Perpetual iridescence, or Impressionism’s minor harmonies

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.