Woad
Merton Abbey Mills, in Surrey in the south of England, had been the site of a textile works for over a century when William Morris purchased it in June 1881. Morris spent his young adulthood picking up and then discarding several careers—priest, artist, furniture maker—before hitting on the one that would make his name and fortune: reviving Gothic designs for fabric and wallpapers. He shunned many of the new synthetic dyes available, preferring vegetable- and mineral-based ones. These acquired interesting patinas as they aged and were truer to the intricate medieval patterns he was partial to. One of his favorite tricks was showing visitors to Merton Abbey skeins of wool being dipped into the deep vats of woad. They would emerge an almost grassy color, and then, before the astonished eyes of his visitors, they would turn first deep sea green and then a resonant blue.1
The plant behind this miraculous transformation was Isatis tinctoria (often also called pastel), a member of the mustard family native to clay-rich soils in Europe. It is one of the 30 or so plant species that produce the colorant indigo [here]. Extracting indigo from woad plants is long, complicated, and expensive. Once harvested the leaves are ground to a paste, formed into balls, and left to cure. After 10 weeks, when the balls have lost three-quarters of their size and nine-tenths of their weight, water is added and the mixture is left to ferment again. After a further two weeks the woad will be very dark and granular, resembling tar. This mixture contains around 20 times as much indigo as the same weight of fresh leaves, but must still undergo a further round of fermentation, this time with wood ash, before it can be used to dye cloth.
This process was noxious, requiring lots of fresh water, producing waste that was often emptied directly into the nearest river, and draining the soil of nutrients, leaving those in woad-growing areas at risk of starvation. Prior to the thirteenth century, woad production was very small-scale. There is evidence that ancient people were familiar with the process: leaves and seedpods have been found at a Viking site called Coppergate in the north of England, and it was purposefully cultivated at various sites from at least the tenth century.2 Classical writers described the Celts making themselves blue, either daubing it on before battle or tattooing it directly into the skin. (Tattooed Celtic remains have been found, both in Russia and in Britain, although it is impossible to say if woad was the dye used.) It has even been suggested that the word Briton derives from a Celtic one meaning “painted people.”
It was sometime around the end of the twelfth century, though, that woad’s fortunes began to change. Innovation in the production process resulted in a brighter, stronger color, which attracted the notice of a more luxurious market.3 It also helped that blue, a previously overlooked color, was not part of the sumptuary system that governed which colors people were allowed to wear, so it could be worn openly by anyone. Over the next century, demand for blue clothes began gaining ascendancy over the preeminent red ones. It was also used as an under- or over-dye to add to the longevity and to mix other colors, including the famous British Lincoln green and even some scarlets [here]. One Elizabethan wrote: “No color in broadcloth or kersey [woven fabrics, usually woolen] will well be made to endure without woad.”4
From around 1230 woad was grown, like madder [here], in near-industrial quantities.5 This created fierce rivalries between woad and madder merchants. In Magdeburg, the center of Germany’s madder trade, religious frescoes began to depict hell as blue; and in Thuringia, the madder merchants persuaded the stained-glass craftsmen to make the devils in the new church windows blue, rather than the traditional red or black, all in an effort to discredit the upstart hue.6
Such tactics proved futile. Areas that grew the “blue gold”—like Thuringia, Alsace, Normandy—became rich. Woad, wrote one contemporary in Languedoc, “hath made that country the happiest and richest in Europe.”7 When Emperor Charles V captured the French king at the Battle of Pavia in 1525, it was an enormously wealthy woad merchant from Toulouse, Pierre de Berny, who was the guarantor for the eye-watering ransom.8
Woad’s demise was by this time in sight, as other indigo-producing plants were discovered, first in India and then in the New World. On April 25, 1577, representatives of the merchants and dyers of the City of London sent a memorandum to the Privy Council, requesting permission to use indigo imported from India to make a cheaper, “oryent” blue. “[F]ortie shillings bestowed in the same, yeldeth as much color as fiftie shillings in woade.”9
Just as the madder farmers had done before them, those involved in the woad trade tried to stave off the inevitable. Protectionist laws were passed year after year. Emperor Ferdinand III of Germany declared that indigo was the devil’s color in 1654; French dyers could not touch it, on pain of death, until 1737; while in Nuremberg, dyers were still swearing an annual oath not to use it until the end of the eighteenth century. There was even a smear campaign against imported indigo: in 1650 officials in Dresden announced that the newcomer “readily loses its color” and “corrodes cloths.”10 It was all in vain. Often produced using slave labor, indigo could undercut woad on price every time, and had far better tinting strength. The European woad trade collapsed, leaving only empty fields and ruined merchants in its wake.
