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Michel Eugène Chevreul
De la Loi du Contraste Simultané des Coleurs et de L'Assortiment des Objects...
2006

Name: De la Loi du Contraste Simultané des Coleurs et de L'Assortiment des Objects...
Brand: Michel Eugène Chevreul
Rating: 4.9 (559 reviews)

About the Item

Eugène Chevreul (1786-1889) De la Loi du Contraste Simultané des Couleurs (The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours). A work of fundamental importance in the history of Western Art celebrated with a rare and precious edition. Available from Wallector – a highly limited edition of the 2006 reprint of the famous French chemist's "Atlas", published in 1839. The book is the origin of the colour revolution waged in France during the 19 th Century by the Impressionists, the Pointillists, the Fauves, etc. which then spread all over the world with Futurism, the Cubism of Robert Delaunay and Opt Art. The edition, printed on high-quality paper, has 40 plates mainly dealing with the laws of chromaticism and the dynamic relationship between colours. Format: In-4° cm, hardback, bound in black cloth. Some information regarding Chevreul’s theory and the genesis of his book: “Only simultaneous contrast makes colour suitable for aesthetic purposes.” J.W.Goethe (Farbenlehre 1810) The French chemist Eugène Chevreul (b. Angers, 1786 – d. Paris, 1889), Member of the Academy of Sciences, directed the Museum of Natual History and taught there for many years. Louis XVIII appointed him director of the laboratory that made dyes for the Royal Manufactury of Gobelins, a post that allowed him to pursue his research into natural colouring agents and to develop the theory of colours he described in “The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours”, published in 1839 and re-presented visually in this book. According to the law formulated by Chevreul: the simultaneous contrast of colours determines the phenomenon of modification which different-colored objects appear to undergo in terms of their physical composition and their hues when juxtaposed. The fundamental aspect of his discovery was that a colour does not exist in its own right but only in relationship to the colours next to it. We know that the composition of the solar spectrum is as follows: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red: seven colours (but if you consider indigo as a kind of blue, they become six). Three are “primary” or “fundamental”: blue, red and yellow. Three are “binary” or “composite”: green, violet and orange, made by mixing two of the “primaries”: blue+red=violet; blue+yellow=green; red+yellow=orange. The primary colour which does not enter into the composition of a colour’s binary is its “complementary” colour: green is complementary to red, orange to blue and violet to yellow. Every colour tinges the space around with its own complementary colour: a red object will cast a greenish shadow. According to the law of simultaneous contrast formulated by Chevreul, two complementary colours (e.g. red and green) strengthen each other if set side by side and therefore become more intense; if they are mixed, they cancel each other out, tending towards grey. Further, the colour common to two colours (e.g. yellow for orange and green) loses intensity if the two colours are superimposed. Chevreul’s essential contribution is the theory of “optical mixture”: separate touches of raw pigments tend to look, in the eye of an observer, purer and more vibrant than if they were mixed on the palette. These laws, a source of inspiration to Impressionist and above all Neoimpressionist painters, to Divisionists and Pointillists, were applied, with varying degrees of strictness, right down to Robert Delaunay’s “Orphism” at the beginning of the 20th Century. Historically, the first painter to become interested in Chevreul’s theory was Delacroix. It is said that a chromatic circle based on the scientist’s research hung on a wall in his studio. In his Diary for the year 1849, Delacroix wrote: “General law: the greater the contrast the greater the splendour”. He used his famous brushstrokes – termed “en flochetage” – with extraordinary ease. His technique, based on fine strokes, was a forerunner of the “comma-like” strokes used by the Impressionists and Divisionists and were capable of creating a wonderful succession of tones in rendering water, leaves or the play of light. Intuiting the division of colours as between primary and binary, as well as the use of complementary colours, the great Romantic master played a pioneering role, to which fellow-painter Paul Signac paid tribute when he wrote: He showed the colourists who followed him the superiority of colours produced by the vibration of diverse elements combined with one another … giving them the chance of using an optical function to create new tonalities. The Impressionists – even those who among them who failed to study Chevreul’s writings in depth (because they preferred to paint empirically and instinctively) – certainly could not have not known about them. One of their “spokespersons” Duranty, the art critic, noted regarding Degas’ 1870 “Portrait of Madame Camus”: “It would have served as a suitable title page for M. Chevreul’s treatise on colours; see how everything show us how to vary