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Untrue Colors: Hues Are Shady Characters
Gene Davis's "Narcissus" may look fine as printed here, but the reproduction pales in comparison with the real thing at Osuna gallery.
(By Brendan Webster -- Webster Photography)
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The acidic emerald green that jumps out of the paintings of the impressionist Claude Monet was another newfound synthetic. So was van Gogh's chrome orange.
Paul Cezanne was an exception. "You paint just with these?" he demanded of a friend, the artist Emile Bernard, in 1904. "Where is your Naples yellow? Where is your peach-black, where is your Siena . . . "
Cezanne had a reason for distrusting the new colors. He knew they wouldn't last. Van Gogh thought so, too. "All the colors that the impressionists have brought into fashion are unstable," he wrote his brother Theo, "so there is all the more reason not to be afraid to lay them on too crudely -- time will tone them down only too much."
He was right in that prediction. You can see this in his art. Van Gogh's great "White Roses," a gift from Pamela Harriman to the National Gallery of Art, no longer bears that title. Today it's just called "Roses." There's a reason for the change. Van Gogh's glowing flowers had a rose flush when he painted them, but the red he used was fugitive, and the pink has disappeared.
His canvas has changed, too. Small areas of the cloth can be seen between his brush strokes. Light beige when he bought it, it's now a coffee brown.
Lots of pictures in museums are continually changing. That's another thing with the colors seen in photographs, which only seize an instant. Pigment changes, often subtle, are sometimes not subtle at all. You can see this at the National Gallery in a small, exquisite portrait by the Dutchman Frans van Mieris. He painted "Agatha Paets" in 1665. There's a fig leaf in the picture. He mixed blue with yellow to get the green he wanted, but the yellow went away and now the leaf is merely blue.
Gene Davis's "Narcissus" is from 1973, and couldn't have been painted many years before. That's because its pigments are neither ancient earth tones nor 19th-century synthetics, but startling acrylics soluble in water that offered color painters here a whole palette of new hues.
None of this, of course, is clear in color photographs. The distortions of that medium so offended Albert Barnes that when he opened his museum in Merion, Pa., he would let his paintings be shot only in black-and-white.
What would Barnes have thought of Bill Gates's TV screens?
Gates's company keeps buying -- Corbis has struck deals with dozens of museums, and today sells online digitized reproductions of some 100,000 works of art.
"That doesn't mean I believe that reproductions are as good as the originals," Gates writes. "There's nothing like seeing the real work."
