Art in Translation, 2018

Volume 10, Issue 2, pp. 143–147, http://doi.org/10.1080/17561310.2018.1480386

# 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Editorial: Michel
Euge
ne Chevreul,
Charles Henry and
Nineteenth-
Century Aesthetic
Theories of
Abstraction
This special issue of Art in Translation contains three nineteenth-century
French sources that explicitly consider the role of abstraction in art.
There are two by Michel Eug
ene Chevreul (1786-1889) and one by
Charles Henry (1859–1926). These two polymathic scientists both
played important, if peripheral, roles in the defining conceptual and
practical frameworks developed by two important avant-garde commun-
ities, namely: the Neo-Impressionist/Chromo-Luminarist (or Divisionist)/
Symbolist/Nabis artists, in the 1880s and 1890s; and the Cubist/Orphist/
L’Esprit Nouveau artists, in the 1910s, 1920s, and beyond. Chevreul’s
144 Editorial

widely acknowledged influence on the avant-garde has been predomin-

antly, and often fleetingly, defined by his famous color theories. Henry’s
less-cited influence has been defined by his efforts to interlace color, line,
direction, rhythm, and measure through a “psychophysical aesthetic.”
The influence of Chevreul and Henry on the ways in which the two
avant-garde communities pursued abstraction has been addressed only
minimally; and almost exclusively by Georges Roque.1 This special issue
shines a light on Chevreul and Henry to join the ever-louder call for a
broad reconsideration of the way the enduringly radical emergence of
abstract art around 1910 is understood, so as to embrace prior debates
concerning abstraction that reach back at least as far as the eighteenth
century, but balloon in the nineteenth.2 Such a recasting cannot solve the
problems attending debates around abstract art. Indeed, it invariably adds
more. Its positive contribution is increased nuance and an enhanced sense
of historical momentum. The issue closes with an article focussed largely
on the nineteenth-century, in which I situate Chevreul’s and Henry’s ideas
within wider debates around abstraction.

This special issue has its origin in a chance encounter with an admir-
able coffee-table book on Impressionism written by respected critic
Pierre Courthion (1902–88).3 In the entry on Georges Seurat’s famous
painting Un dimanche apr
es-midi a
l'^ıle de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday
Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884–6/89) I was staggered
to find a quotation from what Courthion refers to as Chevreul’s 1864
“De l'abstraction.”4 I was immediately puzzled and intrigued, having
never encountered any references to this text before, let alone the text
itself. Following preliminary searches, it was clear that some references
to the text could be found, but that these are both rare and slight.
The full title of the work in question is De l'abstraction consideree
relativement aux beaux-arts et
a la litterature: quatri
eme partie d'un
ouvrage intitule "De l'abstraction consideree comme element des con-
naissances humaines dans la recherche de la verite absolue.” It was pub-
lished twice in 1864, as a contribution to the Memoires de l'Academie
des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Dijon, 1863 and as a monograph.5
In 1866, Chevreul included it, unchanged, as the final section of his
Histoire des connaissances chimiques.6
The editorial board of the journal accepted the proposal to publish a
translation of this piece, but asked for additional texts to be added to create
a full issue. Which texts to choose? Should emphasis be placed on ante-
cedent connections between art and abstraction to contextualize Chevreul’s
work? For example: David Pierre Giottino Humbert de Superville’s 1827
Essai sur les signes inconditionnels dans l’art; Antoine-Chrysostome
Quatrem
ere de Quincy’s 1805 Sur l'ideal dans les arts du dessin (with an
expanded edition in 1837); and the eighteenth-century Encyclopedistes
Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert, et al.7 Or should the
opportunity be taken to move in the direction of Courthion and follow
 Editorial 145

subsequent accounts of abstraction that may have profited from Chevreul’s

text? I momentarily deferred this decision by deciding to include extracts
from the published correspondence between Chevreul and the then-secretary
of the Academie française, Abel-François Villemain (1834–71), as an illumi-
nating supplementary platform upon which Chevreul publicly outlined his
ideas on abstraction in relation to the arts.8 The editorial emphasis chosen is
made clear by the addition of Charles Henry’s 1885, “Introduction
a une
esthetique scientifique.” With no intention of sidelining the earlier history, I
decided to slightly tip the focus toward the flow of ideas around abstraction
from Chevreul through late nineteenth-century art scholarship and the
Paris-centric avant-garde to their early twentieth-century counterparts, who
have been widely hailed for initiating visual abstraction.
The marginal treatment of Chevreul’s theory of abstraction within art
history suggests that scholars are at some loss as to what to make of it and
how to position it; if they are aware of it at all. While Chevreul’s views are
far from radical or avant-garde they do offer much food for thought, espe-
cially in terms of the historical development of the debates around abstrac-
tion. In my view, Chevreul’s account must be reckoned with—on the basis
of its author's wider influence and the extent of its contribution to the use of
the terms “abstract” and “abstraction” in nineteenth-century discourses on
art. Henry’s comparably challenging essay is offered here, in part, as an
index of this burgeoning debate—especially as taken up by two people with
whom he was associated: Gustave Kahn (1859–1936) and Felix Feneon
(1861–1944). Indeed, with the addition of Paul Signac (1863–1935), who
worked closely with both Henry and Seurat toward the end of the nine-
teenth-century, and the younger Maurice Denis (1870–1943), the import-
ance of Henry, Kahn, and Feneon to the topic in hand remains
underdocumented. Given the spans of their lifetimes and social circles
(before and after 1900), it is unthinkable that their views on abstraction
would not have informed the appearance of abstract art around 1910.

