Robert Delaunay: Circular forms, 1913 2.
Conclusion
| The ‘re-orientation to the world’ at the end of the 19th.century, which emphasized the importance of individual perception over clear cut objectivity, had the effect of making the visual arts reassess their role and means of expression. The idea of the power of individual perception was a popular one amongst the avant-garde whose reaction against the institutional and traditional art forms also symbolized a reaction against the society which up held them. The rationality, objectivity and impersonality of capitalist society was felt by many to stand in direct opposition to, and was damaging to, the imaginative and spiritual nature of man. The philosophy of Fredrich Nietzsche(1844-1900) became very influential on the artists of this time. He saw modern capitalist society as being essentially nihilistic. In ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ Nietzsche declared the death of God. He saw the loss of the authority of religion as having led to the loss of the conventional meaning of life. In his quest for a re-valuation of life he put special emphasis on the power of the individual to overcome modern cultural conditioning. He isolates art as a medium through which to challenge society by finding new forms of creative expression. It was this emphasis on the power of the artist to challenge the materialism of modern society through new forms of signifying that came to characterized the spirit of the modern avant-garde. | |
| Colour gained new status as an aesthetic language through which the viewer could be taken beyond the boundaries of the material into a more imaginary, sensory space. In the exploration of our experience of colour in nature and in declaring colour as descriptive and expressive in its own right, the Impressionist took the first steps towards releasing colour from form. The Symbolist, for who the imagination took precedence over the representation of 'reality', took a step further in releasing colour from its descriptive function in employing it as a means of referring to that which could not be described literally: a sensation, an emotion, an idea. It was this idea that colour could signify that which was beyond mere representation that came to define its role for future modernist artists. "It was colour that was to supply the spearhead of non-representational art; it seemed to open up a new era of unprecedented visual freedom."1. |
Robert Delaunay: Circular forms, 1913 2. |
| "Colour is both form and subject." "Colour, the fruit of light.....is the foundation of the painter’s means of painting and its language"3. | |
| Colour, stripped of its associations, acquired a new power and significance for the modernist artist. It seemed to speak of something fundamental and pure, a kind of essential force, which propelled the imagination to a new realm. In trying to define their experience of colour these artists came to relate it to 'inner nature'. It was felt to connect with an instinctive force. The search for underlying laws or a 'grammar of colour' led to the interest in colour theories which were a rich amalgam of physical and metaphysical ideas. One can see this 'theme' running throughout the work of the artists I have looked at in this study. Colour provided them with a means of communicating their inner emotions and ideals in a language which they felt could be universally understood. Colour, as both the subject and content of a painting seems to communicates to the viewer a higher ideal, in the words of Clive Bell "we are lifted above the stream of life"4. |
| Colour was employed by these artists to "represent the existence of that which was not demonstrable....One cannot represent the absolute, but one can demonstrate that the absolute exists."5. |
| I have concluded my exploration of 'the modernist understanding of colour' with the work of Kandinsky and Mondrian, not because this marks a natural end but because it marks a beginning. The artists I have looked at provided the foundation for an aesthetic understanding of colour which has gone on to inspire future generations of artists. It is the work of these early modernists that are still challenging our perception and experience of colour today. |
1.Gage, John. Colour and Culture, Thames and Hudson, 1993.p.247
2.Robert Delaunay, Circular Forms, 1913, Oil on Canvas, 26"x 19", Private collection.
3.Delaunay, R. The New Art of Colour: the Writings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay Arthur A. Cohen (ed.) and David Shapiro(trans.) New York : Viking Press, 1978.p.23
4. Clive Bell, the Aesthetic Hypothesis, 1914, in Art in Theory 1900-1990, Harrison and Woods(eds.) Blackwell, 1992. p.34.
5. J.F. Lyotard in his article ‘Presenting the Un-presentable: The Sublime,1982