observation, refined to just the quantity, quality and adjacency of color, is painted into the matrix of a 10 × 10 grid. The analysis, then, performs as a kind of memory device composed of its 100 pixels to capture the essence of the scanned color experience.
Vanderpoel’s grids liberate the measured color arrangements to be used at another scale or in another medium. No longer part of the observed Mummy Case, or confined to be a Celtic Ornament or Panel of the Taj Mahal, the new compositions are free to be interpreted and repurposed at will. They can be viewed in the context of textile pattern, flower arrangement, parlor decoration, or hat design. They can be seen as space plans or cross sections at the scale of a room, building or town. The color adjacencies create space within the matrix as colors and color fields advance or retreat in relation to each other. The observer and interpreter are assured of the value in a measured practice of color understanding. [15]
The abstraction of the Analyses enables this cross-discipline, trans-media transfer. [16] The object can be liberated from its name while its valuable visual essence remains. Their use of a square format enables further distancing from source by allowing free rotation, erasing any trace of up and down. The method produces a modernist axiom associated with the great living artist Robert Irwin, that “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.” [17]
One will find colors organized in grids in the previous technical literature: square ones, round ones, triangular. But one won’t find the use of grids in the manner that they are employed here…analogous to the arrangement of the rods and cones of the retina, or sensor in a digital camera, though at another resolution and just as subjective as the camera lens of photography. If the appearance of the grid in art was a unique declaration of modernity, as the eminent Rosalind Krause theorizes, “appearing nowhere, nowhere at all in the art of [the 19th century]”, then maybe in retrospect Vanderpoel’s grids could be considered a candidate for such an appearance . [18]
It wouldn’t be until a few years after the 1902 publication of Color Problems that artists and designers, from diverse locations and disciplines would coalesce, using abstraction as a lingua franca in their quest to give a visual language to their shared experience, renouncing representation and declaring themselves, their art and their era “modern.” [19]
It took until the 1929 founding of the Bauhaus in Germany before such approaches to art, craft, and design pedagogy were systematically developed into an institutional force. The Bauhaus entirely changed the landscape of art and design, and its influence is in part why it’s possible for us to now see Vanderpoel’s remarkable works in a way she herself could not, though her passion and pleasure in the work is plainly apparent. [20]
We don’t know if any of the later modernists knew of this work, although running across it in a library was a distinct possibility, especially in an English-speaking country. It doesn’t appear in the library records of the Bauhaus, nor of the American experimental design school Black Mountain College, for instance. Renowned artist and color teacher Josef Albers, whose works have such an affinity for work like Vanderpoel’s, was inspired by but not beholden to the same color theory sources that she was: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Michel Eugène Chevruel, James Clerk Maxwell, and Ogden Rood—her colleague in the Watercolor Club whose color science influenced Georges Seurat as well as Wilhelm Ostwald at the Bauhaus.
How the book was received in its time is unknown, other than appreciative reviews by booksellers. It doesn’t appear to have had much influence on its stated lay audience. The numerous color plates made it expensive and in its two printings the book seems to have been distributed mainly to collectors and institutional libraries. Complete printing records and whatever correspondence [21] that may have remained from the process of its publication and distribution were lost to the blitz of World War II at the London-based publisher. What records there may be of Boston publishing partner Rockwell and Churchill Press also haven’t been found [22].
Vanderpoel went on painting conventionally representational watercolors, never again producing abstractions like those found in Color Problems. She did not write of them again, or exhibit them in an art context that we know of. A 1927 watercolor of black cubic automobiles jostling up and down a rainy Fifth Avenue under the direction of its first traffic lights does seem to bear some fruit of the Analyses. [23]
A series of photographs taken after her 1907 move from Park Avenue to a townhouse on Gramercy Park reveals something of a dual nature in the character of Vanderpoel. There was a Downstairs Emily and an Upstairs Emily. While the photos documenting the downstairs salon are furnished in a respectable unassuming period correctness, the photographs of her fourth floor studio reveal a private world entirely different.
Dressed in a full-length silk Chinese robe, her hand resting on a stone carved elephant trunk supporting the mantelpiece, Vanderpoel presides over a large bear skin rug. The room’s walls carry an oceanic theme adorned by fields of shell-encrusted panels framed by finely crafted Japanese-inspired woodwork. The aperture of the large square skylight above is draped with finely woven fish netting. A winsome expression is on her face.
This lovely, mysterious book is an introduction to that colorful upstairs world, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, and her eye-opening, all but forgotten work.
Alan Bruton, 2018
Notes:
1. Regarded as the first structure of national importance to be designed by a woman and run by women. Designed by Boston architect Sophia Hayden, with the program curated by the Board of Lady Managers, which included women of both the progressively conservative rear-guard and the progressively liberal vote-getting avant-guard. See Weimann, Jeanne M. The Fair Women: [the Story of the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893]. Chicago: Academy, 1981. Across the Exposition, the top 20 percent of exhibitors in each category were awarded the bronze medal. In the Woman’s Building this grouping was in the Hall of Honor. See World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893 : Official Catalogue : pt. XIV, Woman’s Building, Pg 45.
2. The painting The Spirit of the 19th Century is in the collection of the Litchfield Historical Society.
3. This painting is referred to in Vanderpoel’s New York Times obituary as well as in a letter from a descendant to a researcher in the 1970’s.
4. Lynne Brickman, PhD., conversation, 2010. Dr. Brickman discovered the destruction of the personal effects during research on Vanderpoel in conversation with a descendant.
5. In Lynne Brickman’s essay in the catalog of the Litchfield Historical Society 1993 exhibition To Ornament their Minds: Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy 1792-1823, p.36, we learn that “every hour of the week must be occupied” for the young women of the academy that Vanderpoel admiringly documented in Chronicles of a Pioneer School. “Inclined to be a tartar, but she knew what she was doing.” was the opinion of William Lampson Warren, 1896/1998, a longtime Connecticut resident and former director of the Litchfield Historical Society. Documented in 1971 Letter the Dr Clark S Marlor of Adelphi University.
6. Her primary known philanthropy, very substantial, was for the Litchfield Historical Society. In Litchfield she helped organize the local chapter of the D.A.R. (Daughters of the American Revolution) in 1899, and her continuous work on the documenting of girl’s education and particularly their education in the arts and crafts is thoroughly demonstrated in the two volumes of her books Chronicles of a Pioneer School and in her book American Lace and Lace Makers. She donated most of her large collection of artifacts to the Slater Museum in Norwich, Connecticut. The Litchfield Historical Society received much of her ceramic collection.
7. The public record shows Emily Noyes (1842-1938) married John Aaron Vanderpoel (1842-1866), the youngest of the prominent Kinderhook, NY family, 22 May 1865. He died 12 April 1866 before the birth of their son John Arent Vanderpoel,
