Making Colour, National Gallery, Until September 7, 2014
As one of the most inspiring exhibitions of the season, Making Colour provides a fascinating insight into art history through the colours and pigments that artists have used over the ages. From sparkling minerals to crushed insects, artists used surprising materials to create pigments in the pursuit of new hues. Along with various works of art, samples of mineral specimens, textiles, ceramics and glass are also on display. Each of the exposition rooms is devoted to a specific colour, in a journey from lapis lazuli to cobalt blue, through yellow, orange, purple and other colours.
A special section is also devoted to ultramarine, the purest and richest but most expensive blue that was once made from lazurite obtained at the remote Sar-i- Sang mines in Afghanistan. It was more valuable than gold during the Renaissance and was thus used with a sense of veneration by that period's best-known painters. Only in the 19th century did synthetic ultramarine become commercially available, permitting artists to experiment with colour more freely and avoid pawning all of their possessions to obtain costly pigments.
Indeed, it was the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the mass production of synthetic paints that made Impressionist art possible. As artist Piere-Auguste Renoir once said: "Without colours in tubes, there would be no Cézanne, no Monet, no Pissarro, and no Impressionism." In other words, Cézanne would never have been able to produce his legendary landscapes if it had not been for synthetically produced green colours. And who knows, without the technological advancements of the past two centuries, modern art may have developed in a completely different manner, or - as a critic writes in a review of the exhibition in The Guardian - "it may not have happened at all."
Trafalgar Square
www.nationalgallery.org.uk