What is at stake here has less to do with the advent of abstract art per
se—how we define it and who did it first—than with the development of
the aesthetic theories of abstraction that formed the discourse through
which “fully” abstract art could be recognized, conceptualized, and cri-
tiqued. In other words, the increasing references to the abstract and to
abstraction that we encounter in the discourses surrounding the arts from
the late 1700s up to the early 1900s provided successive layers of the
humus that would nurture the first fruits of “fully” abstract art. Moreover,
these layers reflect the increasing involvement of a theoretical or philosoph-
ical dimension within the production of art. There is no single, easy defin-
ition of abstract art and widening the scope of the art historical account of
abstraction reveals a field of even greater, sometimes conflicting, diversity.
Barnaby Dicker
King’s College, London
146 Editorial

Notes

1. See: Georges Roque, "Les vibrations colorees de Delaunay: une des

voies de l'abstraction," in Robert Delaunay 1906–1914. De
l'impressionnisme
a l'abstraction (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou,
1999), 53–64; and Georges Roque, Art et science de la couleur:
chevreul et les peintres de Delacroix
a l'abstraction (N^ımes:
Jacqueline Chambon, 1997), 31–4 and 414–16.
2. Roque, Otto Stelzer, David Morgan, Mark A. Cheetham, Barbara
Maria Stafford, and Charles A. Cramer are the principle art
historians to have worked through different aspects of the wider,
formative debates surrounding abstraction. See, for example: Idem.;
Georges Roque, Qu'est-ce que l'art abstrait?: une histoire de
l'abstraction en peinture (1860–1960) (Paris: Gallimard, 2007);
Otto Stelzer, Die Vorgeschichte der abstrakten Kunst: Denkmodelle
und Vor-Bilder (Munich: Piper, 1964); David Morgan, “The Idea of
Abstraction in German Theories of the Ornament from Kant to
Kandinsky,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50, no. 3
(1992), 231–242; David Morgan, “Concepts of Abstraction in
French Art Theory from the Enlightenment to Modernism,” Journal
of the History of Ideas 53, no. 4 (1992), 669-685; David Morgan,
“The Rise and Fall of Abstraction in Eighteenth-Century Art
Theory,“ Eighteenth-Century Studies 27, no. 3 (1994), 449–478;
David Morgan, “The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and
Empathy from German Romanticism to Expressionism,” Journal of
the History of Ideas 57, no. 2 (1996): 317–341; Mark A.
Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the
Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994); Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the
Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge MA: MIT
Press, 1994); and Charles A. Cramer, Abstraction and the classical
ideal: 1760–1920 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006).
3. Pierre Courthion, Impressionism (New York: Abrams, 1977).
4. Ibid., 148.
5. Michel Eug
ene Chevreul, “De l'abstraction consideree relativement
aux beaux-arts et
a la litterature: quatri
eme partie d'un ouvrage
intitule ‘De l'abstraction consideree comme element des
connaissances humaines dans la recherche de la verite absolue’,” in
Memoires de l'Academie des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Dijon,
1863 (Dijon: J. E. Rabutot, 1864), 31–81; and Michel Eug
ene
Chevreul, De l'abstraction consideree relativement aux beaux-arts et

a la litterature: quatri
eme partie d'un ouvrage intitule "De
l'abstraction consideree comme element des connaissances humaines
dans la recherche de la verite absolue” (Dijon: J. E. Rabutot, 1864).
 Editorial 147

6. Michel Eug
ene Chevreul, “De l'abstraction consideree relativement

aux beaux-arts et
a la litterature,” in Histoire des connaissances
chimiques (Paris: Paris: Guerin and Morgand, 1866), 385–465.
7. Antoine-Chrysostome Quatrem
ere de Quincy, Essai sur l'ideal dans
ses applications pratiques aux oeuvres de l'imitation propre des arts
du dessin (Paris, Librairie d'Adrien le Clere et Cie, 1837).
8. Michel Eug
ene Chevreul, Lettres adressees
a M. Villemain sur la
methode en general et sur la definition du mot FAIT relativement
aux sciences, aux lettres, aux beaux-arts, etc., etc. (Paris: Garnier
Fr
eres, 1856).

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Laura Anne Kalba, Gavin Parkinson,
Ferdinand Fuhrmann, Gareth Polmeer, Nick Lee and especially Eric
Robertson for their assistance in preparing this issue.