The woman who challenged Isaac Newton’s theory of color years before Goethe

In 1805, a little-known English artist and amateur painting instructor did what no woman before her had done: publish a book on the subject of color theory.

Although sadly few details of Mary Gartside’s life and career have survived, her unprecedented volume “An Essay on Light and Shadow, on Colors, and on Composition in General” reveals an extraordinary creative genius.

Modestly presented by its author as little more than a guide to “the ladies whom I have been called upon to instruct in painting,” Gartside’s study is accompanied by a series of startlingly abstract images unlike any previously produced by a writer or artist. of any gender.

At first glance, you could easily mistake Gartside’s eight watercolor “spots” for magnified floral landscapes that anticipate the oversized stamens and pistils that American artist Georgia O’Keeffe would begin to exploit inordinately more than 100 years later.

But look again at these almost petal-like waves of light, whose vibrancy of color isn’t chained to tangible form, and whatever certainty you’ve had about what these images represent or mean begins to crumble.

They are neither fragrant flowers plucked from the real world nor imaginary flowers that grow in the mind; abstract gartside stains burst beyond the limits of themselves a full century before non-figurative painting became established in the best-known canvases of Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian.

More metaphors for the glow of roses than roses themselves, Gartside’s abstract spots served a paradoxically precise theoretical function that belies their amorphous beauty.

Titled, in turn, “white”, “yellow”, “orange”, “green”, “scarlet”, “blue”, “violet” and “crimson”, these evanescent experiments show each “hue in various degrees of saturation and blending abstractly with others,” art historian Alexandra Loske explains in her recent study “Colour: A Visual History.”

Gartside’s goal was to illustrate the harmonies and contrasting tones of primary and secondary colors in a way that was more organic, and perhaps less scientifically distant than the schematic color wheels of his famous male ancestors in the field.

While his spots might have – as TS Eliot writes in his poem Burnt Norton – “the aspect of contemplated flowers”, in truth, generations before his time were trying to shed the self-conscious pretense of established form, and rather isolate the light energy that invigorates our perception of all things: color.

“Colours,” the romantic essayist Leigh Hunt gleefully noted in 1840, “are the smiles of nature. When they are extremely smiling, and burst into other beauty, they are, moreover, their laughter; as in flowers.”

What is clear from Gartside’s pioneering studies is that no theoretician had ever listened more closely to the laughter of color than she.

“There is no other example of a representation of color systems that is as inventive and radical as Gartside’s color spots,” writes Loske.

Loske has dedicated herself to restoring to art history the achievements of forgotten female writers and artists who, despite being discouraged, managed to create some of the most fascinating aesthetic inventions in cultural history.

“If anyone can find me an earlier one,” she tells BBC Culture, when asked how confident she is of Gartside’s position as the first female color theory author, “I’d love to know. She’s the earliest, certainly in the western world”.

first among equals

Loske stumbled upon Gartside by chance as a graduate student after gaining a research fellowship at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, where she now serves as curator.

“They wanted someone to study color theory,” he recalls, “and I spent many happy years doing this Ph.D., and all I could find were men’s names. And then I ran into Gartside. The only womanand that’s what really got me going.”

What little we know of Gartside’s life and career can be summed up in a sentence or two.

Born in 1755, perhaps in Manchester, she eventually taught women to paint watercolors in London and managed to show her own work on at least three occasions between 1781 and 1809, at least once at the Royal Academy.

In Amy Clampitt’s poem Balms (1980), which recalls a chance encounter with a copy of the Gartside watercolors and the “peppery, velvety succulence” of the “pure tones” they embody, the American poet laments the paucity of detail. Known biographies about the creator of the paintings.

“Mary Gartside / died, I couldn’t even / know what year.”

During last year’s lockdown, Loske kept digging and finally managed, with the help of his colleagues, to pin down the date: 1819.

“It was especially nice to hear about this,” says Loske, “because I always thought he died without having been able to enjoy his relative success.”

Gartside’s modestly titled essay predates Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s celebrated 1810 treatise “The Theory of Colors” by half a decade, in which the renowned German poet and critic sought to correct what he believed to be basic errors in the Isaac Newton’s understanding of our experience of color in the world.

