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Perpetual iridescence, or Impressionism’s minor harmonies

Weintraub, Alex (2022) Perpetual iridescence, or Impressionism’s minor harmonies. Journal of Art Historiography (26). ISSN 2042-4752

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URL of Published Version: https://arthistoriography.wordpress.com/26-jun22/

Identification Number/DOI: 10.48352/uobxjah.00004094

Abstract

In histories of modern colour, simultaneous contrast has become something of an idée fixe. From Paul Signac’s 1899 treatise, D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme, to Laura Anne Kalba’s celebrated monograph, Color in the Age of Impressionism (2017), all paths seem to lead back to Eugène Chevreul and to the maximization of chromatic intensity. This essay develops an alternative history of modern colour, which simultaneous contrast has thus far outshined—that of iridescence. The Impressionist (and Neo-Impressionist) desire to represent iridescent colours is found to relate to a contrasting—and more paradigmatically Impressionist—aesthetic rationale for the same formal procedures of divided touches, which are typically associated with simultaneous contrast. Through an examination of iridescent colours in cognate fields of glassware, fashion, and photography, alongside close analyses of a few signal paintings by Berthe Morisot, it is argued that by the end of the 1870s, one of the major aesthetic antinomies that would go on to determine later critical debates surrounding avant-gardist and Modernist approaches to colour had already emerged: whether colour’s aesthetic value derives from its meaningfulness within a pictorial representation or from its physiological effects on the viewer’s experience.

Type of Work:Article
School/Faculty:Colleges (2008 onwards) > College of Arts & Law
Department:Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies
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This article is archived in ePapers for preservation purposes

Date:June 2022
Keywords:Impressionism, colour theory, Paul Signac, Berthe Morisot, Modernism
Subjects:N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general
Copyright Status:Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal. Authors may subsequently archive and publish the pdfs as produced by the journal. By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings. Copyright restrictions apply to the use of any images contained within the articles. This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
ID Code:4094
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