly summarize the painter’s views on Neo-Impressionism and color photography, though it is worth noting that successful commercialization of the latter was still years in the future. Men of science, technology, and business repeatedly boasted of having “invented” or “discovered” color photography. But none of these early technologies—including direct processes, such as Edmond Becquerel’s hopelessly evanescent heliochromes, and indirect
The name that brothers Francisque and Joseph Renard picked for their new aniline dye has a complicated etymology. Fuchs is the German word for “fox,” which in French is renard. Thus, by naming their ...dye fuchsine, or “fuchsin” in English, the Renard brothers marked the pinkish-red color as theirs and theirs alone. It was, they insisted, a branded commercial product with a distinct technological, commercial, and cultural identity. For the bulk of consumers, however, the name fuchsine would have most likely evoked the brilliant reddish-purple hues of the fuchsia flower, a favorite among nineteenthcentury gardeners.¹ This, too, was a calculated
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Michel-Eugène Chevreul was certainly the best-known chemist in France, possibly even in the world. In addition to having received the usual honors one ...might expect for a scientist of his training, expertise, and accomplishment, such as being elected to the Académie des sciences (1826) and admitted into the Légion d’honneur (1844), he had the privilege of having his likeness exhibited at the famed Parisian wax museum, the Musée Grévin, and appearing in the Panorama le “Tout- Paris,” a major attraction at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris.¹ In 1886, Chevreul was interviewed
