Color

Valerio Adam himself, who is a painter as well as a draughtsman, argues that “color is the instrument for reading drawing as the voice is the instrument for reading writing” Color is thus conceived of as akin to musical timbre, as the ancillary of design in its traditional role of articulating ideas in a graphic mode like a script.

It may seem curious that a phenomenon which is a primary sensory exğerience for most of us and has attracted so many commentators from so many points of view, is far from being understood as a whole. Color has so long been a subject of investigation and experiment in both the arts and the sciences. It does little to show how the subjective and objective aspects of color are related. The difficulties inherent in attempting the quantify sensations have meant that color – the subjective outcome of an objective process of stimulation- has rarely been considered in a comprehensive way.

History alerts us immediately to the variety of color-theories of the past, but also to the even greater variety of color-usage. As it developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the study of color-language became a branch of linguistics concerned with the relationship of language to perception, investigated largely within the framework of experimental psychology.

Some years ago Umberto Eco published an essay under the title ‘How culture conditions the colors we see’, but he was unable to live up to the promise of this ambitious formulation because of the very imprecision of his term ‘culture’. As a semiotician, Eco was embarrassed in his discussion of color by the almost complete absence of intelligible codes of color-meaning within a given culture. Does ‘culture’ imply knowledge and embody rational investigation, or may it run counter to them? Is it, in effect, largely a matter of assumption and prejudice? Who are the agents and guardians of culture? Color promises to throw some light on this problem because, in the Western societies that provide me with my material, color-usage has long co-existed with more or less sophisticated theories of color that are relatively well known.

Color Psychology

The attempt to yoke the structures of color-language to the mechanisms of color-vision, although widespread in recent years, is still a rather specialized academic pursuit, but another modern development from late-nineteenth-century psychology has had far wider ambitions. The belief that exposure to variously colored lights could have a direct and variable effect on human bodily functions (it had already been studied in relation to plant growth, by Darwin among others) was perhaps first proposed in the quantified experiments by the French psychologist Charles Féré in the 1880s. Féré found that red light had the most stimulating 136 effects and violet the most calming; but for the student of visual culture, his ideas can only have a limited application, since he treated colored lights simply as variable vibrations of radiant energy that could be sensed by the skin even with the eyes closed. This was the sort of research lying behind the development of chromotherapy, a practice which seems to have had its greatest vogue in Europe around the turn of the century, but which is still in the repertory of alternative medicine. review by the physiologist K. Kaiser indicated, chromotheraphy proved highly resistant to systematic analysis; but another branch of color-psychology, which proposes isolating non-associative scales of color-preference based on laboratory testing, has been more widely acceptable, perhaps because it is promoted and used by powerful marketing organizations for commercial purposes.

The most familiar of these scales is perhaps the test devised in the 1940s by the Swiss psychologist Max Lüscher, which according to his organization is now using widely in ethnographical research, medical diagnosis and therapy, gerontol marriage guidance and personnel selection. The Full Test uses seventy-three color-patches, but a short and handy version includes only eight samples: dark blue, blue-green (also called ‘green’), orange-red, bright yellow, violet, brown, black and grey. The subject is asked to arrange the colored cards in a descending order o preference, and an analysis of this order over a number of test-runs allows the psychologist to interpret the subject’s character. This interpretation is predicated on the meanings attributed to the colors. Thus blue, which Lüscher, like most modern psychologists, has identified as the most widely preferred color among Europeans is held to be concentric, passive, sensitive, perceptive, unifying, and so on, and thus to express tranquility, tenderness, and ‘love and affection’. Orange-red, however, eccentric, active, offensive, aggressive, autonomous and competitive, and hence expressive of desire, domination and sexuality. The section of the public to which the LüscherTest is chiefly directed may be inferred from the interpretation it gives to an ordering which puts blue at the beginning and red towards the end of the sequence:

Psychologically, this combination of rejected red and compensatory blue is often seen in those suffering from the frustrations and anxieties of the business world and in executives heading for heart disease… Presidents, vice-presidents, and others with this combination need a vacation, a medical check-up, and aⁿ opportunity to re-assemble their physical resources.

High culture, popular culture

The most important issue of all: the definition of culture itself. Which sector of a given society is in question? Which age-group, which class, which profession, which gender? In the case of aesthetic preferences, for example liking for black spreading from aristocratic to general usage, and a taste for bright colors spreading from less educated to well-educated groups. R. E. MacLaury has recently argued for an emphasis on brightness or value in color-language as reflecting a belief in unity, and an emphasis on hue as indicating a belief in perceptual diversity. Yet, at least for the specialized class of painters, hue itself has often been a tool for unification. Similarly, the widespread perception that women are more discriminating than men in their use of color may be linked to the relative rarity of color-deficiencies in female vision.