Like Goethe, who had been developing his ideas for decades, Gartside seemed quietly determined to recalibrate Newton’s conception of the spectrum of colors that make up white light, which the English mathematician famously discovered as a student during a plague quarantine in 1666.

Three years later, in 1808, Gartside’s essay was followed by a revised edition which she boldly renamed “An Essay on a New Theory of Colors, and on Composition in General”.

“Calling it ‘theory,'” Loske tells me, “is clever. It puts it in a more serious context, beyond being a painting manual. Also, Gartside’s is more interesting because it took Newtonian ideas and adapted them to painting.

“(The theory of) Newton had to do with immaterial colors, with dividing the rainbow and with colored lights. Someone had to adapt all that fantastic knowledge to material color, and she did it beautifully.“.

The spectrum of colors that Newton unraveled with his carefully angled prisms seemed to many more staged than natural: hues of obsessive intellect under artificially controlled conditions rather than the shaggy hues of messy reality.

Newton’s insistence on doubling the rainbow to accommodate a redundant seventh color, indigo, next to blue, simply to ensure that there were as many colors as there were planets in the sky and notes in the musical scale, is often held up as evidence that he molded what his eyes actually saw to fit an airy ideal.

The century between his eventual publication of “Optics: Or, A Treatise on the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colors of Light,” in which Newton formally presents his ideas, and Gartside’s and Goethe’s volumes on the theory of color in The first decade of the 18th century would see a flurry of publications by writers and artists eager to reconcile Newton’s clinical notions of color with the practicalities of mixing pigments on a palette.

Reshaping the color wheel

At the center of each of these efforts – from the French painter Claude Boutet in 1708 to the British entomologist Moses Harris in 1766 and the Austrian entomologist Ignaz Schiffermüller in 1772 – was the reinvention of the circle of seminal color, albeit curiously colorless, which Newton presented in his Opticks.

For Goethe, Newton’s mistake was not recognizing the critical role that darkness plays in forming the colors we see in everyday experience, prompting his own reshaping of the color wheel.

In 1798, Goethe and the playwright Friedrich Schiller collaborated on a complex diagram they called the “rose of temperaments,” in which concentric orbits of a dozen colors and corresponding character traits revolve around a dark abyss that opens in the center of the diagram.

Eventually this elaborate wheel would give way to Goethe’s more famous and simplified color wheel which he devised in 1809, and included the following year in his own “Theory of Colours”.

Looking more like a suspended explosion of light than antiquated scientific schemes, Gartside’s abstract roses are much less editorialized or carefully subtitled than Goethe’s wheels.

By erasing the labels that his male predecessors inserted into his diagrams, Gartside allowed color clashes and harmonies to express themselves. In doing so, he recovered the color chart as a purely aesthetic document, a work of art.

It is tempting, given the proximity of the publication dates of the Goethe and Gartside studies, to wonder whether some cross-pollination of ideas might have occurred, or whether, in fact, the Gartside volume had any influence on the ideas or practice of Goethe. later artists and theorists.

Impossible to know.

But it is a question that Loske also asks, who believes that there are echoes of “the abstract dimension of Gartside illustrations” in that of JMW Turner, who has been seen by historians as a forerunner of non-figurative art.

The two contemporaries no doubt share a fascination with the weight of weightless color separated from incidental substance.

“It is likely that Turner was aware of his work through his association with various watercolor societies,” says Loske, before admitting that, “unfortunately there is no evidence of that“.

“There is no evidence of that” is the daunting impasse that any critic arrives at trying to assess the contribution of female artists and writers whose achievements have been passed.completely overlooked, demeaningly scorned, or dishonestly unacknowledged.

Such are the three sad axes with which cultural history has too often conspired against the genius of women.

Precisely measuring the importance of Gartside and others like her in the development of art history requires the kind of academic attention that is lavished on those with a much higher profile: a Catch-22 that Loske is determined to rectify.

“I want to create a canon of women who have written about color,” she says of her broader ambition.

The image Loske is patiently assembling, with each female figure forgotten as a trace on his canvas, promises to challenge the image we have in our minds of which palettes actually shaped the forms of art.

I’m dying to see it!