For hundreds of years now, artists have been trying to formalise, through philosophical discussion, the effect of colour in their work. Ever since the Impressionists began to shift the focus of their art away from accurately portraying reality, and recognised that how we see is comprised of fleeting images and emotional memory, the colour palette used to capture these moments has become less reliant on objectivity but increasingly personalised by the artist. 

Even long before these 20th Century philosophical ponderings, colour in art has had a long, multicultural history of representation and symbolism. Purple has represented royalty, wealth and power across civilisations due to the historic difficulty in acquiring its pure pigment; Red represents luck in China, but also its bright, destructive relationship to fire has lent its meaning to various depictions of hell; Blue, often a calming and natural colour seen in the sea and sky, also carries with it connotations of despair, depression and the cold. 

From these purely representative meanings, evolved the movement most renowned for placing a specific emphasis and value on colour, Fauvism, the key players of which such as Matisse, Derain and de Vlaminck drew on their own expression to vividly separate an object from its assigned colour. Allowing colour to take on its own agency and to exist within the frame independently was a radical artistic progression, and it paved the way for all artists henceforth to openly experiment. Matisse once said,

"The chief function of colour should be to serve expression as well as possible. I put down my tones without a preconceived plan. If at first, and perhaps without my having been conscious of it, one tone has particularly seduced or caught me."

This level of unconscious response to colour, or at least an unconscious channelling of colour as an expression, shares many similarities with Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract art, for whom colour, sound, emotion and other sensory experiences often blurred into one due to his condition of synaesthesia. This condition, which means that multiple senses are often unified into one simultaneous sensation gave Kandinsky an intimate knowledge of what certain colours physically did to his being. He used this natural understanding of the links between the chromatic scale and human emotion to academically formulate many theories on the relationship between the two, much of which we still use today. His defining book, “Über das Geistige in der Kunst” (On the Spiritual in Art), first published in 1911 sets out his manifesto on topics such as colour, form, spirituality and their relation to artistic practice.

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