Contrast of Value

Perhaps a little of the history of the mimetic and the structural-expressive use of value gradations should be included here, as it is important that both popular and other conceptions [and misconceptions] about shading be examined with some care. The use of chiaroscuro [light-shade] and the use of color in paintings has always been an uneasy relationship. The use of one in a painting seems to require suppression of the other. It is better, therefore, that the artist choose one or the other, for the most unfortunate results come from the failure to make a choice: too much value contrast having compromised form, and so on. The painting becomes, unwittingly, a no-man's land of conflicting systems. In every painting venture one should have some inkling of what purpose--if any--modeling, light and shadow articulations, will serve. Would color, on its own terms, serve best? Are the forms, spaces, and colors compatible; do they belong, more or less, to the same mode? Are the images meant to be naturalistic or transposed, semi-abstract, referential or nonreferential, or of mixed idioms, mixed systems? [42] These or similar questions may serve to clarify intention and approach.

A photographer may not need to ask quite the same set of questions, but as his or her work deals directly with light and illumination in a way most painting since Impressionism does not, there must be an acute understanding of the play of values in the motif and in the photograph. All of us have been influenced by photographic images. In some ways they and the cinema and television have taken over older functions of painting: narration, documentation, description, persuasion, drama.

Few painters and graphic artists since Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec have been influenced significantly by multiple light and shadow effects--side-lighting, back-lighting, lighting from below, reflection, and especially the uncanny form-dissolving effects of artificial illumination--except, of course, the magazine illustrators. [43] The photographer must know how light and shadow can reveal form, destroy form, and alter the feeling-tone of objects and environments by stark contrasts or the almost imperceptible, pearly mutations of value across surfaces. The sculptor is also a manipulator of values by the way he or she articulates the flat and curved, concave and convex planes of forms, gently or abruptly. These modify the play of light either for the enhancement of form and structure or for expressive purposes, or for both simultaneously. The sculptor's control over these aspects of the work is greater, of course, than over the light and environment in which the work is likely to be placed: Improper lighting can almost undo the best intentions. Some sculpture, because of the delicacy of form and surface, is better seen indoors under a particular light. A number of modern sculptors, especially Henry Moore, David Smith, Alexander Calder, and Tony Smith, have pondered the difficulty of relating form to the light, the competing shapes and forms, the vastness of the out-of-doors. Some of the most impressive architects of the Rococo era, especially in Austria and South Germany, and of the present era, notably Le Corbusier and Luis Sert, have incorporated light and color into the heart of their structures. [44]

It is impossible to train the eyes to see the way the camera sees--that is, with blank impartiality and simultaneity. Few artists have tried to discipline themselves to the task. Even Jan Vermeer [1632-1675], it is believed, used the camera obscura and other very advanced means [measurement in terms of observation and in terms of mathematics] to create his paintings of interiors wherein every nuance of value is rendered. Whether he did or did not make use of viewing devices, he was one of several individuals, passionately interested in the phenomenon of light, who were able to depict every effect of sunlight as it fell upon their favorite forms in their favorite corner of the universe. [45]

Another great Dutchman, Rembrandt [1609-1669], although he never visited Italy, was one of a generation of artists to take full advantage of the dramatic chiaroscuro of the Baroque era, when not only painters, but architects and sculptors [Borromini and Bernini], incorporated a great enthusiasm for space, movement, illumination, and symbolism into their designs. His method, although more profoundly personal [especially in later years] than that of his Italian and Flemish contemporaries, owed something to the development that sprang from the studio of Caravaggio [1571-1610]. Rembrandt used light and shadow to convey both internal and external drama. His works contain less of the stagecraft and operatics of Caravagio, perhaps; but as much--or more--psychological or spiritual drama. Georges de la Tour [1793-1652] in France, and Vel½squez [1599-1660] and Zurbarán [1598-1664] in Spain were also influenced by the new Italian extension of chiaroscuro; however, they, like Rembrandt, often treated light as a mysterious phenomenon, not as the familiar light of day or of candle or lamp.

