John Gage (art historian)

John Stephen Gage (born June 28, 1938 in Bromley , Kent ; † February 10, 2012 ) was a British art historian and university professor who did fundamental work on the British painter William Turner and with Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction ( 1993) published a standard work on the theory of color in the art of the western world and became one of the most important and important experts in the field because of his astute intelligence and deep commitment to researching the meaning of colors in painting.

Life

Studies and first papers on William Turner

Light and Colors (painting by William Turner, 1843)

The title of Turner's painting Rain, Steam and Speed from 1844 gave Gage the title of his 1972 book

After visiting the Grammar School in Rye , he completed a degree in history of modern times at the Queen's College of the University of Oxford , which he finished with a mediocre final 1960th His study time there was interrupted by activities as a freelance tutor for the English language in Florence and as a language assistant at a school in Hesse , using the experience he gained there to bring the European perspective into his studies of British Romanticism .

After graduating, he completed postgraduate studies in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London . To finance his studies, he took a number of jobs, ranging from dishwasher to part-time lecturer, before he earned a Philosophiae Doctor (Ph.D.) with a dissertation on William Turner in 1967 with Michael Kitson (1926-1998) .

He then became a lecturer in art history at the University of East Anglia in Norwich in 1967 and taught there until 1979.

Gage also wrote other seminal papers on William Turner that changed the understanding of this artist's approach to painting, showing how his vivid visual qualities seek to appeal not only to the eye, but to both the eye and the eye because of the rich symbolic and cultural meaning address to the mind.

He achieved his first broad recognition in the professional world with Color in Turner: Poetry and Truth (1969), which he published shortly after earning his doctorate. His special achievement was the demonstration that Turner's use of color and his eccentric , but at the same time systematically pursued, thoughts on color theory were not only primarily optical, but also of a serious spiritual nature, and were combined with a fascination for poetry.

Furthermore, his work challenged the prevailing contemporary interpretations of Turner, who ignored the literary and poetic aspects of his painting, and saw Turner's merits solely in the effects of pure light, colors and optical drama. On the other hand, he showed how essential the poetic and broad cultural references were for the effect of his visual art.

As early as 1972 he devoted himself again to Turner in a short but concise study entitled Rain, Steam and Speed , in which he presented in an extraordinary way how a Romantic artist responded to the industrial revolution .

University professor at Cambridge and standard work on colors and art

In 1979 he moved to the University of Cambridge , where he became a lecturer in art history. The poetic and cultural references in Turner's works were also described by him in the monograph J. MW Turner: A Wonderful Range of Mind (1987), using a comment by John Constable for the title , which he made after a dinner with Turner in made by the Royal Academy of Arts .

His textbook Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (1993) became a standard work in the field of color theory, which also found a wide readership outside of art history and has been translated into five languages .

The book is the most exhaustive historical analysis available for understanding colors in Western art, and it leads the reader to think about colors from a different angle, namely the substance of the color pigments the artist uses and how how even technical questions about colors lead to a broader cultural understanding.

It also clarifies the difference between hue and tone, and shows how subtle color differences that we see in works of art exist alongside the much more imprecise color categorizations in everyday life. The breakdown of the exact identity of a color viewed in isolation can, in his view, be the subject of any kind of certainty. Furthermore, the book presented the cultural and historical specificity of color definitions, while it was free from simple relativizing views that our perceptions of color and the artistic development of colors are merely culturally determined.

In 1995 Gage was appointed professor ( reader ) for the arts of the western world at the University of Cambridge, where he taught until 2000. In 1995 he was also accepted as a member ( fellow ) of the British Academy .

After completing his teaching activities in 2000, he settled on a farm in Tuscany , where he continued his art-historical research and wrote a book on Aboriginal art, among other things .

In his work he repeatedly pointed out that a conscientious study of color should have both anthropological and historical approaches.

Fonts

• Color in Turner. Poetry and truth , London 1969, ISBN 0289795605
• Turner: Rain, Steam and Speed , London 1972
• Goethe on Art , London 1980, ISBN 0-85967-495-9
• JMW Turner. A wonderful range of mind , London 1987, ISBN 0300037791
• George Field and his circle. From Romanticism to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood , Cambridge 1989
• Color and culture. Practice and meaning from antiquity to abstraction , Boston 1994, ISBN 0821220438
• Color and meaning. Art, science and symbolism , London 1999, ISBN 0500237670

in German language

• Two centuries of English painting. British Art and Europe 1680 to 1880 , Munich 1979
• Cultural history of color. From antiquity to the present , Ravensburg 1994, ISBN 3-473-48375-3
• The language of colors. The change in the meaning of color in the fine arts , Ravensburg 1999, ISBN 3-473-48404-0

Web links

• Works by and about John Gage (art historian) at Open Library
• John Gage obituary. Art historian who wrote groundbreaking studies on Turner and a magisterial book on the understanding of color in western art . In: The Guardian of February 14, 2012
• Literature by and about John Gage (art historian) in the WorldCat bibliographic database