tones, quarter tones and tenths of tones.” But the merit for directly implementing Chevreul’s theories nevertheless lies with the Neoimpressionists or Divisionists. With the force of his genius, Seurat, whose aim was to reconcile art and science, dominated the group of artists who followed his theories, finding in him a “beacon”, in Baudelaire’s sense of the word. Seurat threw himself passionately into physical research into optics, the analysis of light and the science of colours. He read Chevreul’s De la Loi du Contraste Simultané des Couleurs before turning to the scientific works of Helmholtz, Maxwell, Rood and Dove, and to Charles Henry’s “scientific aesthetics”. The first scrupulous application of the “Divisionist” method created by Seurat – he used pure tones and colours which, rather than mixed on the pallette, were applied and juxtaposed as dots on the canvas so that it was the spectator’s eyes that mixed them – was demonstrated by the great composition “Une dimanche après-midi a l’Ile de la Grande Jatte” which, from that moment on, became the manifesto of “Chromoluminarism” (a term that Seurat preferred to Neoimpressionism). The canvas is huge and kept Seurat busy from late 1884 to the spring of 1886, during which he used the various shades of Chevreul’s colour disc in separate touches to achieve the effect of the colour of light. Following a visit which he and Seurat paid to Chevreul in 1884, Signac stressed that the meeting was “our initiation to science” and, turning to the subject of Chevreul’s discs, declared, “Neoimpressionism is based on the simple scientific idea of contrast”. Pissarro too, a disciple of Divisionism from 1886 to 1888, and therefore nicknamed “Monsieur Ripipipoint”, went to see the old scientist: “By Jove, if I didn’t know how colours behaved after Chevreul’s discoveries, I wouldn’t be able to continue studying with such confidence.” The writer Fèlix Feneon, herald of Neoimpressionism, during various debates on optical painting and scientific Impressionism, defined, rigorously and with conviction, the aesthetics and technique of Seurat and Signac and their compagnons, Dubois-Pillet, Luce, Angrand, Cross (all fervent “pointillistes”), underlining their striving for “the expression of extreme forms of luminosity”. Although the success of Georges Seurat’s “la Grande Jatte” was due above all to the scandal it created, it earned Divisionism a following among many Belgian artists such as Henry van de Velde and Theo van Rysselberghe. With the arrival of Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, Boccioni, Balla and Novellini, the movement also spread to Italy with Segantini, Previati, Morbelli, Pellizza da Volpedo, etc. who, maintaining the breakup of colour, adopted a process which, according to Previati, the group’s theoritician: “reproduces the addition of light through the methodical and minute separation of the complementary tints”. They also distinguished themselves from the French painters’ group with freer, generally streaky brushstrokes. For a while, the Fauves cultivated Seurat’s experiments, e.g. Matisse in Luxe, calme et volupté (1904). The Simultaneist Delaunay revisited them and, towards 1907, became a serious student of Chevreul’s work and the promoter of an art form which Apolinnaire dubbed “Orphism”. Delaunay imagined a kind of painting technically composed only of contrasts between colours expanding in time, but whose perception is simultaneous. “Using Chevreul’s simultaneous contrasts,” he writes, “I played with colours the way you express yourself musically in a fugue. Thus did he give birth to the 1912-1913 series, Windows, in which he magnifies the colour of the light filtering through the window pane and breaks it down into a wide variety of tones. “You can’t”, he said “deny the evidence of coloured phrases that enliven the surface of the canvas like successive cadences inside the movement of coloured masses, the colour itself acting as a contrast.” “Windows” was followed by the period of his polychrome “Discs”, which issue from the dynamic, circular rythm of the colours, as in a real fireworks show. On the other hand, the Futurists’ Divisionist experiments also produced impressive chromatic and luminescent effects. One need only recall Balla’s Arc Lamp (1909-1911), Severini’s works during his first years in Paris or Boccioni’s paintings, which also used the dynamic and “simultaneous contrast” of colours, as seen in his famous picture The Modern Idol (1911). In perfect accord with the tradition of the positivist Century, art and science have a tendency to unite, if not to blend together, thus holding out the key to a universal harmony more effectively than intuition. We must also recognize Chevreul as having had the merit of giving many painters, from the end of the 19 th Century to the early years of the 20th, the scientific basis required to develop a “mathematics” of modern art.

Creator:
Michel Eugène Chevreul (1786 - 1889, French)
Creation Year:
2006
Dimensions:
Height: 11.62 in (29.5 cm)Width: 10.04 in (25.5 cm)Depth: 0.79 in (2 cm)
Medium:
Paper
Movement & Style:
Post-Impressionist
Period:
2000-2009
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Roma, IT
Reference Number:
Seller: 775791stDibs: LU65032247223

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