Chromophobia

Color and the West

A belief founded on Classical roots

Henri Fuseli –The Artist Moved to Despair at the Grandeur of Antique Fragments

Renaissance Debate Florence and Venice

• Florence, Georgio Vasari, Disegno/Drawing, Michelangelo• Giorgio Vasari, a Florentine artist and writer, described disegno

as the father and foundation of all the visual arts, "the animating principle of all creative processes." For the Florentines and other Central Italian artists, the act of drawing was not only the art of using line to define form: it was the artistic underpinning of a work whereby an artist could express his inner vision. Florentine painters therefore used drawing to study movement, anatomy and the natural world, and they developed compositions in detailed drawings before transferring them to surfaces prepared for painting.

• http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/vefl/hd_vefl.htm

Libyan Sibyl - Michelangelo

Venice, Lodovico Dolce, Color, Titian

• According to Lodovico Dolce, Venetian artists gradually softened their coloring until their manner equaled nature. Rather than beginning with careful drawings, Venetian painters often worked out compositions directly on the canvas, using layered patches of colored brushstrokes rather than line to define form. Venetian drawings show an interest in how light will affect a body and how color will describe it in a painting.

Venice: Tintoretto (sketch of Michelangelo)Titian and Workshop, Venus and the Lute Player

Johann Joachim Winkelmann – NeoClassicism

• The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.”Winckelmann, Johann Joachim.“Unity and simplicity are the two true sources of beauty.”Winckelmann, Johann Joachim.

Charles Blanc 1813-1882Theorist and Writer, Director of Arts

http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/fa257/blanc_color.html

• Supposing the painter had only ideas to express, he would perhaps need only drawing and the mono-chrome of chiaro 'scuro for with them he can represent the only figure that thinks, - the human figure, which is the chef d'oeuvre of a designer rather than the work of a colorist. With drawing and chiaro 'scuro he can also put in relief all that depends upon intelligent life, that is life in its relation to other lives, but there are features of organic, of interior and individual life that could not be manifested without color. How for instance without color give, in the expression of a young girl, that shade of trouble or sadness so well expressed by the pallor of the brow, or the emotion of modesty that makes her blush?

• Here we recognize the power of color, and that its role is to tell us what agitates the heart, while drawing shows us what passes in the mind, a new proof of what we affirmed at the beginning of this work, that drawing is the masculine side of art, color the feminine.

Blanc’s Chromatic “Rose”

Neoclassicism

• Drawing from antique casts• Systematic and scientific use of color• Controlled color through scientific knowledge.

Ingres and Canova

Irony – Blanc’s writings on color influenced Van Gogh and Seurat, although Blanc was hostile to Impressionism and Post-

Impressionism

Modernism and the Gallery as a White Cube

A case study – El AnatsuiEl Anatsui is a Ghanaian sculptor who has spent most of his life in Nigeria. His works use simple,

often recycled objects to create colorful tapestries and sculpture. Here they are on site in Africa.

In the West