Light and shade have been used not only to reveal, but often to conceal, to insinuate mystery, threat, or outrage. Goya [1746-1828], in his paintings, but especially in his etchings, his Caprichos and Disasters of War, presents a spectacle of human cruelty, stupidity, and madness to match any sinister event of modern social and political history, to the very present. Picasso's mural-size painting Guernica was triggered by such an instance of cold-hearted, rational, and deliberate violence, the bombing of the Basque village of the same name by Nazi planes in the service of Spanish fascists in 1937; and, although Picasso did not make use of light and shade in the conventional way, he did compose Guernica entirely of black and white and a number of grays.

The first uses of shading in Hellenistic art [c. 326-c. 25 BC], in Egypto-Roman [Faiyum] mummy portraits of the second century AD, in Roman wall paintings at Pompeii and Herculaneum [c. AD 50], and, later, in Byzantine and Gothic art would seem to have very little to do with light and shadow effects as seen in nature--with striking exceptions: Certain surviving Roman and Egypto-Roman paintings reveal much subtlety of eye and hand, the use of highlights, reflected light, internal shadows, and cast shadows, the essential vocabulary of chiaroscuro we normally associate with the Renaissance, the Baroque, and Rococo periods! Artists that far back in time probably discovered by trial and error that gradients of value, form light to dark or vice versa, produce an effect of rounded form and therefore, make form more factual, tactile, imposing. And so began a primitive [and not so primitive] type of modeling that served artists remarkably well, with technical elaborations, down till the time of Botticelli [c. 1445-1510], Bellini [c. 14321-1516], and Leonardo [1452-1519], when the envelope of atmosphere, light, and space, especially in landscape painting, began to be of increasing interest. Yet the early type of modeling characterized by purely internal shading, revealing little or no concern with directional light and shadows, was not abandoned for all time; Léger and Max Beckmann and other artists of the various modern movements would adopt it, along with other so-called primitive devices, in the service of a new vision.

Impressionism fused the local color of objects and out-of-doors illumination quite freely into a continuum of high-pitched colors, after which Cézanne retrieved modeling by transforming it into what he called "modulation," a method of painting with small strokes and patches of color that was remarkably close to principles also cited with the natural order of colors. He gave form in painting a new life by reconciling it to color, space, and depth, while not discrediting the physical surface of the canvas. We knew that he preferred to a paint on somewhat overcast days. illumination as light and shadow or as prismatic-atmospheric envelopment was not as important to him as the essential forms and colors before him. The lack of strong sunlight and shadow contrasts across forms in the landscape enabled Cézanne to study the ambiguities of color and structure in nature with greater care and to apply himself to one of the most stubborn problems in painting: the realization, in pictorial terms, of optical sensations of nature, including what is referred to as local color [an object's actual color] on its own and the way it is influenced by depth of atmosphere and surrounding forms and colors. A slight cloud cover not only eliminates confusing value contrast [illuminated areas versus shadow areas], but it also produces an extra degree of refraction [microscopic droplets of water acting as prisms]. The scattering of warm and cool lights freed from pure "white" sunlight makes all colors in the landscape appear more rich, more saturated, nearer.

