Periodic Tales

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  There the matter rested until news of the tests was released thirty years later, prompting fears that real dangers had been covered up. An independent report published in 2002 suggested that the risk to the public from exposure to the cadmium pigment was equivalent to what one might inhale in any city in the space of a few weeks or, less reassuringly, to smoking a hundred cigarettes, and ‘should not have resulted in adverse health effects in the United Kingdom population’. A few years later, a Norwich surgeon reawakened public anxiety by suggesting that the above-average levels of oesophagal cancer that he had observed in the area might be attributable to cadmium. A Ministry of Defence spokeswoman was reported in the Norwich Evening News declaring in response that the trial materials were ‘harmless stimulants’ (an imaginative oxymoron–she presumably said, or should have said, ‘simulants’). The cancer incidence was subsequently shown to be in line with what would be expected when the age and general health of the population were taken into account. In the end, the greatest actual risk may have been to the official monitors of the tests from the ultraviolet light under which they worked in order to count the fluorescent particles.

  Wandering the narrow lanes of this tranquil city, with its shops devoted to music and alternative remedies, it is hard to see why it should be singled out for such an odious exercise. In fact, the ministry had first chosen Salisbury to host the trials, but it had been found too small and too hilly to produce the required thermal effect in the city air. In Norwich, I stop outside one of the numerous artists’ suppliers. There, flaunting their sunflower brilliance for all to see, are tubes of cadmium sulphide paint for anyone to buy, and in doses far greater than were ever dropped from any plane upon an unsuspecting populace. All you have to do is to go in and ask.

  Seeing these vivid cadmium paints forces me to consider how hard it is to describe colours at all. Our vocabulary of colour is severely limited. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet doesn’t begin to cover it when the average eye can discriminate several million tones. (Scientists use a particularly dodgy-sounding unit, the ‘just noticeable difference’, as a measure of this magnificent human capacity.) These seven colours of the rainbow tell us less about colour than they do about our laziness when it comes to naming it.

  Global brands like BP and Coca-Cola cling to these primaries because it is easier to defend ‘ownership’ of them than subtle, in-between shades for which there is no agreed word. Beyond this there is no language of pure colour. All we can do is adopt qualifiers–light, dark, dull, greenish and so on–or seek likenesses in things that characteristically have the colour we are trying to describe. These may come from nature–primrose, say, or kingfisher blue–and sometimes they come directly from the elements themselves, as with chrome yellow or cobalt blue. But correct interpretation depends on shared cultural ground. ‘Pillar-box red’ is only that particular shade of red, or for that matter red at all, if you live where the pillar boxes actually are red, and where, furthermore, everybody is familiar with them. More often, the terms are hopelessly vague–sky blue, let’s say–or if not, esoterically precise, such as the artists’ paint called Mummy Brown, which fell rapidly out of fashion when people realized that it truly was made from ground-up Egyptian mummies.

  I find myself growing more attuned to these nuances of semantics and visual perception on a tour of the artists’ paint manufacturer (or ‘colourmen’, as they are known in the trade) Winsor & Newton. Peter Waldron, the company’s chief chemist, tells me how khaki came up in conversation one day among the many nationalities who work at the company’s Harrow factory. The British staff thought they knew exactly what it meant since khaki is famously the colour of British army uniforms. I thought I did too, until I looked it up later in my dictionary and found it described as ‘a light yellowish brown’–I had it down more as a muddy grey-green. The Indian workers were sure of their answer too, since khaki is a Hindi word meaning dust-coloured. But the French and Chinese employees were understandably more perplexed.

  Such difficulties are compounded when it comes to the invention of new colours, which is an important aspect of Winsor & Newton’s work. William Winsor and Henry Newton founded the business in 1832 with an innovative range of moist watercolour pigments that were easier for artists to use. The company has supplied John Constable and most British artists ever since. These days, artists’ paints are a tiny part of the market for pigments, and research is limited to harnessing technology from other fields. ‘We borrow from every colour-using industry–ceramics, print inks, industrial paints, food, building materials,’ Peter tells me. The major effort is to replace pigments now known to be dangerously poisonous, such as those based on lead and arsenic and to some extent cadmium and chromium, with safer equivalents that artists find equal or superior to handle. ‘The challenge has been to produce a range of modern colours that can reproduce anything people have done in the past.’

  But artists are also interested in completely new colours. Metallic paints of the kind that have long been popular on cars are one fascination. Another wish is for ultra-bright colours that are lightfast, since most fluorescent pigments are inherently fugitive. For Winsor & Newton, it’s a matter of watching the big boys and waiting for the right moment. There is some advantage in being low down the pecking order as the colourmen can at least avoid others’ expensive mistakes. Peter tells me with some amusement of a bright yellow bismuth pigment enthusiastically taken up by the car industry. At first, it was not noticed how much the colour faded when exposed to the light because it faded evenly and returned to its former brightness when the light dimmed. The problem was only exposed when the test car was parked under a tree. By the time the driver returned, the finish could only be described as dappled.