Electric blue
The sound that Alexander “Sasha” Yuvchenko, a 24-year-old nuclear engineer, heard at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, was not an explosion but a thud, a shaking. It was only two or three seconds later, as radiation from the nuclear core of reactor 4 ripped through the nuclear complex in Chernobyl where he worked, that he heard the almighty boom of the greatest man-made disaster ever known.1
Yuvchenko had taken the position because Chernobyl was one of the best nuclear stations in the Soviet Union, the money was good, and the job was interesting. On that night, though, it was all supposed to be routine: he was overseeing the cooling of the reactor, which had been manually powered down earlier for a planned safety test. He was in his office, chatting to a colleague, as the nuclear rods were lowered into water to cool them. This inadvertently caused a power surge so powerful that the 1,000-ton plate covering the nuclear core blew off, triggering a series of other detonations and spewing radioactive uranium, burning graphite, and bits of building into the sky.2 Speaking to New Scientist in 2004, he remembered steam, shaking, the lights being extinguished, concrete walls buckling as if they were made of rubber, and things falling around him; his first thought was that a war had begun. He stumbled through the ruined building, scrabbling past blackened bodies,3 before stumbling out into the hole where the reactor building had been moments before. It was only then that he noticed the glow:
I could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the reactor. It was like a laser light, caused by ionization of the air. It was light bluish, and it was very beautiful.4
It is not that surprising that a pale, bright blue has come to be the shade of electricity in the popular imagination. After all, the eerie aureole seen haloing very radioactive material after nuclear tests, and at Chernobyl, is blue. Other electrical discharge phenomena observed and puzzled over from the earliest days, such as sparks and lightning, produce similar effects—St. Elmo’s fire, for example, which dances on ships’ masts and across the windows in airplanes during storms, is bright blue, sometimes tinted with violet [here]. The effect is caused by the air becoming ionized: nitrogen and oxygen molecules become violently excited, releasing photons visible to the naked eye.
The color blue and electricity came together rather earlier than might be imagined, though. A dusty periwinkle shade named “electric blue” came into vogue in the late nineteenth century, just as Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison were groping toward harnessing electricity for producing light. A British drapers’ association trade publication mentions “dark electric blue faille and velvet” in its January 1874 issue; while the Young Ladies’ Journal notes the fashion for a walking dress “of electric blue double nun’s cloth” in November 1883.5
The i
dea of electric blue has always been shorthand for modernity. For the Victorians, witnessing the latest electrical innovations creep from the lab and factories into smart hotels and then individual homes, it must have seemed as if the future and the present were coalescing. This shade has—apart from a brief spell in the 1980s and 1990s—dominated our imaginings of a technologically controlled destiny. While the film The Matrix, released in 1999, is suffused with the ghostly greenish light emitted from monochrome computer screens (which in reality were mostly phased out in the 1980s, but are still portrayed as futuristic), the technology in Minority Report, released just three years later, is powered by electric blue. Similar light can be seen in both the 1982 and 2010 Tron films, in publicity stills for Inception (2010), and in the disturbing dystopian fate humanity suffers in WALL-E (2008).
Although we see it as the color of the future, we are clearly more than a little unnerved by electric blue; perhaps we don’t trust ourselves with the forces at our disposal. As Sasha Yuvchenko knows all too well, the cost of mistakes can be devastating.
