by David Kastan
On Color
On Color
DAVID SCOTT KASTAN
with Stephen Farthing
Published with assistance from the foundation established in
memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College.
Copyright © 2018 by David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing.
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“Living with a Painting,” by Denise Levertov, from Poems, 1968–1972, copyright © 1972
by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
“Reno Dakota,” written by Stephin Merritt, published by Gay and Loud (ASCAP).
Lyric reprinted by permission of the author.
“Another Birth,” by Forough Farrokhazad, trans. Hamid Dabashi, in The Green Movement in Iran
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011), reprinted by permission of Hamid Dabashi.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Pete Turner, 1934–2017.
Other photographers shot the world in color;
Pete shot great pictures of color itself.
Contents
Preface
Color Matters: An Introduction
1 Roses Are Red
2 Orange Is the New Brown
3 Yellow Perils
4 Mixed Greens
5 Moody Blues
6 Dy(e)ing for Indigo
7 At the Violet Hour
8 Basic Black
9 White Lies
10 Gray Areas
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index
Preface
COLOR IS A COLLABORATION—a collaboration, as Paul Cézanne said, of the mind and the world. So it seems only right that a book about color should itself be a collaboration (as all books in fact are). This one began in 2007, in a restaurant in Amagansett village on Long Island, when a mutual friend pulled us together, saying, “You two should talk,” then wandered off, leaving us to get on with it.
As it happened, he was right about our compatibility, and we were able not simply to talk but to start an ongoing conversation. During that first meeting, we quickly covered the usual introductory topics, then without too much effort found a large chunk of common ground, which has been the basis of our subsequent meetings, many emails, and a friendship.
It turned out that the writer had an interest in painting and the painter an interest in writing. When we parted company that first evening, neither of us imagined that this conversation would last over ten years and stretch over nearly that many countries.
It took us from the painter’s studio to the writer’s study, from Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name Is Red to Derek Jarman’s movie Blue, from a colorman’s shop in London to the paint-splattered floor of the Krasner-Pollack house in Springs, New York, from Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color to George Stubbs’s Zebra. It took us from Amagansett to New Haven and to London, and then through Washington, DC, New York City, Amsterdam, Paris, Mexico City, and Rome. Very often the conversation was accompanied (aided?) by glasses of wine, whose wonderful colors were not the least of their pleasures and not the least of what was remarked upon.
The chapters usually started, or restarted, in a gallery or museum. We began in front of a set of dark drawings at the top of that ramp in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and ended up six hours later separated by a white tablecloth in a restaurant on the Herengracht. In other cities, the catalysts and the contrasts were different, but always there was the conversation, and always there were the colors.
The division of labor within our collaboration was clear-cut from the beginning. The project was ours, but we would elect Kastan for obvious reasons as the writer. Yet like all good collaborations, this one also had more than two people in the conversation. There were, of course, all the people who have written about color before us, each a part of the larger conversation and community of engagement that now we have joined. Endnotes will acknowledge some of our indebtedness, but we know well how much more we owe others and how little of our debt these notes have discharged. And there were the conversations that were more literal. We discussed the idea of the book and the ideas with everyone who would listen and shared drafts with anyone who was willing to read.
Fortunately there were many. Color is a topic that everyone has experience with and opinions about. The list of names here is almost certainly not complete, and the only thing that makes us feel a bit better about the inevitable omissions is our awareness of how utterly inadequate even this mention is for the remarkable generosity that has been shown us. Certainly the book would have been impossible to write without the intelligence and kindness of many people: Svetlana Alpers, John Baldessari, Jenny Balfour-Paul, Jennifer Banks, Amy Berkower, Rocky Bostick, Stephen Chambers, Keith Collins, Jonathan Crary, Hamid Dabashi, Jeff Dolven, Laura Jones Dooley, Robert Edelman, Rich Esposito and John Gage (for both of whom this thanks has sadly come too late), Jonathan Gilmore, Jackie Goldsby, Clay Greene, Marina Kastan Hays, Donald Hood, Kathryn James, Michael Keevak, Robin Kelsey, Lisa Kereszi, Byron Kim, András Kiséry, Doug Kuntz, Randy Lerner, James Mackay, Alison MacKeen, Claire McEachern, Amy Meyers, John Morrison, Robert O’Meally, Caryll Phillips, John Rogers, Jim Shapiro, Bruce Smith, Caleb Smith, Donald Smith, Michael Taussig, Pete Turner, Michael Watkins, Michael Warner, Dan Weiss, John Williams, Christopher Wood, Julian Yates, Ruth Yeazell, Juan Jesús Zaro, and Gábor Á. Zemplén. That’s a long list, and it should be still longer. It is, nonetheless, an A to Z of deeply felt gratitude, however meagerly expressed.
