What is, for you, the most important in art: line or colour?

Drawing could be the most genuine expression of an artist: there are no masks, no disguises, no obstacles between the artist and his brush. It is where creators are the most vulnerable and exposed.“If we master a bit of drawing, everything else is possible,” said the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966), the master of endless lines in the 20th century. Colours, on the other hand, may catch the eye even before one realises the content of an image. They are responsible for bringing mood, atmosphere, depth, and light to artworks.“Colour is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me,”defended the celebrated American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986).

Believe it or not, one of the most remarkable quarrels in Western art history was exactly about the supremacy of colour versus line in painting. The so-called Querelle du coloris [Dispute on colour] which took place in the 1670s, led the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, in Paris, to embark on a fierce theoretical dispute. Painters split into the Rubénistes (inclined towards the works of Peter Paul Rubens) and the Poussinistes (who were partial to the works of Nicolas Poussin). The first group believed that colour was superior as it was more true to nature. According to them, drawing appealed only to a few experts whereas colour reflected emotions and could be enjoyed by everyone. The second group, which considered form to be more valuable, defended thinking before acting. To them, the use of lines to depict form was the essential skill of painting, and colour was purely decorative. A 17th century dispute that actually drove scholars mad.

In those days, academies were dogmatic training programmes that provided artists with a regular exhibition venue. According to art historian Michael Driskel,“the development of academic theory was predicated on the notion that painting was a‘discipline’governed by rules that could be defined and taught.”Today,art is everywhere to be seen and created. Decentralisation and nonhierarchical are the order of the day.

This exhibition revisits the quarrel in relation to contemporary times. A Controversial Affair gathers works by ten contemporary urban artists who deal with various expanded forms of painting, and are influenced daily by the harmony and confrontation of line and colour. The majority of these artists started their practice in the streets of the world, writing their names on walls. The line is essential in graffiti art, a rapid signature inscribed on the landscape. With its development, colour started being added, becoming crucial, notably on train graffiti, evolving into the creation of murals, where line and colour started blending.

In 1678, colour won. Emotion, and not rationality, was the order of the day. To the Western world, it meant that painting started to be more accessible to people outside the Academy, an important first step towards the openness of the art world. Today, the accessibility of the contemporary art world is another controversial affair. A discussion that is an integral part of urban art.

Nearly four centuries after the Querelle du coloris, your opinion is all- important: do you choose line, colour... or both?