The Secret Lives of Color

by Kassia St. Clair

  For their part, early artists had a very different relationship with their colors than modern artists. Because some colorants reacted with others, artists had to plan their compositions bearing potentially ruinous combinations in mind, ensuring that none overlapped or appeared next to each other. Most pigments were made by hand, either by the artists themselves or with the help of apprentices in their studios. Depending on the pigment, this could require grinding down rocks to powder, or the handling of technically challenging or poisonous raw ingredients. Pigments could also be obtained from specialists, including alchemists and apothecaries. Later, those who produced and traded in colors were known as colormen, and procured rare pigments from across the globe.

  It was only relatively late in the nineteenth century that artists really benefited from a proliferation of ready-made pigments (and even then these weren’t always reliable). Cheap compounds, such as cerulean, chrome orange, and cadmium yellow, freed artists from either pestles or unscrupulous colormen who sold unstable mixes that would discolor within weeks or react with other colors, or the canvas itself. Coupled with the invention of collapsible metal paint tubes in 1841, the new colors allowed artists to work outside and douse their canvases with the brightest pigments anyone had ever seen. It is small wonder critics were initially unsure: this was color as it had never been seen before, and it was dazzling.

  Too often histories of color—what few there are—are limited to the most recent periods and to artistic matters, which is very reductive. The history of painting is one thing, the history of colors is another—and altogether more vast.

  Michel Pastoureau, 2015

  Vintage paint charts

  Mapping color

  In the dying years of the seventeenth century, a Dutch artist called A. Boogert made a concerted attempt to pin all known colors down. In a volume containing over 800 hand-painted swatches glossed with spidery black labels, Boogert described how to mix an array of watercolor tints, from the palest sea foam to deepest viridian. He is far from the only person to have attempted to catalog all known tints, shades, and hues. Scientists, artists, designers, and linguists have all spent time trying to chart courses through color space, and assign plot points with names, codes, or grid references. Pantone’s index-card-style chips are the most famous modern solution to the problem of locking precise shades across linguistic and cultural divides, but it is only one in a long line of such efforts.

  Because colors exist as much in the cultural realm as they do physically, such attempts are somewhat Sisyphean. Take, for example, the idea that colors can be grouped into two camps, warm and cool. We would unhesitatingly say that red and yellow are warm, and green and blue are cool, but this division can only be traced back to the eighteenth century. There is evidence that in the Middle Ages blue was considered hot, even the hottest of colors.

  There are also discrepancies between the name a society gives a color and the actual color, and these can shift over time, like tectonic plates. Magenta [here], which is now considered a pink but was originally more purple-red, is one example. Others can be found among the wonderfully abstruse definitions in Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, published in 1961. Begonia is “a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral, bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than sweet William.” Lapis lazuli blue is “a moderate blue that is redder and duller than average copen and redder and deeper than azurite blue, Dresden blue, or pompadour.” The intention of these descriptions was not to send the reader on a wild definition-chase through the dictionary; they were probably the work of color expert Isaac H. Godlove, a consultant hired by the editor of Webster’s Third and the director of Munsell, a color-mapping company.5 The problem is that, fun as these entries are now, average coral, fiesta, and copen have largely lost their cultural currency—they don’t get the reader one iota closer to knowing what the color being defined actually looks like. By the same token, someone reading about avocado green in 100 years’ time might be equally mystified: Is it the dark color of the skin that’s meant? Or the clay green of the outer flesh? Or the butter tint near the seed? But for people today, avocado green [here] still has meaning.

  Over the course of time the margin for error becomes ever greater. Even when the documentary evidence, such as a painting, remains, we are often seeing it in lighting conditions entirely different from the ones it was created in. It’s the difference between looking at a house-paint sample on your computer screen, in the can at your local hardware store, and then on the walls in your home. Also, since many stable dyes and paints are recent innovations, the colors themselves may have deteriorated. Colors, therefore, should be understood as subjective cultural creations: you could no more meaningfully secure a precise universal definition for all the known shades than you could plot the coordinates of a dream.

  Savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colors.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1810

  Chromophilia, chromophobia

  Politics of color

  A certain distaste for color runs through Western culture like a ladder in a stocking. Many classical writers were dismissive. Color was a distraction from the true glories of art: line and form. It was seen as self-indulgent and, later, sinful: a sign of dissimulation and dishonesty. The bluntest expression of this comes from the nineteenth-century American writer Herman Melville, who wrote that colors “are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like a harlot.”6 But arguments like these are very old indeed. The Protestants, for example, expressed their intellectual simplicity, severity, and humility in a palette dominated by black and white; bright colors like red, orange, yellow, and blue were removed both from the walls of their churches and from their wardrobes. The pious Henry Ford steadfastly refused for many years to bow to consumer demand and produce cars in any color other than black.

