“THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY”,
L.P. HARTLEY ONCE WROTE: “THEY
DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY THERE.”
..........................................
Still, anyone curious about the past can
always dig back through the archives to
read what was going on, or trudge up the
hills to see the crumbling ruins. It’s much
harder to reach forwards in time and grab
on to the signifi cant stu of 50 years ahead.
And yet the artist and writer Emily Noyles
Vanderpoel appears to have done just that.
The New York creative stubbed her toe on
abstract expressionism and minimalist design
at the dawn of the 20th century, a good fi ve
decades before either movement actually
reared its head. And she did this quite by
accident, while on a mission to explain how
colours interact with one another on the
canvas, the results of which she recorded in
her 1901 book Color Problems: A Practical
Manual for the Lay Student of Color.
The book was a strange creation. And 117 years
after it was fi rst published, it has fi nally got
people talking. “There’s a conversation going
on between eras here,” says Keegan Mills Cooke,
founder of Circadian Press. The Brooklyn-
based publisher is resurrecting Vanderpoel’s
400-page volume after thousands backed a
Kickstarter campaign to see it return to print.
Newly bound with handmade inlays, it
re-emerged into the world this November,
with help from record label Sacred Bones.The project has stirred the interests of art
enthusiasts around the world. “Her work
looks so contemporary,” Cooke says, “that
I can imagine it – especially the square
grids – working in the form of an Instagram
post.” That said, he’s under no illusions about
Vanderpoel’s time-travelling abilities. “We
look through our 21st-century eyes and see
[Color Problems] as a modernist example
of minimalist design. But there’s just
no way she could have seen that.”Still, Vanderpoel’s colour manual did o er
the world of 1901 an uncanny vision of the
modern art that was to come. Her Tetris-like
squares represent the proportions of colour
found in various still-life objects, so artists
might better understand the e ects of di erent
colour combinations. These include gridded
representations of a teacup and saucer, a slice
of an orange, a butterfl y and, slightly more
exotically, an Egyptian mummy case. On
one page, Vanderpoel warns artists not to
mix extreme versions of the same colours:
place a crimson rose next to an orange-red
geranium, she wrote, and “they injure each
other”. Vanderpoel designed her colour charts
as lessons, but taken as artworks, it’s not hard
to see how they resemble the works of later
artists such as Mark Rothko and Josef Albers. >>Left
Emily Noyes Vanderpoel at
her home. Photo courtesy of the
Litchfield Historical Society,
where Vanderpoel served as the
organisation’s first curator.