Early/Modern Color: Masquerades and Make Overs

A workshop organized by the ECS Graduate Affiliate Working Group on Materiality and Colors in European Art.

With a few prisms and some brilliantly crafted experiments, Sir Isaac Newton established in 1704 that color was the effect of refracted light. This emphasis on color-as-light has endured throughout Modernity and encouraged an ever-more immaterial approach to hue. Indeed, notions of color’s immateriality have flourished in the era of pixelation, as a limitless diversity of colors seems available to anyone with an electronic screen. And yet, for most of human history, color has been the consequence of things; pigments and dyes have come from stones, plants, insects, and animals. This rootedness in stuff has made color especially impactful. In this workshop, Sarah Rich and Daniel Zolli will present case studies on color’s materiality—its connotations, conscientious theorization, and pointed rejection—during two disparate moments in Western art. They will also discuss the potential, and the perils, of engaging with color’s materiality in the classroom.

Lunch will be served.

RSVP to Liliane I. Ehrhart (ehrhart@princeton.edu) by May 1.