Cinéma, couleur, mouvement. Kinémacolor et abstraction

Abstract

The 1910s witnessed the birth of abstraction, a crucial historical turning point of the 20th Century in art: in abstraction the double problematic of color and movement played a major role and was simultaneous to other explorations of the same questionings: 1) the chromatic organ shows; the discovery of cinema by some artists was expressed through the re- alization of the first abstract movies and 3) the success of Kinemacolor, the first commercially exploited cinematic process with natural colors. This article intends to reestablish the historical connections amongst those events and to develop some of their aesthetic and epistemological consequences.