Cerulean
On February 17, 1901, Carlos Casagemas, a Spanish poet and artist, was having drinks with friends in the smart new Parisian cafe l’Hippodrome, near Montmartre, when he pulled out a gun and shot himself in the right temple. His friends were distraught, none more so than Pablo Picasso, who had never quite recovered from watching his sister die of diphtheria six years previously. His grief cast a pall over his works for several years. He abandoned almost the entire palette, except for the one color that could adequately express his grief and loss: blue.
This isn’t the first time blue has helped people express matters of the spirit. When, at the end of the Second World War, the UN was formed to maintain global peace, they chose for their symbol a map of the world cupped by a pair of olive branches on a slightly grayish cerulean ground. Oliver Lundquist, the architect and designer who created the insignia, chose this shade because it is “the opposite of red, the war color.”1
It is spiritual as well as peaceful. Many Hindu gods, including Krishna, Shiva, and Rama, are depicted with skin the color of the sky, symbolizing their affinity with the infinite. The French call it bleu céleste, heavenly blue. It is also, confusingly, the color many of the buildings at the Church of Scientology’s Gold Base in California—including the mansion awaiting the reincarnation of the religion’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard. (The man himself, when founding Scientology, is reported to have told a colleague, “Let’s sell these people a piece of sky blue.”) Pantone named its paler, forget-me-not shade as the color of the millennium, guessing that consumers would “be seeking inner peace and spiritual fulfillment in the new millennium.”2
A true cerulean pigment—one of the cobalt family [here]—was not available to artists until the 1860s, and then only as a watercolor.3 Made from a mixture of cobalt and tin oxides known as cobalt stannate, it did not make much headway until the 1870s, when it was finally released as an oil paint; in this medium it lost the slight chalkiness it had in watercolors and seduced a generation of painters. While Van Gogh preferred to create his own approximation of the tint using a subtle mixture of cobalt blue, a little cadmium yellow, and white, others were less cautious. Paul Signac, known for his airy pointillism, squeezed countless tubes dry, as did many of his fellows, including Monet.4 When the photographer and writer Brassaï ran into Picasso’s Parisian paint supplier in November 1943, the man handed him a piece of white paper filled with Picasso’s handwriting. “At first glance it looks like a poem,” wrote Brassaï, but, he realized, it was actually Picasso’s last paint order. Third on the list, just below “White, permanent—” and “White, silver—,” is “Blue, cerulean.”5
Verdigris
Absinthe
Emerald
Kelly green
Scheele’s green
Terre verte
Avocado
Celadon
Green
There is a Buddhist fable about the color green. In the tale a deity appears to a small boy in a dream one night and tells him that to obtain everything he could ever desire all he need do is close his eyes and not picture sea green. The story has two possible endings. In one the boy eventually succeeds and finds enlightenment; in the other he is so consumed by his continued failure that life and sanity gradually slip away.1
Today green tends to conjure up comforting images of countryside and environmentally friendly politics. Despite its association with envy, it is generally seen as a peaceful color and is often associated with luxury and style. A glaucous shade was the darling of the art deco movement; emerald was Pantone’s “Color of the Year” in 2013, while greenery, a tangier, leafy shade, has taken up this mantle for 2017.
