Introduced in Germany, in 1932, by Hungarian-born Béla Gáspár (1898–1973) and his brother Imre, Gasparcolor quickly captured the attention of avant-garde filmmakers such as Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye and Alexander Alexeïeff, with its vibrant hues, becoming a popular choice for animation films in the 1930s.

Gasparcolor's technological roots can be traced back to experiments exploring the silver dye bleach process for still photography, first theorized in the writings of R. E. Liesegang in 1889 and elaborated upon by Karl Schinzel, for his process Katachromie, and by Danish inventor Jens Herman Christensen. However, it was Béla Gáspár and his brother Imre who founded the company Gasparcolor Naturwahre Farbenfilme GmbH in Berlin in 1930 and patented Gasparcolor in Germany in 1932, making it the first viable silver dye bleach process for color cinematography. In order to achieve this, Gasparcolor initiated an important collaboration with Geyer-Werke AG, a well-known film factory and film services provider in Berlin.

At the time of Gasparcolor’s introduction in Germany at the beginning of the 1930s, several companies and inventors were keen to develop a new and reliable color film technology to compete with the American Technicolor and to demonstrate German technological prowess. This resulted in a series of color film processes being developed in Germany in the 1930s, amongst which were Berthon-Siemens, Agfacolor Neu and Pantachrom. 

The 1920s and 1930s also witnessed an increased intensity in experimental and avant-garde filmmaking, with artists exploring the fusion of color, motion and music to create a "Gesamtkunstwerk" – that is, a total work of art comprising different art forms – following the artistic and sometimes spiritual concept of “synesthesia” (the simultaneous perception of multiple sensory stimuli in one gestalt experience). In this artistic context, Gasparcolor became a fruitful tool for avant-garde filmmakers, including Oskar Fischinger whose films, such as Kreise (1933), exemplified the synergy of visual and auditory elements. 

As a result, Gasparcolor found its place in advertising, a burgeoning industry that provided avant-garde filmmakers with a commercial platform for creative experimentation, and particularly for animation. A second Gasparcolor company, the Gasparcolor Werbefilme GmbH, was founded in order to focus on the production of advertising films. With growing implementation, the process’ success extended beyond Germany, reaching the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and France, where artists such as George Pal and Alexander Alexeïeff embraced the process. Consequently, Gasparcolor was able to rapidly expand. In 1934 the subsidiary Gasparcolor Ltd. was founded in London, managed by Adrian Klein (later Adrian Cornwell-Clyne). After leaving Germany, Gáspár himself ran a laboratory in Luxemburg until 1940, when he emigrated to the United States.

However, live-action films presented challenges for Gasparcolor due to lengthy exposure times required for the successive capture of color separations, resulting in color fringing on moving subjects. Consequently, Gasparcolor was rarely used for live-action films, with Adrien Klein's documentary Colour on the Thames (1936) being the only known surviving live-action Gasparcolor film. Importantly, however, Klein shot this film with a beam-splitter camera, thus avoiding successive photography with its associated issues to a certain extent.

In Germany, experiments with a beam-splitter camera were also underway in the mid-1930s, with two live-action shorts produced in 1938 by Epoche-Gasparcolor –  only the first, Erinnerungen vor dem Spiegel (1938), a commercial, was publicly presented, while the second, a short musical revue, was never screened. According to archival sources, the beam-splitter camera used for these two films had been produced by a Dr. Asche, who was working for the Paris-based arm of Paramount as a color film specialist.

At the same time, the political climate in Germany shifted dramatically after 1933, with the Nazi regime targeting both Jewish filmmakers and the artistic avant-garde as part of its propaganda efforts. Labelled “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art), modernist and avant-garde art was declared to be un-German, Jewish or Marxist. In 1936 all modernist art was banned and, in 1937, the exhibition Entartete Kunst in Munich presented 650 examples of confiscated art before the artworks were hidden, sold or destroyed. The escalating political situation prompted dozens of members of the film industry, including Béla Gáspár and Oskar Fischinger, to leave the country.

In 1935, the Gasparcolor company was merged with Werbefilm-Epoche, creating the company Epoche-Gasparcolor, and ‘Germanized’ – after which Béla Gáspár had no formal ties to the German Gasparcolor companies. Press reports of a Gasparcolor film demonstration later the same year emphasize that Gasparcolor was a German process, invented and implemented by Germans (Orosz, 2012: p. 349), temporarily erasing Gáspár from the process’ history. 

Another significant hurdle for Gasparcolor was a protracted patent dispute with Agfa, a regime-linked company owned by I. G. Farben, the largest German chemical conglomerate and producer of film and photography supplies. The dispute lasted nearly a decade, with both companies objecting to the other's patents, as Agfa's experimentation with dye bleach processes, which at least partially informed Agfa’s process Pantachrom, paralleled Gáspár's work, leading to ongoing dispute that fundamentally hindered the further development of Gasparcolor. This was particularly delicate as Gasparcolor was dependent on Agfa’s Tripofilm raw stock for its film prints.

With the outbreak of the World War II, the introduction of Agfa's chromogenic process Agfacolor Neu in 1939, and the repression of avant-garde filmmaking in Germany, Gasparcolor began to fade. The ongoing patent dispute in Germany, and the competition's continued efforts to discredit Gasparcolor, culminated in the cessation of production in the early 1940s. Béla Gáspár moved to the United States, where he continued his research into color film and photography, but was unable to commercialize his inventions – ultimately, he resolved to sell his patents to Technicolor. Subsequently, both a two- and three-color version of Gasparcolor was briefly promoted in the United States, but this seems to have been a very short-lived venture, and very little documentation of this phase exists today (Wyckoff, 1941: p. 510).

However, from the 1960s onwards, based on Gáspár’s previous work, the Swiss company Ciba implemented a silver dye-bleach process for still photography under the names Cibachrome and Ilfochrome, in collaboration with Ilford. The process was developed by Gáspár's former collaborator Paul Dreyfus, who joined Ciba AG after Gáspár's death and used the expired Gasparcolor patents to develop Cibachrome (Fazekas, 2022: p. 125).