In welcher Weise und in welchem Maß haben die Ergebnisse des Newtonschen Experiments der Farbbrechung Einfluss auf die Bildende Kunst des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts genommen? Diese Fragen stehen im Zentrum der Beiträge, welche die Malpraxis, die Theoriebildung zur Farbe, die neuen graphischen Reproduktionstechniken, die steigende Sehkompetenz, die Materialität von Farbe, die Verfeinerung der Darstellungsdetails und die Rolle optischer Instrumente untersuchen.Die Irritation im 18. Jahrhundert entstand aus der nicht eindeutigen Trennung in Licht- und Pigmentfarben. Für die Künstler hatte die alte Farbtrias - Blau, Rot, Gelb - weiterhin Bestand. Nichtsdestotrotz ist eine Verfeinerung des Sehens zu konstatieren, wie zunehmende Differenzierungskompetenz, die nicht nur neue graphische Techniken hervorbrachte, die im 19. Jahrhundert zur Fotographie führen sollten, sondern auch die Ästhetisierung verstärkte.

Autorentext
Werner Busch, geboren 1944, ist Professor für Kunstgeschichte an der Freien Universität Berlin.

Leseprobe
" John Gage (S. 91-92)

When Warm was Cool: On the History of Colour Temperature

The two most signi.cant late twentieth-century treatments of colour for artists: the chapter on colour in Rudolf Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception (1954, 1974) and Josef Albers' Interaction of Color (1963) look at the subject with a dif.dence surprising in writers with such a degree of learning and such an experienced eye. Turning to the warm and cool character of colours, which is the topic of my discussion, Arnheim writes: ""The distinction between warm and cold colors is fairly common (.. .)

But sketchy remarks based on subjective impressions do not get us very far (. . .) The pure fundamental primaries can hardly be called either warm or cool. Is a pure red clearly more warm than a pure blue of equal saturation? is pure yellow cold or warm?"" Arnheim argued that the appearance of warmth and coolness depends on in.ecting one colour with another, so that, for example, a red veering towards blue looks cool, while a reddish blue looks warm1.

Albers, on the other hand, took on board what he called the ""western tradition"" that blue usually appears cool and yellow-orange-red warm, and in his colourcircle he placed the warm-cool axis roughly between blue and orange. But he went on to recall his early period of training with Franz von Stuck in Munich when, he said, painting in this city was ""dominated"" by the ""warm-cool"" principle in colour, which ""resulted .nally in fruitless controversies"", largely about the spatial effects of these colours2.

As I have suggested elsewhere, this controversy arose from an important book of 1874 by the Munich meteorologist Wilhelm von Bezold, Die Farbenlehre im Hinblick auf Kunst und Kunstgewerbe, and this is an important instance of a scienti.c text in.ltrating the artists' studios. But in the present discussion I want to look a case of the movement of ideas from art to science for, like the notion of ""primary colours"", colour temperature seems to have been first identified in the context of painting. Albers closed his account of warm and cool colours with a rather vague reference to ""a new theory"" of the spatial effect of colours, which depended on the longer wave-length (warm) colours as appearing near, and the shorter (cool) far.

What is clear, however, is that, if we think of colours in terms of wavelength, precisely the opposite characteristics emerge: i.e. the short wavelengths (blue) have greater energy and thus expend more heat than the longer wavelengths at the red end of the spectrum. Wavelength is, of course, a comparatively recent discovery, but the modern physics of colour does suggest that warmth and coolness in colour are largely associational, and it is these associations in the history of colour which I want to explore.

Since Classical Antiquity, colours had been seen as functions of the four elements, two of which, .re and water, were notably characterised by temperature. But, as I have demonstrated elsewhere4, writers on the elements were far from unanimous about which colours were appropriate to which elements. In ancient Greek thought, for example, we .nd .re as white (Empedocles), as red (Democritus and Plato), and as ""golden"" (Pseudo-Aristotle On Colours), water as black (Empedocles) or white (Pseudo-Aristotle). "

Inhalt

Ursula Klein: Testen und Erfinden: Farbe im chemischen Experiment des 18. Jahrhunderts Annik Pietsch: Farbentheorie und Malpraxis um 1800. Die handwerkliche Produktion des künstlerischen Kolorits nach den "Gesetzen der Ästhetik und Physik" Monika Wagner: John Constable: Taktiles Sehen fluider Landschaften Ulrike Boskamp: Prismatische Augen, gemischte Sensationen. Farbensehen und Farbendruck in Frankreich um 1750 Werner Busch: Joseph Priestleys Optik in Newtons Bahnen und die Darstellung des Regenbogens John Gage: When Warm was Cool: On the History of Colour Temperature Bettina Gockel: Reproduktion als Experiment. Gainsboroughs Druckgraphik im Licht von Adam Smiths ökonomischer, moralphilosophischer und sinnesphysiologischer Theorie Carolin Meister: Das Stilleben als optisches Theater. Zur Reflexion von Newtons Theorie der Körperfarben in der Lichtmalerei Chardins Jutta Müller-Tamm: Augengespenster, Lügengeschichten und Gesichtswahrheiten. Zur Theorie des Sehens zwischen 1780 und 1830 Marc Wellmann: Die Studienköpfe Balthasar Denners (1685-1749): Natur- und Selbstwahrnehmung im Medium extremster Feinmalerei H. Otto Sibum: Latente Bilder. Optische Praktiken und die Natur der Wärme im frühen Viktorianischen England Erna Fiorentini: Optical Instruments and Modes of Vision in Early Nineteenth Century