This year marks the centenary of a pivotal moment in modern art history—a turning point in the perception and application of colour that resonates with an obscure 17th-century masterpiece. In 1918, after a four-year break from painting, avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp created his final canvas, a work that transformed artistic thought on colour and image-making. Titled T um’, a curt abbreviation of the French phrase tu m’ennuies (meaning “you bore me”), the painting was a commission for the library of American art collector Katherine Dreier. After completing it, Duchamp never painted again, focusing instead on other artistic pursuits until his death in 1968.
The painting is unusual in its proportions—over 3 meters (9.4 feet) long but less than a meter tall—and it challenges traditional ideas of what a painting should be. The canvas features shadowy references to Duchamp’s earlier readymades, sculptures made from everyday objects like a hat rack, corkscrew, and bicycle wheel. Alongside these ghostly silhouettes lie real-world items, including safety pins, a bolt, and a bottle-cleaning brush. Yale University notes that T um’ “summarises different ways in which a work of art can suggest reality: as shadow, imitation, or actual object.”
What makes T um’ truly revolutionary is the cascade of colourful, lozenge-shaped tiles that sweep across the painting like a mechanical comet’s tail. Today, this arrangement is reminiscent of the colour swatches found in any DIY store, but in 1918, such pigment samples were still a novelty. These vibrant tiles exist in a liminal space between tangible objects waiting to be painted and the abstract realm of imagination, where they could become any colour. Duchamp presented colour not as a feeling to be experienced but as a conceptual and aspirational commodity—a bold departure from the 19th-century theories of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Michel Eugène Chevreul, who focused on the human perception of colour.
Duchamp’s ideas foreshadowed a shift in how artists approached colour in the 20th century, influencing figures like Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Ellsworth Kelly, and Gerhard Richter. His vision also predated the commercialisation of colour epitomised by Pantone’s influential 1963 colour-matching system, which, along with Josef Albers’ Interaction of Colour, underscored the divide between seeing colour as an artistic craft or as a manufactured product.
But the roots of Duchamp’s chromatic revolution stretch further back, connecting to an extraordinary 800-page book from 1692, Klaer lightende Spiegel der Verfkonst. Created by a mysterious Dutch author known only as A. Boogert, the book is a meticulous guide to mixing and creating an astonishing array of watercolour shades. Intended as a practical manual for artists, this handwritten and hand-painted tome remained largely unknown until its rediscovery in 2014 by Dutch medievalist Erik Kwakkel, who shared it on his blog, reviving interest in this historical lexicon of luminosity.
By linking his modern innovation to a centuries-old tradition, Duchamp’s T um’ serves as a bridge between past and present, highlighting how the concept of colour as both an artistic and commercial tool has evolved. His work remains a testament to the enduring influence of colour theory, from Boogert’s painstaking recipes for tints to the sleek, systematic palettes of today’s creative industries.
