A healthy human eye can see millions of shades of colors. And it is very common that we feel a special predilection for any of them. It is something that has also happened to many artists, who in some cases even devoted a good part of their careers to the exploration of a specific color. As writing about each of the shades would result in an endless article, we have focused on the colors of the rainbow, although with some caveats. Although the rainbow distinguishes between cyan and blue, here it is grouped under the same heading and that part of the palette has an unquestionable protagonist: the French artist Yves Klein. And just in case you don't have a favorite color, we mentioned two authors who used them practically all (and many times at the same time).
Violet
The relation of the impressionists with this color is the least peculiar. It all started at the turn of the century, from the 18th to the 19th, when Claude Monet became more interested in light and dedicated himself to expressing the consequences of its incidence on all kinds of objects and monuments. Many of his canvases, almost frantic snapshots, had the peculiarity of not immortalizing shadows with the typical black tones, but with violet, a color that until now had remained in a shy background. As Monet himself said: "He had discovered the color of the atmosphere."
Little by little the use of this type of tones was spreading among the rest of the impressionists, who affirmed that "in nature there is no black, but violet shades". But critics did not welcome the change, coining a new term to designate its followers: violetomania. For their part, supporters of the Impressionist current believed themselves capable of perceiving ultraviolet light at the end of the spectrum, as Stella Paul points out in her book Cromophilia: the story of color in art , although in reality it is imperceptible to the human eye.
blue
Yves Klein turned everything he touched into blue. Few artists have been as intimately related to a specific color and have made it evident in their work as he did. And he did not settle for just any blue, but instead created his own, especially vibrant and intense, which he recorded in 1960: the International Klein Blue. Once he realized that blue was the perfect channel for his message, his big challenge was to find a binder for the ultramarine blue pigments that did not alter his original brilliance at all. And it seems that he got it and incorporated it into all kinds of objects: sponges, balloons and even the classic Venus.
Before staying to live in blue, Yves Klein tried monochromes in other colors, such as pink or gold. So what made you choose the tone we know you for today? Klein found blue as the most complete of colors, which transcended the dimensions of the rest and which, in relation to elements as identifying as the sea or the sky, was in fact abstract. As he himself said, "blue is the invisible making itself visible". His blue era is a reflection of his vision of space and dreams, inspired by the words of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard: "First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing and then a blue depth."
The complexity of Klein's painting is understood with the little details. For example, he avoided using brushes, which left an individual line too subjective, and replaced them with rollers, which he considered "more anonymous". He even used the human body. In Anthropometries , one of his most famous works, he combined performance and provocative painting, using three naked women as human brushes, making him the conductor who watched the work be created before his directives.
Green
Green has commonly been associated with hope, but if there is anything we can relate to this tone, it is the representation of fresh air and nature. In fact, also in the case of green, the Impressionists played a very important role in the new use of color, since outdoor paintings and representations of nature were one of his favorite subjects.
Green and blue were Cézanne's favorite colors, whose works are considered the starting point towards modern art. Much of the painter's production is made up of landscapes, in which the wide variety of green tones is no accident. In fact, despite thinking otherwise, Cézanne's palette was broad in nuances. His work The Pond is a good example of the type of greens that he liked to integrate into his paintings.
Green, moreover, contains a story that shows how the search for the perfect color can become tragic. In the 18th century, the chemist Carl Scheele created a color that was dubbed "Paris green", and which gained great popularity both among painters (including Cézanne and Manet) and the major dye companies. What was not known then is that one of the materials with which the pigment was obtained, copper arsenate, was toxic and life-threatening. It caused great dramas: a wealthy English family, for example, ended up discovering that the death of their four children was not due to diphtheria, as was thought, but to the green color present in the rugs, curtains, furniture and paper of the wall they had at home. Even the legend that the color green is related to Monet's blindness and Cézanne's diabetes is quite widespread.
Yellow
The relationship between Vincent Van Gogh and the color yellow has been talked at length. Despite the fact that throughout his production his color palette underwent notable variations until reaching the intensity of color that characterizes him, most people associate Van Gogh with yellow, surely because his most emblematic works are bathed in his golden light. : its sunflowers, its wheat fields and even the moon of its Starry Night .
