Colourist painting
Colourist painting is less a single movement than a style tendency: color is made the dominant feature of the work, outranking line, drawing and subject. Its roots lie in Impressionism's turn to bright, unblended color, and it came to prominence with the Fauves - Henri Matisse and André Derain painting in deliberately unnatural, blazing hues around 1905 - before spreading through Expressionism, the interwar Polish Kapists, the Scottish Colourists and the Nabi Pierre Bonnard. Later, the color field painters of abstract expressionism pushed the tendency to its limit, letting color stand for the subject itself. What unites a century of colourist work is the conviction that color relationships - contrast, complement, saturation - are what painting is finally about.
Defining characteristics
- Intense, saturated color as the work's dominant feature
- Color relationships (contrast, complements) treated as the true subject
- Often unnatural or arbitrary color, freed from description
- Light and color studied outdoors, en plein air (the Scottish Colourists)
- Flattened form; drawing yields to color areas
Key figures
- Henri Matisse (1869-1954) — Fauve founder who made arbitrary color a program
- André Derain (1880-1954) — Fauve founder whose blazing landscapes set the terms
- Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) — Nabi painter of interiors built from light and color
Example works
- Woman with a Hat — Henri Matisse (1905)
- Goldfish — Henri Matisse (1912)
Sources
- Colourist painting - Wikipedia encyclopedia