Hue & Cry: French Printmaking and the Debate Over Colors is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Anne Leonard, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. Ironically, the whiff of transgression may have fueled innovation: the great flowering of color printmaking waned once its fine-art status gained official acceptance. Still, color remained a problematic category: contested, controversial, and even forbidden at the Paris Salon until 1899.
This launched a period of intense experimentation and production that spurred printmakers, seduced by the lure of color, to technically and aesthetically audacious feats. When color crept back into French printmaking toward the end of the nineteenth century, its reentry was eased by the example of Japanese ukiyo-e prints, then enjoying an immense vogue, and by progressive voices in the art world insisting that any means of expression chosen by an artist should be taken as legitimate. Extremely costly, and intimately associated with the decadence of the monarchy, these exquisite, printed confections saw both their relevance and their primary clientele disappear abruptly in the wake of the French Revolution. By the terms of the period, prints were understood as an art of black and white if a print had color, it failed to qualify as fine art and had to be considered within some other classification, like illustration or advertising.Ī century before the “color revolution” of the 1890s, color prints had already attained a zenith of technical perfection in France, but their popularity did not last. It is generally considered to be the first of the Ealing comedies, although it is better characterised as a thriller for children. Arnold, Joseph Bato Art Department Draughtsman: Tony Rimmington. Hue and Cry is a 1947 British film directed by Charles Crichton and starring Alastair Sim, Harry Fowler and Joan Dowling. These negative associations discouraged the practice even after technical advances had made it more feasible and affordable. Credits Director: Charles Crichton Director of Photography: Douglas Slocombe Art Direction: Norman G. Critics at the time scorned color printmaking, calling it gaudy, garish, vulgar, cheap, showy, and commercial. Not only was printed color difficult and expensive to achieve, it was also frowned upon as a matter of taste. Hue & Cry C10-620587 C16-980857 AC0428 1751 Bruce Street, Anderson CA 96007 28306 Industrial Blvd Suite I Hayward CA 94545 613 W.
Yet their extraordinary popular appeal both then and now masks the fact that, for a very long time, color in print was an outlier phenomenon. Brightly colored prints and posters are synonymous with Paris in the 1890s-a period known as the Belle Époque (beautiful age).
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