A meditation on colour in post-war art, exploring ideas from healing to hard-edge.

The evolution of colour theory began as far back as Aristotle, and while Newton’s scientific breakthrough in the 18th century heralded the formalisation of ideas, it took the German poet Goethe in the early 19th century to recognise that colour is a purely physiological sensation within human consciousness. It was this concept that sparked speculation about colour’s relationship with the human soul, most notably in Theosophy, with Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater’s “Key to the Meaning of Colours” published in 1901, and taken up by Hilma af Klint, and Kandinsky in his essay “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” proposing that the wavelength vibrations of colours directly effect human spiritual energy. This association between colour and emotion also gave rise to the more symbolic or “expressionist” use of colour in modern art.

Other influential discoveries in colour theory include the French Chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul’s “Law of Simultaneous Colour Contrasts”, 1839, which explained how the juxtaposition of complementary colours reinforced and brightened each of them. This technique was greatly influential in the emergence of Impressionism, and especially Pointillism. Further progress in the understanding of the dynamic nature of the way we perceive colour continued to evolve, with significant contributions made at the Bauhaus through Johannes Itten and Josef Albers whose work exploited the Bezold effect of a colour appearing differently depending on its adjacent colour.

This exhibition explores the evolution these ideas and techniques in post-war European art through a selection of artists for whom colour was their primary medium, including Claude Bellegarde who experimented with Chroma Therapy and its physiological affects; James Pichette who sought to use colour to resonate with the energy of jazz music; and Swiss Art Concrete painter Léo Leuppi whose paintings were designed to evoke a serene harmony.