Liking of art and the perception of color.

Abstract

Color has been a defining feature of paintings throughout art history. Despite the great diversity in the use of color between epochs, there are some surprisingly stable and unifying features in chromatic properties across visual artworks. For example, artists' palettes seem to be biased toward the yellow-red range of the spectrum. Here, we assess the impact of a holistic color manipulation (i.e., rotating the color gamut) on aesthetic liking and perceived colorfulness of abstract paintings. We presented 6 versions each of 100 abstract artworks that differed only in the rotational degree of their color gamut within the CIELAB space. Results indicated a very stable preference for the original color compositions-both on a participant level and on an item level. Furthermore, participants perceived original color compositions as more colorful than rotated versions. This effect remained robust even when the exact number of different colors-among other chromatic features-was taken into account in covariate analyses. Thus, it seems that original color compositions are inherently special. Specifically, it seems that the aesthetic appeal of original artworks arises from nontrivial color features, which are characterized by their distribution within the visible spectrum. We assume that the rotation manipulation may change the perception of some colors more strongly than others due to differences in sensitivity of our visual system to these hues. We discuss these findings with respect to category-specific color perception, which may be a potential contender for a neurobiological foundation of the observed effects. Public Significance StatementHuman viewers are surprisingly good at spotting color changes of artistic color compositions. It is still unclear which color characteristics they use for this ability. We systematically manipulated the color of abstract artworks and measured its effect on participants' preferences and perception of colorfulness. We used abstract art because it does not contain any objects that are associated with particular colors. First, we found a systematic shift of artistic original palettes into the yellow-orange color range. Further, participants preferred original artistic palettes, as well as perceiving them as more colorful than manipulated artworks. Even slight changes in the color makeup out of this yellow-orange hue range was connected to decreased liking and colorfulness. Our study provides further evidence that the composition of abstract art is far from random: artists seem to intuitively pick up color features in their art that are optimized for our natural perception of different color categories.

Swipes and Saves: A Taxonomy of Factors Influencing Aesthetic Assessments and Perceived Beauty of Mobile Phone Photographs

“… Nascimento et al (2017) found that viewers prefer the original colors in abstract paintings over rotated color versions, and found that artists’ color palettes throughout different epochs were dominated by the yellow-red range of the spectrum (cf. Altmann et al, 2021 , for related results). There has been a long tradition to believe that (all or at least most) people appreciate certain colors more than others, but there is also strong evidence that color preference has a lot to do with cultural background providing associations and a history of individual learning.…”

Regularity of colour statistics in explaining colour composition preferences in art paintings

“…Another possible factor could be the perceived richness of colour (how many colours participants perceived). However, no evident correlation has been found between preference and colour richness; people do not simply prefer colourful paintings 20 . A recent study 23 focusing on the colour statistics of landscape paintings and photographs found significant correlations between colour statistics and visual aesthetics responses, although the authors tested only a limited number of images (15 paintings and 15 photographs).…”

“…These studies manipulated only colour composition by rotating the three-dimensional colour volume of unfamiliar paintings. Observers were asked to adjust the hue angle to obtain the best subjective visual impression 18 , to select their preference among pairs of hue-rotated versions of the same painting 19 , 21 , or to rate their personal evaluation of each original or hue-rotated painting presented 20 . Despite the minor differences in methodology, these studies commonly found that observers typically prefer a chromatic composition very close to the original, rather than one that is hue-rotated, even in the case of non-figurative or spatially scrambled paintings 19 , or patchwork images comprising different art paintings 21 .…”

Universality and superiority in preference for chromatic composition of art paintings

“…Since art paintings generally contain numerous colors, there is a tremendous gap between preferences for a single color and a range of colors, it seems futile to approach color preference in art paintings. However, more recent studies 45 – 47 have measured observers’ preferences for color composition by rotating the color gamut within the CIELAB color space. In these studies, observers were asked to adjust the hue angle of the color gamut of unfamiliar paintings to obtain the best subjective visual impression or to select the preferred one among pairs of hue-rotated versions of the same painting.…”