  In art, the tussle over the respective merits of disegno (drawing) versus colore (color) raged on through the Renaissance and, although somewhat muted, continues into the present day. Disegno represented purity and intellect; colore, the vulgar and effeminate. In an imperious essay from 1920, tellingly entitled “Purism,” the architect Le Corbusier and his colleague wrote:

  [I]n a true and durable plastic work, it is form which comes first, and everything else should be subordinated to it ... [Cézanne] accepted without examination the attractive offer of the color-vendor, in a period marked by a fad for color-chemistry, a science with no possible effect on great painting. Let us leave to the clothes-dyers the sensory jubilations of the paint tube.7

  Even among those who accepted the value of color, the ways in which they were conceptualized and ordered had an impact on their relative importance. The ancient Greeks saw colors running along a continuum from white to black: yellow was a little darker than white and blue was a little lighter than black. Red and green were in the middle. Medieval writers had great faith in this light-to-dark schema too. It was only in the seventeenth century that the idea emerged of red, yellow, and blue as primary colors, and green, orange, and purple as secondary ones. Most iconoclastic of all was Newton and his spectrum, an idea that he wrote about in 1704 in Opticks. This was hugely influential: suddenly white and black were no longer colors; the spectrum no longer ran from light to dark. Newton’s color wheel also imposed order on the relationship between complementary colors. These were color pairs—for example, green and red, blue and orange—that were found to resonate strongly with each other when placed side by side. The idea of complementary colors would prove to have a profound effect on the art that followed; artists including Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch used them to give structure and add drama to their paintings.

  As colors came to take on meanings and cultural significance within societies, attempts were made to restrict their use. The most notorious expression
of this phenomenon was through the sumptuary laws. While these were passed in ancient Greece and Rome, and examples can be found in ancient China and Japan, they found their fullest expression in Europe from the mid-twelfth century, before tailing off again in the early modern period. Such laws could touch on anything from diet to dress and furnishings, and sought to enforce social boundaries by encoding the social strata into a clear visual system: the peasants, in other words, should eat and dress like peasants; craftsmen should eat and dress like craftsmen; and so on. Color was a vital signifier in this social language—dull, earthy colors like russet [here] were explicitly confined to the meanest rural peasants, while bright, saturated ones like scarlet [here] were the preserve of a select few.

  It is the best possible sign of a color when nobody who sees it knows what to call it.

  John Ruskin, 1859

  Colorful language

  Do words shape the shades we see?

  It was a stern-faced British politician who first noticed something awry with the colors in ancient Greek literature. William Ewart Gladstone was a devotee of the poet Homer and it was while he was preparing the definitive tract on his hero in 1858 that he stumbled across some psychedelic oddities. Brows could certainly be black metaphorically—in rage—but was honey really green? Or the sea “wine-dark,” the same color, bizarrely, as oxen, while sheep were violet? He decided to survey the Greek writer’s entire oeuvre for color references. Melas (black), it turned out, was by far the most frequently used, with around 170 mentions, and there were about 100 mentions of white. Next—a steep drop in frequency—erythros (red), which was used only 13 times, while yellow, green, and purple were all referenced fewer than 10 times. Blue was not mentioned once. To Gladstone it seemed there was one possible explanation: that the Greeks were, in effect, color-blind. Or, as he put it, more sensitive to the “modes and forms of light, and of its opposite . . . darkness” than they were to color.

  In fact, humans evolved the capacity to see in color several millennia earlier, so color blindness is not to blame. And it isn’t only the ancient Greeks who seem to talk about color in ways that feel unfamiliar. A decade later Lazarus Geiger, a German philosopher and philologist, began to examine other ancient languages. He pored over the Koran and the Bible in its original Hebrew; he studied ancient Chinese stories and Icelandic sagas. All exhibited the same muddled references to color and, as he noted in one much-quoted passage on Vedic chants from India, the same omission.

  These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and reddening of dawn’s play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and ether, all these are unfolded before us, again and again in splendor and vivid fullness. But there is one thing no one would ever learn from those ancient songs who did not already know it, and that is that the sky is blue.8

  When the word did appear, it evolved out of the words that had previously served either for green or, more commonly, black. Geiger believed he could trace humanity’s seeming sensitivity to different colors through the evolution of their languages. All started out with words for light and dark (or white and black); next came red, and then yellow, then green, then blue. A wider study conducted in the late 1960s by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay confirmed a similar sequence. This, it was believed, meant two things: the first was that color categories were innate; the second was that if we didn’t possess a word for a color, it affected our perception of it.

