Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The Van Gogh museum has recently revealed that the colours in Van Gogh’s paintings are not quite as vibrant as the original colours the artist used in the 1880s and that despite conservation efforts, these have faded over time. Van Gogh is known for his expressive use of colour and it will come as a surprise to many that these colours are paler than the artist originally painted. The discovery will be presented in the new exhibition in Amsterdam called “Van Gogh at Work”, which explores the connection between the skills and techniques of Van Gogh’s painting style and the finished pieces. As an artist, he was known for his unusual methods, as Jonathon Jones writes in the Guardian:
“Van Gogh painted on everything from raw jute to, when he was short of cash, a dishcloth… he regularly reused his canvases, painting over early works. A flower painting in the show has a painting of wrestlers by Van Gogh concealed under it. When he wanted to keep a painting, he sometimes painted on the back: two brown studies for his early work The Potato Eaters have later, vibrant self-portraits on their reverse.”
The reaction to this discovery has brought up an important question: why does it matter that the colours have faded when we can appreciate the beauty in the works as they stand today?
Colour poses a problem for art historians, in terms of both conserving it and understanding it. Artists use often use colour to express emotion in their works, but it is difficult to gauge just how these are going to be perceived subjectively by the spectators. This becomes increasingly difficult for art historians who try to document the use or meaning of colour in works of art painted centuries ago.
It seems strange to think of colour as something subjective. Were someone to tell us that the sky were green on a clear blue day then we would instinctively feel that they were wrong, but colour must perceived subjectively, the colours that we describe or respond to in a painting are not objective even though as a society we ascribe objective terms to these colours like ‘blue’, ‘pink’, ‘light’ etc.
Taking the problem of faded colours to the extreme, art historians were shocked to discover that the cream or white Greek marble statues of antiquity, that we know so well, were actually painted in bright colours. The Greeks thought of their gods in living colour and portrayed them that way too. The temples that housed them were also in colour, though time and weather have stripped most of the hues away. In the 19th century, the excavations of the Ancient Greek and Roman sites uncovered great numbers of statues and traces of the colour were visible even then. As Matthew Gurewitsch writes for The Smithsonian Museum:
“Some of these traces are still visible to the naked eye even today, though much of the remaining color faded, or disappeared entirely, once the statues were again exposed to light and air. Some of the pigment was scrubbed off by restorers whose acts, while well intentioned, were tantamount to vandalism.”
Colour, or the lack thereof, was in fact so important to these restorers working in the 19th century that to envisage these statues from the classical era as colourful seemed intolerable. In fact, the Renaissance masters modelled their great marble works like Michaelangelo’s “David” on these pure, white Greek sculptures. The German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann has done extensive research to replicate these statues in their original techicolour form. An example of his work is pictured below – this shows a replica of c. 490 B.C. sculpture of an archer originally found at the Temple of Aphaia on the Greek Island of Aegina. To our eyes now, this statue looks bizarre but would have fit in well with the bright surroundings of the Greek temples.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Colour has been used by art historians to explain surprising discoveries of religious sculpture in early 17th Century German buildings. During the Reformation, idolatry was condemned and iconoclasm resulted in large amounts of decorative religious statues and ornaments being destroyed in this period. But, Tara Hamling discovered that some religious statues and relief sculptures were even commissioned during this time for the homes of protestants. Interestingly, all these sculptures were plain white or cream. Hamling assesses that in fact these sculptures were only permitted on the basis that they must be colourless, indicating that it was the colour itself that was seen as problematic for religious worship
“The Second Commandment specifies that man must not make a ‘likeness of anything that is in heaven above’…the application of colour to an image contributed to towards a closer likeness and was therefore suspect…firstly it was an act of deception resulting in a false and lying appearance. Second, this deceitful image could seduce and corrupt, and lead to the sin of idolatry”
The recent discovery of the faded colours of Van Gogh’s work is posing the questions for art historians about what this discovery means. Does it matter that the paintings are less vibrant? Does it alter our reading of these? How might the colours in their original format have looked and how might that have shaped the reaction of the contemporaries that viewed them?
One thing is for certain; understanding colour is not quite black and white.
For further information about this subject see:
http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp?page=303335&lang=en
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors.html?c=y&page=2#
If you are interested in topics like this then you might be interested in our Art History Summer School on the 19th-23rd August.