Contrast of Extension

To understand the reason for extension of color in a composition, we must recognize that the eye prefers simple, comprehensible structures, or elements to which structure can be given, if only momentarily. And visual memory being what it is, a few colors deployed in large areas and in perhaps a few smaller patches create a much more intense and lasting impression than a folly of many colors. Gauguin believed, figuratively speaking, that a square yard of red [or whatever color one may choose] is more red than a square ot of the same red. Quantity, in most instances, should take precedence over quality--meaning that no small area of color, no matter how brilliant it may be, can serve as effectively as quantity or extension. This is not meant to suggest that quantity and quality are incompatible. In the majority of cases where color assumes a major role, as it does in Persian and Indian miniatures and in much twentieth-century painting, this axiom regarding quantity and quality is given impressive proof. It is necessary, therefore, to state the principle of color proportion in several connections, for the intuitive balance of larger and smaller areas of similar and/or dissimilar hues is of prime importance. Of almost equal importance is the placement and recurrence of colors in a design. [Anyone who has painted a room probably knows the astonishment--not to mention shock--that comes of seeing hundreds of square feet of walls just painted in a color that seemed so ideal in the small samples at the paint store.]

Relating to these matters, and to the use of color in modern paintings in particular, is the theory put forward by Dr. Charles Henry, Seurat's friend, in the late 1880s, which has it that we tend to ses color before we see form. This idea, applied esthetically and technically, might have contributed to the freeing of color from the confines of delineated form in paintings by Matisse and Raoul Dufy, in Cubist paintings after about 1913, and especially in paintings by Léger, Juan Gris, and Robert Delaunay from that date or slightly earlier. As with so many modern pictorial means, more than a germ of this structural extension of color is to be found in Cézanne's paintings, notably in late works. Colors were allowed to reach out to what seemed their natural limits, to stretch beyond the boundaries of any defined shape if need be, or to force any shape to expand or contrast. [40] Color was permitted to "live a life of its own" on about equal terms with line. When we consider to what an extent color [starting with Greek vase paintings, which is about all that remains of ancient two-dimensional Greek art, and continuing through Renaissance painting and its impoverished off-spring, the art of the nineteenth-century academies] has been dominated by line, shading, and considerations of form, we begin to realize how important color-line separation is in the work not only of the artists mentioned above but also of Kandinsky, Mir÷, Masson, Gorky, and others. Color, having won its freedom from traditional chiaroscuro, also gained its freedom from line. The two may be compared with the melodic [line] and harmonic [color] structure of music: Each element has a distinct role to play at one and the same time, on two or more levels of sound or space within the total design. To appreciate the interplay, we must learn how to give attention to what is happening simultaneously on these different levels.

Certain American painters--Rothko, Reinhardt, Gorky, Still, Tworkov, de Kooning, Francis, Motherwell, Newman, and others--who sprang to prominence after World War II have applied these principles in a unique way. [41] In paintings by Mark Rothko, where no delineated form of any sort occurs, color is allowed to extend to the very limits of the canvas; and his canvases, like those of other artists mentioned, are unusually large. Color as quality and quantity assume a new adaptation to each other, related to a concept of scale and optics. The size of the canvas increases as form, shape, and subject matter decrease. If the eye has little to focus upon in the painting, it will tend to unfocus and spread outward as the colors spread. The effect of color-space extension is both psychological and esthetic. The observer is made to feel that he or she could almost step into the color, as though into a mist. The increase in amount of color makes the threshold of space seem nearer, more hallucinatory. One experiences what is referred to as film color, as distinct from the more familiar surface color. The field of view being homogenous and almost undifferentiated, the observer has no strong figure--ground experience to seize on. [p. 113]