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The innovation of French master painter Michel Henry's color theory was his success in going beyond conventional painting theory and using red as a bright color. Red is generally considered a dark color, but Michel Henry made it shine brightly and even expressed light with red.
I have never seen an artist who paints such beautiful pictures by layering red on red. Michel Henry accomplished an adventure that no artist from the Renaissance, Baroque paintings (up to this point, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain were the main focus), Rococo period (the period of French painting begins here), Symbolism, Impressionism, or the 20th century Ecole de Paris painters had ever attempted.
The word color value ( = Valeur in French) may be unfamiliar to you, but it is not unusual for painters and those of us who deal with paintings. Let me explain color value (= Valuer in French). Materials reflect light, and that light enters the retina of the eye, and the retina sends color and shape information to the brain, which recognizes the color and shape. In other words, color is created by the correlation between materials (objects), light, eyes, and the brain.
(The mechanism is explained in an easy-to-understand way in the book "The Art Museum in the Brain" by Hidetoshi Fuse (art critic), published by Chikuma Gakugei Bunko. As an aside, I once gave a lecture with Mr. Fuse on the subject of "French Paintings Loved by the Japanese," and he is a man of great intellect.)
Hidetoshi Fuse and the Art Museum in the Brain
A painting is a representation on a canvas of the complex relationships that occur between real-world objects (landscapes, still lifes, people, etc.) and light, the eye, and the brain. Of course, the painting itself is also perceived as a complex interrelationship with the objects, but we will not go into that issue here.
In other words, paintings do not faithfully express the colors of objects in the real world, but rather calculate how they will appear to the human eye, and in order to do so, decide which color to place where, and in what relationship to other colors. Roughly speaking, color value is the correlation between colors. There is no clear list that specifies it, so it is up to each artist to decide, but white is the lightest color value, and black and brown are classified as dark color values.
Now, back to Michel Henry's red.
Michel Henry had two teachers at the Beaux-Arts (Paris School of Fine Arts).
The main gate of the Beaux-Arts ↓ The banks of the Seine
Narbonne was a professor of drawing at the beginners' level, and Chaplain-Midi was a master of color at the regular level. Buffet was also in the Narbonne class, but he dropped out. Buffet never studied color, and continued to draw only for the charm of simple drawing.
Beaux Arts Buildings on the banks of the Seine ↓
Michel Henry was taught the power of color by Chaplin Midi. Once, Chaplin Midi saw Michel Henry successfully create a painting using red as a bright color, and said, "Michel Henry has surpassed me." In conventional color theory, red is classified as a dark color, but Michel Henry created a bright and shining painting using red as the base color.
Michel Henry uses around 30 different kinds of red paint, all subtly different shades of red made in France, Italy, Holland, America and Germany.
Check out this beautiful piece that uses red as a bright and shining color, layering red on red.
Michel Henry "Red Symphony" Oil painting No. 50
The original title of this work , "The Red Symphony" is "Coqulicots en fete " ("The Feast of Coquelicots"), and the bouquet of red Coquelicots is painted on a red background, shining with an intense red color. This work was published in the summer 2000 issue of the French magazine Univers des arts , and Michel Henry said of the work:
" Crees, it is metamorphoser your imporessions en signs, en colors, en y melant son ame" (To create is to abstract impressions into certain signs and colors and to mix them with one's soul). Michel Henry loves the real world, so he stays in the world of representational painting, but to me this painting looks like an abstract painting where the experiment of color combinations is a great success.
The following is a quote from the above mentioned Univers des arts magazine:
After graduating from Beaux-arts after the war, he turned his back on the miserabilism of the painters Crubert (Buffet, Jansen, Draguard, etc. ) and smiled, "Why should I be ashamed of being happy?" The theme of his pictorial adventure is "happiness and empathy " . His flagship is shining flowers full of color and life. At Casa Velázquez (where Michel Henry studied as a scholarship student in Madrid), he certainly learned how to arrange those magnificent bouquets in large compositions. Michel Henry's still lifes are lessons in how to live gently. Using all kinds of paints and techniques, he focuses on depicting the vitality of flowers with uncompromising passion, and reds explode. The violent flurry of ruby and vermillion red paints eclipse the charm of the world's most beautiful cities in the background, and celebrate the vitality of the flowers. This wonderful hymn to nature pushes Paris and Venice into the background of the canvas, reminding us that human form cannot match the charm of Coquelicot.
Beauty exists in its simplicity, in its richness of expression, and in its most ephemeral form. Michel Henry is fascinated by the Coquelicot, so beautiful, so fragile, so fleeting, that it takes us into a state of ecstasy for a few hours, before it falls apart in a crystal vase. If you look beyond Michel Henry's canvases, you may sense a sweet and gentle bitterness. His paintings of Coquelicot and roses seem to echo some lines from the poet Ronsardno :
Will you believe me, maiden? Enjoy your youth while it blossoms in its verdant freshness; then, as the flowers age, so will your beauty be lost.
Michel Henry's oil paintings and articles published in the magazine Univers Ces Arts.
I (Galerie Adeka) have worked with this brilliant painter of the 20th century for over 20 years, and while I continue to handle his current works, I continue to discover new secrets of his paintings.
Click here to find out why Michel Henry's paintings are becoming more and more valuable