  However, a broader survey, conducted in the 1980s, revealed many exceptions: languages that didn’t necessarily “develop” in this way, and some that divide up color space entirely differently. Koreans, for example, have a word that distinguishes yellow green from regular green; Russians have different words for light and dark blue. A classic example is Himba, a language spoken by a tribe in southwest Africa, which splits the color spectrum into five slices. Another is Rennell-Bellona, a Polynesian language spoken on an atoll in the Solomon Islands, which roughly divides the spectrum up into white, dark, and red, where dark includes blue and green, and red includes yellow and orange.9

  The subsequent literature on the relationship between language, color, and culture is maddeningly inconclusive. One camp—the relativists—say that language influences or even shapes perception and that without a word for a color we don’t see it as distinct. The universalists, following Berlin and Kay, believe that basic color categories are universal and rooted, somehow, in our biology. What we can say for sure is that the language of color is tricky. Children who can discern the difference between a triangle and a square with ease may still struggle differentiating pink from red or orange. We also know that not having a separate word for something does not mean we can’t distinguish it. The Greeks, of course, could see colors perfectly; perhaps they just found them less interesting than we do.

  Lead white

  Ivory

  Silver

  Whitewash

  Isabelline

  Chalk

  Beige

  White

  “For all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.” So wrote Herman Melville in the forty-second chapter of Moby-Dick. Entitled “The Whiteness of the Whale,” the passage is a veritable homily on the troubling, bisected symbolism of this color. Because of its link with light, white has laid deep roots in the human psyche and, like anything divine, can simultaneously inspire awe and instill terror in the human heart.

  Like the eponymous albino leviathan of Melville’s novel, white has an otherness to it. If colors were people, it would be admired, but it probably wouldn’t be popular: it is just a little too exclusive, autocratic, and neurotic. For a start, it’s tricky to make. You can’t reach it by mixing together other colored paints, you have to begin with a special white pigment. And anything you add to that pigment will only take it in one direction: toward black. This is due to the way our brains process light. The more pigments there are in a mixture, the less light is reflected back into our eyes, and the darker and sludgier it becomes. Most children will, at some stage, try mixing all their favorite paints together expecting to make an extra special color. They will gather fire-engine red, sunny-sky blue, and perhaps some Care Bear pastels and begin stirring. That such a mixture results not in something beautiful but in an irretrievably murky dark gray is one of life’s first hard truths.

  Fortunately, artists have always had relatively easy access to white thanks to one of the most popular pigments known to man: lead white [here]. Pliny the Elder described the process of making it in the first century, and it continued to be the white of choice in art for centuries, despite being highly toxic. In the eighteenth century Guyton de Morveau, a chemist and politician, was asked to find a safer alternative by the French government. In 1782 he reported that a lab technician by the name of Courtois was synthesizing a white called zinc oxide at the Dijon Academy. But although it wasn’t toxic and didn’t darken when exposed to sulfurous gases, it was less opaque, dried slowly in oils, and, most important, was about four times the price of lead white. It was also brittle—the fine tracery of cracks in many paintings of the era can be laid at its door. (Winsor & Newton did introduce it as a watercolor pigment in 1834—under the name Chinese White, to make it sound exotic—but it didn’t take off. Of 46 English watercolorists questioned in 1888, only 12 admitted to having used it.)1 A third metal-based white was more successful. Titanium white, first mass-produced in 1916, was both brighter and more opaque than its rivals, and by the end of the Second World War it had conquered 80 percent of the market.2 Now, everything from the markings on tennis courts to pills and toothpaste uses this sparkling pigment, while its older sibling languishes on the sidelines.

  White has long been intricately connected w
ith money and power. Fabrics, including wool and cotton, had to be heavily processed in order to appear white. Only the very wealthy, supported by battalions of staff, could afford to keep the fresh lace and linen cuffs, ruffs and cravats worn in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries pristine. This connection still holds true. Someone wearing a snow-pale winter coat telegraphs a subtle visual message: “I do not need to take public transportation.” In Chromophobia David Batchelor describes going to the house of a rich art collector that had been decorated entirely in the shade:

  There is a kind of white that is more than white, and this was that kind of white. There is a kind of white that repels everything that is inferior to it, and that is almost everything . . . This white was aggressively white.3

  As he points out later in the book, it is not shades of white that are the problem, but white in the abstract, because it is associated with tyrannical labels like “pure.” Le Corbusier, for example, proclaimed in his 1925 book L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui the Law of Ripolin: all interior walls should be whitewashed [here]. This, he argued, would act as a moral and spiritual cleansing for society.4

  For many, however, white is seen as positive, or as having a transcendent, religious quality. It is the Chinese color of death and mourning. In the West and Japan, brides wear it because it is a color symbolic of sexual purity. The Holy Spirit has often been depicted descending onto benighted humanity as a white dove appearing in a rush of pallid golden light. In the early twentieth century, when Kazimir Malevich was completing his White on White series, he wrote:

  [T]he blue of the sky has been defeated by the supremacist system, has been broken through and entered white, as the true, real conception of infinity, and thus liberated from the color background of the sky . . . Sail forth! The white, free chasm, infinity, is before us.5