But the Cubists--Picasso, Braque, and others--who admired Cézanne so much, did not continue his use of color modulation. Instead, they adopted a type of modeling that went beyond the primitive type mentioned two paragraphs back, especially as it applied to both figure and ground, to inner and outer areas. They could have discovered more than a hint of it in Cézanne's works; but its clearest and most evolved application in drawings and paintings was to be found in works by Seurat. This type of shading has been referred to as simultaneous contrast shading because of effects analogous to those of color perception, as pointed out by Chevreul. Seurat and Sutter called it "irradiation." ["Irradiation is a phenomenon of light which makes objects stand out one from the other, setting them ins harp relief," wrote Sutter; and he advised artists to "observe a white wall standing out against the sky. You will see a white line lighter than the surface of the wall, and a blue or gray line darker than the mass of the sky. This line of irradiation remains unnoticed by the majority of painters, and, nevertheless, it is of the greatest importance to copy it exactly."] [46] Paul Klee referred to it as "endotopic-exotopic [literally, inside-place/outside-place] treatment" [47], in other words, values alongside one another in a condition of extreme contrast, light against dark. As they move away in opposite directions from the line of contact, the light one grows darker and the dark one grows lighter. If this type of shading is applied to a form, one side of the form will oppose light [figure] to dark [ground], while the other side will oppose dark [figure] to light [ground]. Gradations of value will move away from these contrasting areas across the form or figure and outward into the surrounding space or ground. Figure and ground represent two planes, one overlapping the other; yet the turnabout shading relates each to the other in the most democratic fashion by giving very little more attention to one than to the other. This suited the aims of the Cubists, who wanted to challenge still further the duality of figure and ground, form and space. Many of the inventions of modern design partake of this tightening of dualities: Figure is no longer primary and active and space is no longer secondary and passive; one no longer speaks of things and "the background area." This change of sensibility is seen in the best and most characteristic painting, sculpture , and architecture since the 1880s, each in its own way.

Klee was fond of dualities of all sorts, and of processes and interactions in the world and in nature. Not only did he introduce endotopic-exotopic shading to his students at the Bauhaus in the most accessible and straightforward way, but he kept returning to the idea in more complex applications. [48]

Medical illustrators, designers, and technicians have found this method of shading useful in various drawings of a diagrammatic nature, in their effort to achieve clarity and definition of planes without the quirks of naturalistic light and shade, cast shadows, and reflected light. Their reason and their method are not very different from those of the Persian miniaturists of the sixteenth century into the seventeenth century: to clarify overlapping forms by the simplest means. [Moreover, all shading may be looked upon as form of embellishment.]

When we consider that the colors available to the old masters were limited and surprisingly somber when compared with ours from about the beginning of the nineteenth century, we wonder how they managed so well, especially those who came, directly or indirectly, out of the more coloristic school of Venetian painting: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, El Greco, Rubens, and others. For many artists of the more chiaroscurisitic tradition of Florence and Rome [excepting mid- and late-sixteenth-century painters like Correggio and Parmigianino [49]] and into the Baroque era [Rembrandt and scores of other artists], this lack of a wide range of colors posed no serious problem. Their interest lay not so much in color as we have become accustomed to it in the twentieth century, but in the play of values, in illumination. The technical history of European and American painting since the Renaissance [witness the works of Thomas Eakins [1844-1916], some of the last great examples of the realistic or naturalistic vision] may be described as the gradual development in studio after studio of methods and skills for the handling of value relationships; and they came in the same parcel as did that of figure drawing, human and even animal anatomy, drapery studies, motion studies, perspective, pictorial composition according to a linear-illusionistic conception of time, space, and optics, and the old, complex "cuisine" of painting in oils. [50]

Even the great Chinese landscape artists of the tenth and eleventh centuries turned away from an earlier coloristic tradition of the Six Dynasties period in favor of the most subtle gradations of value; not, however, in the service of shading, as in European art, but in order to translate [51] an aura of light and atmosphere in deep space.

A careful analysis of a characteristic painting by almost any artist of the European sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would reveal a range of values of the light, medium, and dark registers, most of which would be chromatic grays, browns, tans, and ochers. There would be very few colors of appreciable strength. Titian is supposed to have said that an accomplished painter needed only three colors. Rembrandt seems to have got by with little more than six or eight. Yet, for superb examples of what can be wrought with limited means, it is not necessary to turn always to the masters of the past. Georges Braque, in his great Atelier [The Studio] paintings of 1949-1956 [there being nine in all], most of which contain the strange image of a large bird in flight, reveals a masterly use of a few low-key colors in a rich matrix of grays. [And Braque, at age twenty-four, was a wild colorist and a member of the notorious Fauves!]. [pp. 113-117]