  ‘Lonely-chrome America’

  In 1951, the Museum of Modern Art in New York put on an exhibition called ‘Eight Automobiles’. Reflecting the museum’s chronic fondness for European style and art, five of the eight were European designs of impeccable coachbuilding pedigree, supporting the curators’ thesis that cars were–or should be–‘rolling sculpture’. The remaining three provided a representative tableau of where American design then found itself: a voluptuous 1941 Lincoln Continental, the continent in question being not America but the very same Europe, where the company president had recently spent an eye-opening vacation; a 1937 Cord 812 Sedan, which made up with chromium crusting what it lacked in fine lines; and an army Jeep as a functional alternative for those immune to the siren call of curves and glitter.

  Preparation for the exhibition had begun the previous year with a conference on automobile design at which one of the curators, the architect Philip Johnson, announced–guiltily, you imagine, as if at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous–that he owned a brand-new Buick. Buick was the brashest of the model lines manufactured by General Motors, which also controlled the Cadillac and Chevrolet brands: ‘looks like a Jet Plane, travels the same way’, promised one advertisement at the time. Johnson’s car ran well enough, he confessed, but he was embarrassed by the gaudy look of the thing, especially when he was with his Europhile friends, who drove cars like the British MG. So in order not to offend their sensibilities or his own, he had instructed that the decorative chrome components be stripped from it.

  How can one metal induce such rapture and such distaste? Though discovered as early as 1798 by Nicolas-Louis Vauquelin, chromium only became popular during the 1920s, when electroplating became widespread. Until then, nickel had been favoured for this finishing treatment. A surface layer of nickel has a gentle yellow glow, but polished chromium produces a chill blue-white colour and a piercing shine. Chrome-plated objects such as lamps and furniture were a striking feature at the influential 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, and the metal thereafter became part of the visual grammar of the Art Deco movement. It was the perfect gloss for brittle times. In A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece of interwar manners, Mrs Beaver’s incessant urge
to redecorate other people’s homes invariably involves a liberal application of chromium.

  The glamorous new metal lent itself equally well to luxurious interiors and practical household objects. It provided the key signature of Art Deco extravaganzas like the Strand Palace Hotel in London. But modernist designers too made abundant use of chrome, gainsaying the puritanism so often ascribed to them. At the Bauhaus in Weimar, the artist László Moholy-Nagy brought revolution to the metal workshop, forcing its smiths to shift ‘from wine jugs to lighting fixtures’, abandoning craftwork in silver and gold to embrace steel, nickel and chrome-plate in designs for mass production. The skinny cruciform columns of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion of 1929–the most opulent and sensual of all temporary exhibition structures–were chrome-plated, as was much of the furniture that he designed.

  The unattainable glamour of these designs, signified by their abundance of shining surfaces, merely whetted the appetite of consumers. When Parisian art deco crossed the Atlantic, to be effortlessly co-opted into the more egalitarian spirit of what America knew as the Machine Age, chrome travelled too (in style, aboard ocean liners like the Normandie), and was used to adorn luxury home appliances and other big-ticket items. It was not until after the Second World War that the ability to produce plate with a durable and appealing finish led to the extravagant use of chrome in many more products.

  Chrome quickly became the metallic element most closely identified with the booming consumer society. It radiated modernity, glamour, excitement and speed. But it had something else too. Unlike aluminium, another material in fashion at this time, which shares some of these associations because of its lightness, chromium was seen almost always in the form of plate, and so began also to connote superficiality. For a while, though, its bright shine was enough to obliterate any doubt people might have had and give them what they craved in their lives after the Depression and the war–a little affordable lustre.

  Nowhere was the consumption of chromium more conspicuous than in the automobile industry. Although the trend was global during the 1950s and 1960s, it was American cars above all that became the bejewelled emblems of the period. The man chiefly responsible for the grinning grilles and bulging bumpers and the tail fins that grew higher year by year was Harley Earl, the ‘da Vinci of Detroit’. Brought into General Motors to head the corporation’s newly created Art and Color Section, Earl injected Hollywood into Motown and became the acknowledged pioneer of automobile styling, exerting huge influence over General Motors’ entire range of Buick, Cadillac, Pontiac and Chevrolet models. He counted Cecil B. DeMille among his acquaintances, and it soon began to show, as he introduced the concept of the ‘new model year’, which guaranteed his design team permanent work with its irresistible formula of change for change’s sake leading to a spectacular unveiling each fall. As with the evolution of the peacock, the only path after a while was towards greater and greater excess, which meant more and more chrome. Iconoclastic gestures by puritanical museum curators were never going to be able to call a halt.