The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the color was the papyrus stalk, a plant that the Egyptians held in high regard. In Latin the word for green is viridis, which is related to a large group of words that suggest growth and even life itself: virere, to be green or vigorous; vis, strength; vir, man; and so on.2 Many cultures associate the color positively with gardens and spring. For Muslims, for whom “paradise” is almost synonymous with “garden,” green became prominent from the twelfth century. It was the favorite color, along with white, of the Prophet Muhammad. In the Koran, the robes worn in paradise and silk couches scattered amidst the trees are both the color of leaves. And in medieval Islamic poetry Mount Qaf, the celestial mountain; the sky above it; and the water at its feet are all depicted in shades of green. This is why the color appears in the flags of many predominantly Islamic countries including Iran, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.3
In the West green was particularly linked with the courtly rituals of spring. On May 1, for example, many courts required members to s’esmayer or “wear the May,” which in practice meant wearing a leafy crown or garland, or a prominent item of green clothing. Those who were pris sans verd, or showed themselves without this color, would be loudly mocked.4 Possibly because of such rituals, and the inevitable flirtation and trouble they could cause, green also became the badge of youth and young love. The expression “to be green,” meaning inexperienced, was already being used by the Middle Ages. Minne, a Germanic goddess who, like Cupid, was fond of shooting people with mischievous arrows of love, habitually wore a green dress, as did fertile young women—this is one interpretation, for example, of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (c. 1435) [here].
Despite such positive associations green had, in the West at least, something of an image problem. This was partially due to an early misunderstanding surrounding color mixing. Plato, the ancient Greek mathematician born in the mid-fifth century B.C., stoutly maintained that prasinon (leek color) was made by mixing purron (flame color) and melas (black). Democritus, father of atomic theory, believed pale green was a product of red and white.5 For the ancients green was, like red, one of the middle colors between white and black, and in fact red and green were often confused linguistically: the medieval Latin sinople could refer to either until the fifteenth century.6 In 1195 the future Pope Innocent III reinterpreted green’s role in the divine order in an influential treatise. It must, he wrote, “be chosen for holidays and the days when neither white nor red nor black are suitable, because it is a middle color between white, red, and black.”7 This, theoretically, gave it far greater prominence in the West, but materially it was still rare: it never appeared in more than 5 percent of heraldic arms.
One reason for this is the long-standing taboo against creating green dyes and pigments by mixing blue and yellow. Not only was this poorly understood for many centuries—see Plato’s assertions above—but there was also a deep aversion to mixing different substances together, in a way that is difficult to understand today. Alchemists, who routinely mixed elements together, were mistrusted, and in medieval art colors usually appeared in unmixed blocks with no attempt to show perspective by shading. In the clothing industry this was complicated by guild restrictions and the high degree of
specialization: in many countries blue/black dyers were forbidden to work with red and yellow dye substances. In some countries anyone caught dyeing cloth green by dipping it in first woad [here] and then weld, a yellow dye, could face severe repercussions, including large fines and exile. Although there were some plants, including foxglove and nettle, that produced a green color without the need for any mixing, these did not produce the kind of rich, saturated color that people of taste and influence wanted to buy. The effect this had is plain from an offhand comment made by the scholar Henri Estienne in 1566: “In France, if one sees a man of quality dressed in green, one might think that his brain was a little off.”8
Artists had to deal with inferior green pigments. The Dutch artist Samuel van Hoogstraten wrote in the 1670s: “I wish that we had a green pigment as good as a red or yellow. Green earth [here] is too weak, Spanish green [here] too crude, and ashes [verditer] not sufficiently durable.”9 From the early Renaissance, when the taboo against mixing began to fade, until the late eighteenth century, when new copper greens were discovered by a Swedish chemist called Carl Wilhelm Scheele [here], artists had to blend their own green paints.
Even this was tricky. Verdigris was prone to reacting with other pigments and even blackening on its own, and terre verte had poor tinting strength and luminosity. Paolo Veronese, who worked in Venice for most of his career during the sixteenth century and was, like Titian before him, an extremely skilled and resourceful colorist, was famous for being able to coax bright viridescent colors out of recalcitrant pigments. His trick was to apply a precise mixture of three different pigments in two layers and to protect green areas with layers of varnish to stop them reacting. Even he, though, had the occasional green mishap, and as late as the nineteenth century artists were struggling to produce reliable green. The grass in the foreground of Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, for example, appears withered in patches because of misbehaving pigments. This painting, one of the best-known examples of the pointillist technique and the work that launched the neo-impressionist movement, was created in the mid-1880s, which demonstrates just how recently painters were struggling against their materials.
The Secret Lives of Color Page 15