On this shelf alone I have eighty different kinds of yellow and forty grays.
—Josef Albers
What does color do? To early nineteenth-century eyes and those before, an apple was green, flesh pink, in life and so in art. Then in the 1860s Monet and other Impressionists, drawing on certain insights of Delacroix and the physicist Michel Eugene Chevreul, began handling color differently. These artists learned that local color—the intrinsic color of an object—was not fixed but mutable; it was affected by atmospheric conditions as well as by the reflections of adjacent objects. In their quest for objective optical fidelity, the Impressionists altered forever the way color was conceived and used. “Liberated” from the object it depicted, color became a function of the eye, a purely optical phenomenon. And here lies one of the more interesting paradoxes in the history of art. In its scrupulous attention to matters of visual fact, Impressionism brought to a climax the Western naturalist tradition initiated by the Renaissance; but it also brought that tradition to an end by providing the foundation for an art in which color played a commanding role—abstract and nonobjective art.
Like pictorial space in Renaissance painting, Impressionist innovations in the use of color became one of modernism’s chief tools of operation; it also became one of its “subjects.” Freed from the conventions which had formerly governed its use, color loomed for a succession of avant-garde painters as one of the most vital and fundamental artistic challenges. Parallel
