Le laboratoire de la couleur

Ever since, as a 17 year old student at the school of the Gobelins, he fell into the Chevreul workshop, André Lemonnier pledged an exclusive passion to a demanding muse,color. As Goethe and Itten before him, he spent years writing up theories, inventing machines, as well as applying his knowledge to concrete inventions. He worked in particular on bringing color to industrial plants and corporate headquarters, as can be seen in the images of Socabu (a subsidiary of Exxon) with his shades of blues and greens, or the headquarters of Merlin Gerin. With an elder color artist, Jacques Fillacier, he invented in 1968 the Polyton, a diabolic machine, capable of producing 180 000 colors by optic mixing of moving disks. He also created a range of 222 colors, especially for Vasarely, and helped the RATP, Ricard as well as Béghin-Say to put some chrome in their installations. This book accompanies the donation of his fund to La Piscine in Roubaix, where an exhibition was recently dedicated to him, and it describes, in our civilization governed by «zapping», an unusual itinerary as it is totally focused on an objective.

• Le laboratoire de la couleur, by André Lemonnier, Gourcuff Gradenigo 2010, 144 p., 24 €