Color Problems. Emily Noyes Vanderpoel

15thCentury” of a spinner preparing flax on a tool called a hetchel that has a remarkable likeness to a person looking through the 15th century device of a Sighting Grid. The nature of the Tale being told is how women of the revolution won the Revolutionary War through their weaving and other necessary and fine crafts, as it says has been throughout history.

      10. A 1928 clipping from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Vertical File reports her exhibition at the Community House of the Connecticut Agricultural College of nine watercolors, brought there by the Met, none of which remain in their collection. The titles were: The Long Hill, Japanese Color, Over the Dark Valley, The Green Mug, The Bronze Home, Early Morning, The Cliff, Moonrise, and The Ledge.

      11. World’s Columbian Exhibition Catalog, 1893 Department L, Liberal Arts, Gallery I, Primary Secondary Superior Education, Z-13, page 215 lists several likely possibilities for such presentation of the Color Machine.

      12. Bradley, Milton. Elementary Color. Milton Bradley co, 1895. Print

      13. See for instance the article Women as Consumers, Women as Producers in Lupton, Ellen, and J A. Miller. Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design. London: Phaidon, 2008. Print. pp178-79.

      14. Vanderpoel demonstrates the method in Plates LXXXI, An Antique Rug, and LXXXV, its Analysis. Note the asymmetry in the analysis which has color quantity winning over formal quality.

      15. Vanderpoel tells us these Analyses are not merely pixelated representations, fixed in scale, material, name and meaning on page 109 of Color Problems where she projects onto PLATE LIV, Color Analysis from Mummy Plate her re-interpretation of the matrix as a “gayly feathered parrot”. Thus, the grids could be considered “continuous sites of emergence of material thought”, as per Carol Armstrong’s analysis on the dialog between painting (in the work of Seurat) and other media (textile craft in the work of Anni Albers.) in Armstrong, Carol. “Seurat’s Media, or Matrix of Materialities.” Grey Room. 58 (2015) 6-25. Print. P18. Vanderpoel also here refers to “those who made [the plates]” as if they were her students or someone else, but no record of her teaching the method or somehow stumbling upon it as the work of someone else exist.

      16. In the introduction to the catalog of the exhibition Ornament and Abstraction, at the Beyeler Foundation, (pp16-26), Markus Bruderlin introduces questions in the discourse about abstract art’s continuation of the history of ornament that Vanderpoel’s work engages.

      17. A quote attributed to the French poet Paul Valery, and the title of Lawrence Weschlers 1982 biography Robert Irwin’s titled “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.”

      18. Krauss, Rosalind. “Grids.” October. 9 (1979): 51-64. Print.

      19. Dickerman, Leah, and Matthew Affron. Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012. Print. pp13-14. For an institutional definition of what is Abstract Art verses what is abstract otherwise, refer to the catalog of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Inventing Abstraction: “Scores of earlier images from other Western disciplines — chromatic studies, theosophical and mediumistic images, cosmogonic images, scientific images—may resemble abstract art. But these are not at all, for despite any formal similarity they are meant to produce meanings in other discursive frameworks….[they] do not declare a break with subject matter.” Vanderpoel certainly generates an ambiguity if not a “declared break” with subject matter.

      20. Bergdoll, Barry, and Leah Dickerman. Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009. Print.p.21 On the “Grid logic” that developed in the Bauhaus: “the grid became a structural tool allowing for the creation of spaces that integrated disparate mediums into overarching designs - painting, furniture, and textiles into architecture…city planning…the computer-like punch cards used in the Jacquard looms.”

      21. Correspondence with Reading University, 2010, archive of publisher Longman’s and Green.

      22. Correspondence with Pearson Press, 2010, successor to Longman’s and Green.

      23. New York Historical Society, Object #35.66, gift of Emily Vanderpoel. In Color Problems, Vandepoel often positions her interest in color in relation to personal and public well being, even safety: color blindness as a primarily male trait would be dangerous for railroad engineers and drivers of automobiles in relation to choreographing color signals.

      24. Collection of New York Historical Society.

      COLOR PROBLEMS

      Copyright, 1901, by

      EMILY NOYES VANDERPOEL.

       All rights reserved.

      First Edition, January, 1902.

      Reprinted, January, 1903.

      Reprinted, October, 2018.

      Rockwell and Churchill Press

      BOSTON, U.S.A.

       To

       My Father

      WILLIAM CURTIS NOYES

      PREFACE

      FROM a scientific standpoint admirable works on color have been written, but they demand more time and study than many can give to them, and are too theoretical to be easily understood; while those written from an artistic standpoint may be useful to those who paint pictures but are not of much benefit to larger classes of people who are artists in other occupations. Painters of pictures must study color as well as lines and composition; but a better understanding of color would also be of great value to decorators, designers, lithographers, florists, dressmakers, and milliners; women in their dress and home decoration, and many others. For such, to combine the essential results of the scientific and artistic study of color in a concise, practical manual, and to classify the study of color in individual eyes, in light, in history and in nature, has been the aim of the author of this book. Also, as color cannot be fully appreciated by any written description, the text has been made as brief as possible, the plates full and elaborate.

      It has been asked by artists who have given years of study to form, perspective and composition, why it should be necessary to study color if one has a good eye for it, to which another question may serve as answer. Suppose a person intending to make art his life work has a good eye for form, will he, therefore, begin to paint pictures before learning to draw, or without going through a thorough drill in perspective? Later, having some subject in his mind which he wishes to put on canvas, he does not stop to review all the rules he studied of form and perspective; the knowledge and facility he gained in that study will enable him unconsciously to crystallize his thought into better shape on his canvas. Does the possessor of a naturally fine voice think he can dispense with the time and trouble of cultivating it? The same reasoning may well be applied to color and its study.

      E. N. V.

      INTRODUCTION

      FOR some years I have known of the study and research the author of this book has devoted to problems in Color, and its uses in the arts of Design and Decoration, and it is gratifying to me that the result of much of this work is to be given to the public for the use of those who are interested in the subject.

      A great deal will be found in these pages that will be of practical service, particularly to those who have not been able to read the works of Chevreul, Von Bezold, Rood, Church, and others. Indeed, even in these, careful study would be necessary to select passages describing combinations that could be applied to special work.

      Much