6533b820fe1ef96bd127aa45

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Couleur et transparence à l’ère des procédés photomécaniques

subject

description

This paper aims to show that the reception of British coloured illustrated books in the early twentieth-century reflects the artistic and aesthetic repositioning induced by the development of photomechanical process. Photomechanical reproduction freed the graphic line as well as colour. Reviews published at the turn of the century—as exemplified by The Studio—reveal a tension between opacity and transparency, materiality and lightness, chromophilia and chromophobia. These oppositions apply to the art of the book—as in the books illustrated by Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac—as well as to interior decoration. They are subsumed in the image of the peacock’s ocellus, the eyespot that symbolises the exercise of aesthetic judgement. Taste for colour finds expression in a form of tempered chromophilia best understood in the light of three factors: the practice of black and white graphic arts (notably wood engraving), the reception of photography and the revived conflict between line (disegno) and colour.