"Water Lilies", 1922, by Claude Monet (Photo: Toledo Museum of Art)
Our understanding of color underwent a sea change in the mid-1600s when Isaac Newton’s work with prisms shattered light to reveal the visible color spectrum. Artists were fascinated by Newton’s experiments with light as the source of color and began to find ways to use contrasting and complementary colors in their work. Tonight, William Woodward illuminates different techniques artists have drawn on to manipulate light and color, and how generations of artists have enlisted their unique properties to create masterpieces.
Woodward explains terms associated with color and light, including value, tone, shade, chiaroscuro, and tenebrism. He shows how these and other elements surfaced in the work of Venetian artists such as Titian, for example, who introduced translucent layers of brilliant color and initiated a wave of new creativity that influenced the development of mannerism and foreshadowed the Dutch Masters. Impressionists, including Monet, Cassatt, and Renoir, painted en plein air to capture the intensity of light and its effect on color. More recently, artists such as avant-gardist Kazimir Malevich have used just one color in their paintings to see how light changes the viewer’s perception.
Woodward is an artist and an emeritus professor of art at George Washington University.
World Art History Certificate elective: Earn 1/2 credit
