Contrast of Temperature

It was not until the art of Turner in the early years of the nineteenth century and the art of the Impressionists in the 1870s that contrast of temperature was given special attention, and not until the rude arrival of fauvism and German Expressionism in the first decade of this century that it became a dominant pictorial means. Undoubtedly warm and cool contrast was known and used in the past. The Italian painters of the early fourteenth century, of Giotto's time, used green earth pigments for middle values and shadows in faces, hands, and other warm flesh areas. In aerial perspective, as employed first by the Northern landscapist--by Jan van Eyck in particular, [26] and then by Leonardo, whose unique "stamp of approval" ensured its acceptance until well into the nineteenth century--objects were made to go bluer and cooler as they receded into the distance. Warm colors were reserved mainly for near objects. Rubens, the master of Baroque painting, used cool tinted grays in the delicate half-shadows inside his elaborately modeled forms, with warm lights and background areas completing the radiant play of contrasts. Yet these examples from diverse styles of the past seem almost technical in comparison with the more deliberately expressive and coloristic use of warm-cool contrast in portraits and figure paintings by Renoir and landscapes by Monet. Both artists owed something to Manet, whose warm and cool tones prepared the way for Impressionism, technically and esthetically, in the late 1860s. In Renoir's opalescent paintings of beautiful young people, we see one expressive result of the use of warm-cool contrast: a quality of tenderness and uncomplicated sensual delight, the emergence of a sunny, non-puritan eroticism. In Cézanne's white tablecloths or large napkins, juxtaposed and overlapping strokes of warm and cool colors create an aura of contemplation, of both intensity and stillness. In his landscapes they weave in and out of sky and earth areas to create a transcendent unity of near and distant spaces and of vibrant air and form. Bonnard's warm and cool interiors of later years conjure up an almost mystical domestic happiness. [37]

The expressive use of contrast of temperature in these examples is mild compared with the use of warm and cool hues by the German painters known collectively as Die Brückie [The Bridge] and Der Blaue Reiter [The Blue Rider]. They made a special virtue of this type of contrast to convey what were often the most "uncivilized" emotions and to create a limited but vigorous spatial dynamism [it has been accepted in recent years that warm colors tend to advance and cool colors to recede]. We encounter the shock of a blue against a hot orange-red in characteristic works by Kirchner and Nolde that go far beyond the gentle mood of Renoir, and sometimes beyond the most daring Fauve paintings by Matisse, Vlaminick, and Derain. [38]. [p. 111]