Color has been the inspirational and inexhaustible subject of our ongoing conversation. Over the decade that it has lasted, our view of ourselves changed. Sometimes we were two professors with a shared interest in painting and literature engaged in a cross-disciplinary exploration of the relations between words and color; other times we were simply a writer and a painter sharing ideas and images as we each thought about the nature of color itself, which always, of course, always involved thinking about the nature of the world we live in. Color, it turns out, is something shared, and also something impossible to share, or maybe just impossible to know if or how it is shared. But color is also unavoidable and irresistible—and always worth the effort of trying to understand its many wonders.
On Color
FIGURE 1 (overleaf): Doug Kuntz, The Instability of Color: Haiti after the Earthquake, January 2010
Color Matters
AN INTRODUCTION
Man needs color to live.
FERNAND LÉGER
OUR LIVES ARE SATURATED by color. The sky above us is blue (or gray or pink or purple or nearly black). The grass we walk on is green, though sometimes it is brown. Our skin has color, though not exactly the color we normally ascribe to it. Our hair has color, even if that color inevitably changes
with time—and may change again with the skill of our hair colorist. Our clothes have color; our furniture and our houses, too. Our food has color; so do milk, coffee, and wine. Color is an unavoidable part of our experience of the world, not least as it differentiates and organizes the physical space in which we live, allowing us to navigate it.
We also think in (or, maybe better, with) color. Color marks our emotional and social existence. Our psychological states have color: we see red, feel blue, are tickled pink, and, not infrequently, are green with envy, particularly when confronted by those so tickled. Gender is distinguished—maybe even shaped—by color: we dress baby girls in pink and baby boys in blue, though at one point in history we did it the other way around. Class has color designators: there are rednecks and bluebloods, though bluebloods often declare their blue blood with their resistance to all vivid colors—even blue. The political world is demarcated by its colors: for example, the polarized red and blue states in America, and green parties now almost everywhere committed to environmental causes.
But for all color’s inescapability, we don’t know much about it. There is no comparably salient aspect of daily life that is so complicated and so poorly understood. We are not quite sure what it is. Or maybe it is better to say we are not quite sure where it is. It seems to be “there,” unmistakably a property of the things of the world that are colored. But no scientists believe this, even though they don’t always agree with one another about where (they think) it is.
Chemists tend to locate it in the microphysical properties of colored objects; physicists in the specific frequencies of electromagnetic energy that those objects reflect; physiologists in the photoreceptors of the eye that detect this energy; and neurobiologists in the neural processing of this information by the brain. Their disagreement, or, more accurately, the mismatch of their inquiry, seems to suggest that color inhabits some indistinct borderland between the objective and the subjective, the phenomenal and the psychological. Crudely put, the chemists and physicists operate on one side of the boundary, the physiologists and neurobiologists on the other. Philosophers, at least those who think about the ontological question of color (that is, what is it?), function in all this somewhat like NATO peacekeeping troops patrolling the borders and are successful mainly when they are clearly neutrals, with their own interests of little concern to the disputants.
For artists, the precise scientific nature of color is more or less irrelevant. What matters is what color looks like (and also, and not to be underestimated, how much the paint costs). The artists are, one could say, the indigenous population, largely uninterested in the scholarly debates but who have been successfully cultivating color for millennia in order to survive.
The rest of us, with no professional stake in the matter, are for the most part color tourists. We enjoy what we see, take the occasional color photo, and, happily, are at no risk from the conflicts.
The lack of a coherent and unified understanding of color reflects the fact that all the individual disciplines concerned with color are studying and solving distinct problems. The word “color” functions differently for each of them, and it is defined by each in carefully specified ways that appropriately reflect and clarify the concerns of the particular discipline, even if this only reveals how fractured our understanding of color is.
But this admittedly hasty disciplinary overview should not be taken as a version of “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” Each field of inquiry might possibly be thought to correspond to one of the blind men accurately describing that part of the elephant he has touched but failing to realize how incomplete his experience of the whole has been. That isn’t the case here.
Usually in this familiar children’s story there is a framing narrative of the king and his court, who are watching and much amused by the scene of each blind man confidently describing the elephant in terms of which part he is feeling. One man thinks the elephant is like a snake because he is holding its tail; another, rubbing the elephant’s tusk, believes the elephant is like a spear; and another is certain that the animal must be like a large tree, as he has wrapped his arms around one of the elephant’s legs. In the story, the blind men are all wrong, mistaking what is a mere part for the whole. But the point is not that we need—and it is certainly not that we can provide—some regal perspective that would allow us to see the elephant in this room in its entirety. Our point here is exactly the opposite: that color, unlike an elephant, cannot be understood as a coherent whole.
That is, the scholarly thinking about color doesn’t so much offer us a set of partial perspectives that can be combined to provide a comprehensive understanding of color as much as it reveals a fundamental disunity that defines the subject. There are no blind men in our story, and in fact, there is no elephant. There is only the extraordinary enigma that is color, a topic blind men perhaps should stay away from.
