THE APPLICATION OF THE PHYSIOLOGY OF COLOR 

 AaSION IN MODERN ART.^ 



By Henry G. Keller, 



Cleveland School of Art, 



and 



Prof J. J. R. MACLEOD. 



Western Reserve Medical School. 



I^onardo in his treatise on painting says: 



Those who become enamorecl of the practice of the art without having previ- 

 ously applied themselves to the diligent study of the scientific part of it, may be 

 compared to mariners who put to sea in a ship without rudder or compass, and. 

 therefore, can not be certain of arriving at the wished-for port. Practice must 

 always be founded on good theory. 



Instead of serving as an incentive to more extensive study of tlie 

 use of colors in art, these words seem to have marked the advent of 

 an epoch extending over several centuries, during which colors came 

 to be less and less successfully employed. The ideals of art came to 

 be dictated by the academic painter and they were much more 

 mythological and allegorical than founded on the l>eauty of color 

 patterns. Much of art became black painting, little attempt being 

 made to use pure colors and no consideration being given to the 

 effects which could be produced by the influence of juxtaposed colors 

 on one another. With the exception of some masters the ideal of 

 artists was merely to reproduce as closelj^ as possible the color tones 

 and values as seen in nature — to produce a colored photograph with- 

 out adding to it that mysterious something for which is responsible 

 (he peculiar charm and strength of the paintings of the early Italian 

 masters and of the Chinese and Japanese, and which includes some 

 subtile influence of the picture itself quite apart from what it repre- 

 sents ; something that endows it with a charm that is all its own, and 

 which no colored photograph can ever contain. 



It is true that from time to time in the history of modern art 

 masters have arisen who have, intuitively as it were, produced pic- 

 tures the color schemes of which have contained this "something." 

 But it is the individual rather than the system that has been responsi- 

 ble, and no attempts have been made until comparatively recently 



^ Reprinted by permission from the Popular Science Monthly, November, 1913. 



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