Charles Blanc

Charles -Alexandre -Philippe -Auguste Blanc ( born November 17 1813 in Castres, France, † January 7, 1882 in Paris) was a French art historian and critic and brother of Louis Blanc.

Blanc studied until 1835 in Paris at the engravers Paolo Mercuri and Luigi Calamatta. In 1845 he published his work Histoire des peintres français du dix- neuvième siècle, in which he criticized the contemporary painting.

After the February Revolution of 1848 in France Blanc was until 1850 Director of the Department of Fine Arts in Paris Interior Ministry. He laid down the policies of government arts funding. Its objectives were, among others, the democratization and popularization of art. So he promoted, for example, the painting of stations, the event artistic festivals and the decoration of the Pantheon.

From 1848 to 1876 he worked on his book Histoire de toutes les écoles of peintres, in which he collected biographies of the most important painters of European schools. In 1859 he founded the first international art magazine Gazette des Beaux -Arts and was its editor.

From 1870 to 1873 Charles Blanc was again director of the Department of Fine Arts. After the end of his political activities he designed in 1879 a new color system, with which he wanted to explore the possibilities of simultaneous contrast and the optical mixture and which became the basis for the pointillism. This color system he worked in his last work, Grammaire des Arts du Dessin, which appeared in French and English.