Broken colour in a modern world: chromatic failures in purist art and architecture

Abstract

Modern colour is free colour. Nineteenth century science liberated it from its longstanding submission to form, transforming it into a free-floating matrix of sensory effects. And yet, in the early modern art and architecture of Purism, this freedom was for the most part disavowed. The article charts the ways in which experimental aesthetics and psychophysics atomised colour into sensory fragments, connecting this research to the role of colour in the art and architecture of Purism, consisting of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret and Amédée Ozenfant. Within the Purist approaches, the article argues, one finds the epitomisation of the ongoing effort to deny and systematically re-organise colour into new formal systems of meaning and control. However, the article concludes, these efforts fail, not due to any glorification of achromatic white but, rather, because colour always manages to break free of formal and technical systems of control.