His love for yellow has wanted to find various explanations. Initially, it was associated with the consumption of absinthe, a liqueur popular in bohemian circles and containing tujona, an oil that in high amounts can produce vision in colored halos. Although over time this option was rejected, since a disproportionate intake was required to experience such symptoms.
Another theory holds that the yellow in Van Gogh's paintings, rather than a symbolic device for expressing his emotions, is the result of a medical condition. According to this, the Dutch painter actually suffered from xanthopsia, known as "yellow vision", a direct result of his consumption of digitalin, a substance extracted from the foxglove plant, and that his doctor would have prescribed to stop his manic-depressive crises. In fact, in the Portrait of Dr. Gachet , his doctor appears portrayed next to this plant, almost as evidence of the crime. However, there are those who are suspicious of any medical explanation: "Van Gogh simply liked yellow," said Michael F. Marmor, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University who has studied the use of colors by part of some artists.
Orange
Perhaps orange is the color that offers the most difficulties when it comes to being related to a specific artist. Although shades of orange appeared since ancient times, its consolidation was late. In fact, in Europe it did not receive that name until the 16th century, the yellow-orange tones being popularly known as saffron.
Of course, there were movements, such as Pre-Raphaelite, which were frequently associated with orange due to their common use. And the same happened with some artists, such as Toulouse-Lautrec, who incorporated orange to symbolize the frenzy of Parisian dance halls. There are even specific works, such as Burning June Sun, by Frederic Leighton, which inevitably come to mind in our search for the representative of this color. But perhaps the most curious example of the use of orange is that of Egon Schiele.
Schiele was one of the first painters of the Viennese Secession to put aside the style created by Gustav Klimt, developing a very personal expressionist style in which the orange and red tones take on a leading role. It is surprising considering that Egon Schiele's production is not especially remembered for the use of color, which actually appears as a complement to the drawing, which is extremely expressive. What is certain is that Schiele was very aware of the expressive capacities and of provoking reactions of this type of tonalities and therefore decided to incorporate them into his painting.
Red
Henri Matisse was one of the first artists of the 20th century to understand color as the key tool in his painting, using it to convey emotions and feelings. Such was his knowledge about it, that he understood and used the different complementary colors, such as blue or green, playing with the force and intensity produced when he put them in relationship.
Cadmium red emerged in the late 19th century and became quite popular throughout the 20th century, as a synthetic pigment that served as an alternative to vermilion, the most widely used so far. Matisse was one of the first to dare to use this new red pigment, which he admired for its special brilliance. It was an especially showy red, which accompanied by other colors made a great impact on the viewer who approached his works for the first time. His attraction to the new pigment was so great that he tried, without much success, to convince Renoir to change his traditional vermilion to cadmium red.
All these features are well reflected in Harmony in red , a work close to the later Fauvism and in which the use of color, contrasted and strong, acquires an undoubted importance compared to other features such as shapes or composition.
All colors
And if you are one of the people who do not have a favorite color, nothing happens, because there is an artist whose work covers almost all of them: Sonia Delaunay. The artist of Russian origin was the protagonist in 2017 of an exhibition at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum titled Sonia Delaunay. Art, design and fashion . The mention of the title of this exhibition is useful for us to recognize the multidisciplinary character of this singular artist, who also painted a painting, who designed a dress, who decorated a room.
She was one of the great standard-bearers - along with her husband, Robert - of simultaneism, an artistic avant-garde that explored the impact of light on colors depending on how they were combined. In the words of the art critic Estrella de Diego, Sonia Delaunay "took cubism one step further through the use of color". Although it is not her most colorful work, we have chosen as the representative work of this author the quilt that she wove for her son Charles in 1911, since it is for many the origin of her way of approaching art.
And in this same section, that of the colorist artists, Hilma af Klimt deserves a special mention, a relatively unknown Swedish artist who was even ahead of Kandinsky and Mondrian in the break with figuration, becoming the great precursor of abstraction.
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