Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art by Laura Anne Kalba (review)

Reviews 193 subsaharienne, notamment au Sénégal, tandis que le troisième chapitre établit l’affiliation au texte biblique pour montrer les mécanismes mensongers qui érigent l’hétérosexualité comme unique possibilité normative. L’analyse queer est donc nécessaire pour comprendre les mécanismes d’exclusion en jeu dans cette injonction sociale à l’appartenance dans un contexte de diaspora. On note l’analyse du processus qui mène à l’enracinement de cette mythologie généalogique dans le chapitre suivant. Le cinquième chapitre réitère la tentation que la généalogie fixe et le besoin de racines qui se constitue à travers une analyse exceptionnelle du roman Roots de Alex Haley dans un contexte de diaspora arménienne. Queer Roots est important pour les études francophones, une contribution théorique cruciale pour les études queer, postcoloniales et utile pour les chercheurs qui sont intéressés par l’impact de l’intrusion de la mémoire collective dans la fabrication de l’identité de l’individu. Augustana College (IL) Chadia Chambers-Samadi Kalba, Laura Anne. Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 207. ISBN 978-0-271-07700-0. Pp. 266. Kalba explores the revolutionary burst of color on all levels of French culture during the nineteenth century. A whole new rainbow of colors made itself visible in science, technology, commerce, fashion, home decorating, and art. All these developments were paralleled by a continuing discussion of the subject by critics, scientists, and artists. Kalba devotes her first chapter to the chemist M.-E. Chevreul, who was both a teacher and the master of the dye works at the Gobelins tapestry workshop. In his De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (1839), he elaborated a systematic classification of colors to bring under control what he considered the tasteless proliferation of badly-matched color arrangements in modern dress and décor. His work was highly influential for a time, but it soon became dated when English and German chemists invented synthetic dyes in mid-century, thereby unleashing a broad gamut of previously unheard-of hues, like mauve, onto the market. Consumers derived too much pleasure and merchants too much profit from the new colors to pay attention to Chevreul’s theories and the admonitions of self-appointed arbiters of taste. Even the latter were not immune to the onslaught of color and commercialism. The advertising posters created by Jules Chéret, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others plastered all over Paris came to be looked upon as collectable works of art. Color was manifest in the greater variety of clothing and other goods for sale in the new department stores at prices within reach of the middle and working classes. It was also a major factor in the way these items were displayed by merchandisers who wanted to attract customers for them. Color became a central focus of public celebrations in the new and improved ways of staging fireworks. Here color increasingly became a value in itself, without reference to an external narrative. It helped to create a world of fantasy, permitting onlookers to escape for a moment from the concerns of everyday existence. Color was, of course, a significant preoccupation of the Impressionist painters in their effort to capture the fleeting impressions of modern reality on the human eye. Kalba discusses at length the theory and treatment of color in Degas, Renoir, and Monet.While Degas celebrated the invasion of color in the visible universe of contemporary French society, Renoir adopted a more conservative, classicizing approach. Monet remained aloof from the issue, emphasizing instead how changes in atmospheric conditions affect our way of seeing things. The expatriate American painter J.A.M. Whistler expressed his fascination with the modernity of color in his depiction of a fireworks display, Nocturne in Black and Gold. The Neo-Impressionists, like Seurat and Signac, welcomed the influence of scientific theories about color on the elaboration of the pointilliste technique in their works. Kalba discerns a similarity between their paintings and the new autochrome color photography developed at the end of the century by the Lumière brothers and other inventors. University of...