Poser la couleur : le Centre Pompidou Mobile, la coloration des murs et l’anthropologie

Abstract

Based on a cross-examination of scholarly literature on antique and industrial polychromy and data from a fieldwork about a contemporary architecture that takes its distances from the functional colors of modernist architecture, this paper examines how an ethnographic approach to colorist practices reveals a widely undervalued historiography on colorist art in modern architecture. In reviewing the interviews I had with Patrick Bouchain and Daniel Buren about their ideas about coloring of walls and in comparing their answers to the nineteenth-century european theorists, I address the delicate question of the coloring of the Center Pompidou Mobile. Is it a « decorative » approach ?

Keywords

• color
• polychrome
• architecture
• decorative art
• contemporary art