Making Colour at the National Gallery

A celebration of the beauty, science, economics of colour in artworks across the millennium... 

Making Colour is the first exhibition of its kind: a material history of the spectrum as presented through the National Gallery’s 13th to 20th century collections, displaying June 18 until September 17. This ambitious curatorial premise is brought to life in a series of exhibition rooms each dedicated to a single colour, gold and silver included, generating unexpected connections between artworks ordinarily separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles’ worth of geography. 

Spanning 700 years of works from the early Renaissance in 14th century to the Impressionist paintings of the late 1800s, this exhibition teases out the history of colour as a means of expression, as decoration, as an alchemic science, and as a global industry.

Throughout history, the theory of colour has always been cross-disciplinary, and the artistic pigments we know today are the products of thousands of years’ experimentation by artists, scientists, philosophers and sociologists alike. The exhibition races the changing science of producing colour across time from the notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Isaac Newton's 1704 Opticks tract on the natural philosophy of light, and indeed the nineteenth and twentieth century colour theories of the Bauhaus and the philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Accordingly, it presents colour as a chemical as well as an optical phenomenon, and the story of the elemental composition of the pigments (natural and synthetic alike), is traced in parallel to that of the individual works. 

What’s we particularly love about this show is its focus on historical socioeconomics that physically brought colours to the canvases of Western Europe. In tracing the trade routes that moved coloured mineral compounds through different parts of the world, civilisation’s greatest works of art are cast anew as the products of immense practical, technical challenges and shoestring-like resources. 

The exhibition hosts a treasure trove like no other of paintings, ceramics, glassware and textiles, many of which will be present on national loan. These individual works are of course remarkable in their own right, and in among the exhibition’s swathes of context you can look forward to close-up encounters with masterpieces such as Edgar Degas' La Coiffure, a veritable fantasia on the colour red.

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