Most of my examples, from Grünewald to Winifred Nicholson, and from Cleomedes to Lüscher, have come from what used to be called ‘high’ culture, but an example of ways in which modern consumerism has appropriated the allure of this ‘high’ culture for the purposes of mass-marketing. Some years ago a British household paint manufacturer produced a range of emulsions and gloss colors which were launched under the names of a number of European Old Masters. Anyone familiar with the history of painting might well be bemused by the faded gentility of’ Turner’ (pale violet) or ‘El Greco’ (pale blue), and equally perplexed by the close proximity of’ Chardin’ to ‘Vermeer’ (both pale grey greens). If by now you are thoroughly confused by how little the languages of color relate to its perception, you may at least take heart that this manufacturer was prepared to supply a handful of these ‘colors’, from ‘Leonardo’ to ‘Manet’, in black and white versions as well. It may also be a welcome sign that this range of paint did not enthuse the public, and the names of great artists were apparently soo replaced by numbers.

The politics of color

The politics of color as a subject of study has had a lively history since at least the early nineteenth century, when Romantic commentators on the Norse Edda interpreted the three-color rainbow-bridge of Bifröst as symbolizing the three social divisions of nobles (gold), freemen (red), and slaves (blue). These color-coded social divisions have been revived more recently by Georges Dumézil to bolster his now rather discredited analysis of the tripartite social structures of the Indo-Germanic peoples. More fundamental as well as more urgent are the values attributed to black and white in many Western societies — values that have continued to underpin racial prejudice.s Recent work on the connotations of black has served to give a more nuanced picture of the values attributed to blackness and whiteness, light and dark, in the United States, and not least in Black Africa itself.

European historians of art there have been occasional and rather half-hearted attempts, in the tradition of Wölfflinian formalism, to distinguish national characteristics in the color-usages of painters; and some more promising work has been done on the propaganda functions of the colors of national flags.

Within the history of Western painting, the structures of power and influence may be seen in the economics of picture-making itself, in which raw materials played a major role. Since Classical times it had been usual for the patron to provide the most expensive and brightest pigments, such as ultramarine, a practice still followed occasionally as late as the eighteenth century. This gives us some indication of a split, particularly developed in the High Renaissance in Italy, between the aesthetics of patrons and the aesthetics of artists. The lavish use of color which Vitruvius and Pliny had condemned on the grounds of wanton extravagance was now interpreted as a failure to recognize the proper function of painting. This judgment is encapsulated in Vasari’s sixteenth-century story of the fifteenth-century Florentine painter Cosimo Rosselli, who in seeking to curry favour with his patron, Pope Sixtus IV, smothered his contribution to a cycle of frescoes in the Sistine Chapel with the brightest and most expensive colors. The Pope (who according to Vasari ‘knew little of painting’) awarded Rosselli his prize for the best work in the series; but to Vasari and to later critics, the Florentine’s extravagance was simply another example of his lack of invention and design. The growing field of patronage-studies has usually rested on some perceived community of interest between commissioner and executant, at least before the nineteenth century: color is one area where this was manifestly not always the case. But none of the considerations mentioned above has so far impinged upon the social history of art.

Color and gender

In Black Athena Martin Bernal cites the nineteenth-century racial theorist Gobineau’s equation of the male with white and the female with black, a judgment curiously at odds with the Egyptian and Graeco-Roman traditions of painting, in which pale skin was already established as a most appropriate attribute of the fair sex. ^Il Feminist art historians might well find much to ponder in the history of color, for in one phase of the post-Renaissance debate about the values of design and color, even when both of them were characterized (as attributes of pictura) as female, color was the ‘bawd’ whose wiles and attractions lured spectators into trafficking with her sister, drawing. In the nineteenth century the French theorist Charles Blanc stated categorically that ‘drawing is the masculine sex of art and color is the feminine sex’, and for this reason, color could only be of secondary importance. When, around 1940, Matisse told a friend that for him the opposite was the case, and that drawing, the more difficult task, was female, he was still insisting on this traditional gendering of polar opposites. The polarities that have since the eighteenth century increasingly been assumed in the color-systems used by painters have also lent themselves to gendering: about 1809 the German Romantic painter and theorist Philipp Otto Runge devised a color-circle expressive of ideal and real values, on which the warm poles of yellow and orange represented the masculine passion’ and the cool poles of blue and violet the feminine. When this scheme was taken up about a century later by the neo-Romantic Expressionists in Munich these values were reversed, so that for Franz Marc blue became the mascu_ line principle and yellow the feminine, ‘soft, cheerful, and sensual’.

Perhaps the most interesting area for feminists to explore is, indeed, the reCUrrent assumption that a feeling for color is itself a peculiarly female province, an assumption touchingly exemplified in the admission by one of the leading mid-twentieth_ century German color-theorists, Rupprecht Matthäi, that he left all judgments of color-harmony to his wife. Such beliefs, as previously mentioned, may have a biological as well as a cultural basis, for it is well known that color-defective vision is nearly a hundred times more common among white males than among white females. It is also striking that one of the most important areas of color-study in the history of art, the study of dress, is — notably through the work of Stella Mary Newton’s Department of the History of dress at the Courtauld Institute in London — virtually a female preserve; although the most important large-scale work of costume history’s ancillary, the cultural history of dyestuffs, has been carried out in recent years by the chemist Franco Brunello. But if the history of the costume has been attacked with great vigor by feminist historians, so far the history of color has not.

References:

Colour and Meaning – Art, Science and Symbolism, John Gage