Cercles chromatiques de M.E. Chevreul 2006

In Cercles chromatiques de M.E. Chevreul, Arnaud Maggs continues to explore the aesthetic and conceptual potential of historical objects as his subject. The detail shown here displays a circle of seventy-two pure hues of colour—les couleurs franches—proposed by Michel-Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889), a prominent French chemist who was part of a group interested in exploring the human perception of colour. The hues are presented in this plate at their maximum chroma, or saturation.

Maggs’s series captures eleven of twelve colour wheels from Chevreul’s 1861 book, an atlas of colour titled Exposé d’un moyen de définir et de nommer les couleurs. He photographed a copy held by the Rare Book Collection of the Robertson Davies Library at Massey College in Toronto. This book puts forward a detailed system of analysis that defined a nomenclature for and classification of colour, something that appealed to Maggs’s career-long interest in systems of classification and identification. The plates display the desaturation of colour through the incremental addition of black, with each stage showing increasing subtlety between shades. Ultimately, the chromatic wheel is rendered colourless. It is a process Maggs described as akin to “passage from day to night, from positive to negative, from life to death.”

Chevreul’s plates were etched and printed by René-Henri Digeon using a four-colour aquatint process, and as art historian Alexandra Loske points out, the 14,420 shades represented in Chevreul’s colour wheels make “these plates masterpieces of color-printing in the later nineteenth century.”  Maggs would have been drawn to the circle forms, but also to the craftsmanship of the award-winning prints. The original book measures 36 centimetres high, so at 99.1 x 81.3 centimetres, Maggs’s images are dramatic enlargements.

The work highlights ever-present themes in Maggs’s art practice: time and duration. The exaggerated size of the plates amplifies the condition of the atlas pages, drawing attention to their handling over years—the lives they lived, so to speak. The scale and sequencing of Maggs’s colour wheels invites bodily engagement from the viewer. Hung in a row, Cercles chromatiques de M.E. Chevreul emphasizes the artist’s exploration of time. Step by step the viewer follows the incremental shifts from maximum brightness to blackness, each step inching toward darkness.

Cercles chromatiques is an extension of an important earlier exploration of colour classification, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, 2005, in which Maggs photographed the colour charts from a book of the same name published in 1821. It was the effort of a flower painter named Patrick Syme (1774–1845), who expanded upon the work of German geologist and mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817) to develop a handbook of colour for use in the arts and sciences. With a series of charts organized by colour, it served as a useful guide for field studies. “For instance, a scientist might be trying to describe a reddish white bird that he had discovered that day,” Maggs explained. “He would look up in his book, find a similar colour, and say ‘ah yes, it is similar to “the egg of a grey linnet” or “the back of a Christmas rose.”’”  Maggs marvelled at the publication’s practicality, but also at its poetry. This duality reveals itself in the work, which includes thirteen dramatic enlargements of the colour plates from the original book.