  Chromium became the international calling card of American plenty. In the showstopper from Leonard Bernstein’s and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story, the Puerto Rican girls sing:

  Automobile in America

  Chromium steel in America

  Wire-spoke wheel in America

  Very big deal in America!

  One of the girls, Rosalia, loves American things as much as the rest but pines for home, and dreams:

  I’ll drive a Buick through San Juan.

  Half a world away, the flash of chromium on cars is an index of the growing American presence in pre-war Shanghai in J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. China’s alliance with America is indicated by the Kuomintang pennant flying from the chromium mast of a Chrysler limousine. And when a mysterious ‘Eurasian’ appears near the end of the book to release Jim, the boy who is the autobiographical central character, from the stadium where he has been held with hundreds of prisoners of war, it is noted that ‘He spoke with a strong but recently acquired American accent, which Jim assumed he had learned while interrogating captured American aircrews. He wore a chromium wristwatch…’ The American impersonation is as disposable as the trophy watch.

  The meanings of chromium have grown more numerous and ambiguous over time. But designers consciously employed the metal above all to convey a sense of speed–even sometimes on things that never went anywhere, like mechanical pencil sharpeners. Harley Earl’s stylists streaked their Buicks and Cadillacs with fulgent fairings and elaborate horizontal corrugations guaranteed to catch the light and beam it into the eyes of admiring observers. The missile-shaped headlight mountings and stabbing ailerons were chromed too, their lines plainly intended to suggest not only speed but also an aggressive virility. These were definitely cars ‘For the man of Success’ in the words of one Buick advertisement of the 1950s. (The male characteristics formed in chrome find their female counterpart in the painted curves of the bodywork, making these designs into fully conceived hermaphroditic sex machines.)

  The link between shiny metal and speed is apparently a permanent one. In the story of Phaëthon’s chariot in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Phaëthon begs to borrow his father’s car which he promptly crashes in flames. Its

  axle and pole were constructed of gold, and golden too was the rim encircling the wheels, which were fitted with spokes of silver.

  Inaptly enough, one of the 1937 Cords was named the ‘Super-charged Phaeton’.

  This tendency reaches an explosive apotheosis in Crash, J. G. Ballard’s disturbing novel in which car crashes–imagined and staged–are explored as a fetish to produce sexual arousal. Chromium serves as a stimulus throughout, providing first the prism through which erotic visions are glimpsed–‘In the chromium ashtray I saw the girl’s left breast and erect nipple…Her sharp breasts flashed within the chromium and glass cage of the speeding car’–and then the weapon in scenes of increasingly appalling violence where the hard metal parts strike and penetrate flesh to generate sensations of sexual intensity. The harsh gleam of the metal is key. Ballard imagines ‘flashing lances’ of afternoon light reflected from chromium panels tearing at the skin, before moving on to ‘the partial mammoplasties of elderly housewives…carried out by the chromium louvres of windshield assemblies’ and ‘the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights’.

  In this critique of our unreasoning love of dangerous technology, chrome is merely the surface that first excites our lust. Crash was published in 1973, when the first oil crisis struck and the public passion for chrome on cars was already cooling. But by this time the metal had spread its influence well beyond Paris, Weimar and Detroit to become a powerful cipher for consumerism in general.

  A year or two after Philip Johnson stripped the chrome from his Buick, a group of artists and writers met at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Mayfair and resolved to take an unashamed look at the kind of thing that so offended him. The Independent Group, as it became known, counted among its founders the artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi and the critic Reyner Banham. They took a more forgiving view of technology and the growing culture of consumerism, and celebrated the pulp fiction, film, advertising and mass-manufactured products that the artistic establishment chose to ignore. They sought out items possessing what they called ‘symbolic content’ with the idea that this, rather than patrician good taste, was the key to making things people would actually like. At one meeting, Banham explicitly praised the styling coming out of Detroit. Later, he moved to Los Angeles, where he was finally obliged to learn to drive a car, an experience he likened to acquiring Italian in order to read Dante in the original.

  Richard Hamilton, one of the progenitors of Pop Art, periodically unveiled new paintings to fellow members of the group. These collage-like compositions began to incorporate the shapes of some of these shiny consumer goods. American cars were explicitly represented in works such as Hommage à Chrysler Co
rp. of 1957, whose pink and chrome mélange of sexual and machine parts simply accentuated the symbolism that was readily apparent in contemporary car advertisements. By replicating the lustre of the chrome in oil paint, Hamilton grouped himself with artists throughout the ages who have placed metal objects in their still lifes in order to demonstrate their mastery of optics and colour. But for Hamilton there was a paradox, for the greater the realism, the more the careful paint tones would imply a depth and solidity to the object. So in works where it was more important to remind the viewer of the essential superficiality of chrome plate, he made his own finishing touch superficial too, by pasting on pieces of metal foil.