Georges Roque's Revised 'Art et science de la couleur' Restores Chevreul's Centrality

Georges Roque, CNRS research director, has published a revised and expanded edition of 'Art et science de la couleur' with Éditions Gallimard's 'Tel' collection. The book reexamines Michel-Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889), chemist and director of dyeing at the Gobelins manufactory, who formulated the law of simultaneous contrast of colors in 1839. Chevreul's principle—that a color imparts a complementary hue to an adjacent color without mixing—established a structural organization of colors through opposition pairs and optical fusion. Roque traces the history of color theory from Newton's classification and quantification, through Buffon and Goethe's dynamic construction, to the psychophysiological approaches of Fourier, Young, Maxwell, Helmholtz, Bezold, Blanc, Grégoire, and Henry. By positioning Chevreul at the center of this lineage, Roque highlights his influence on philosophers, poets, and artists who approached painting topologically. The paradigm shift affected Delacroix, the Impressionists, Neo-Impressionism, Pointillism, Divisionism, Symbolists, Orphic Cubism, Italian and Russian Futurists, leading to abstraction and extending through the Bauhaus, VHUKTEMAS, GINKhUK in Soviet Russia, and via Albers to Op art. The review was written by Louis-José Lestocart for art press n°359 (September 2009).