LOCAL COLOR
And that, surprisingly, brings us to Homer. “The blind poet of rocky Chios,” in Thucydides’ phrase, did stay away from color.1 That is, two of the greatest poems in the world, The Iliad and The Odyssey, display an extremely limited and counterintuitive color vocabulary. This was not, however, because their author was actually blind but, it has been claimed, because he was color-blind, as were, in fact, all of the ancient Greeks. That was the notorious conclusion of William Gladstone, hardly a crank, but rather one of the most eminent of Victorians, who in the second half of the nineteenth century served four terms as prime minister of Great Britain, as well as four as chancellor of the exchequer. And he was also a distinguished classicist.
What Gladstone had noticed in his reading of The Odyssey and The Iliad was how strange the descriptions of colors were, particularly those in the range of colors English speakers normally think of as blue. For most people, Homer’s best-known phrase is his description of “the wine-dark sea” (though the adjective usually translated as “wine-dark” means something closer to “wine-like,” composed of the Greek word for wine and a form of the verb that means “see”). The word is also the one the poems use to describe oxen. So it seems to indicate a reddish brown shade, if it describes a color at all.
Although the sea in a storm might possibly appear the color of wine, in sunlight, as anyone knows who has visited Greece, it looks blue (and it is the color as something appears in sunlight that our color terms name). But the poems never use a word meaning “blue” to describe it. Various English translations of Homer do have phrases like “the dark blue wave,” but the “blue” in the phrase is always the translators’ imposition. Homer just calls the wave “dark.” Gladstone’s explanation for this was that it didn’t look blue to the ancient Greeks because they were incapable of seeing that color. And this idea about their inability to see blue gets recycled in the popular media every few years.
Presumably the color of the ocean hasn’t significantly changed between Homer’s time and our own. Gladstone decided on the basis of the linguistic evidence that what has changed is our ability to process color. “The organ of color and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age,” he wrote.2 Greeks, he hypothesized from his study of their use of color words, saw the colors mainly as contrasts of light and dark tinged by shades of red. So Homer’s “wine-dark,” if not literally what the Greek adjective means, perhaps does describe what Greeks saw—at least some of the time.
Yet how would we know? Do the words we use accurately describe the colors we see? Color inevitably exceeds language—or maybe defeats it. But regardless, Gladstone’s hypothesis was just bad science. His speculations were published in 1858, a year before Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species—and quickly it became clear that the five hundred years or so that Gladstone proposed for the development of what he called the “color-sense” was impossible. Evolutionary change could not possibly have happened as quickly as he assumed. And in any case, it is hard to imagine that the ancient Greeks never saw a blue sky or a blue sea (Figure 2).
; There is, however, another—and better—explanation for the color vocabulary of the two great classical poems. Homer (if indeed there was such a person and if indeed he could see) would of course have seen blue skies and blue seas, but he may not have known that they were blue. Or, more precisely, he may not have known that “blue” was the appropriate word for what they were. It wasn’t that the Greeks’ color-sense was underdeveloped. It was that they had a different color vocabulary for what they saw.
FIGURE 2: “Wine-dark sea”? The view from Santorini
Lots of languages, it turns out, do, although this says almost nothing about how their speakers see the colors of the world. Hungarian, for example, has two words for red: piros and vörös. Most Hungarian-English dictionaries define both as “red,” though some suggest that vörös is a darker red than piros, closer perhaps to the English crimson. But the two words do not really differentiate particular shades of red. A linguist would say that they differentiate an attributive rather than a referential difference: the words mark not a difference of the color itself but rather a difference in the feeling the color provokes. A child’s ball is almost inevitably piros; blood is always vörös—but a dark red wine, possibly the same color, would be piros. Red apples are piros; red foxes are vörös. The red in the Hungarian flag is piros; the red of the Soviet flag was vörös. To the degree, then, that vörös is a darker red than piros, the darkness is as much conceptual as it is chromatic.
There are languages that have no distinct color vocabulary at all, at least if we expect them to isolate and abstract color in the ways that English, for example, does. But there are many languages that tie color words to particular experiences that our color vocabulary ignores. For example, the indigenous people of Bellona, one of the Polynesian Islands, have only three discrete color categories: one for black-dark, one for red, and one for white-light, rubrics under which the entire visual spectrum is divided. Yet they have a robust color vocabulary. Among their words for shades of red, there is a specific word used for the red of a feather of a certain bird, another for the red used as a dye made from a particular root, a different word for the red of the clouds at sunrise or sunset, and a separate one to describe the red color of teeth stained from chewing betel nuts. Somewhat oddly the two Danish anthropologists who studied the Bellonese concluded that in their language “colours are vaguely demarcated.”3 But they are in fact quite precisely demarcated, as their careful distinguishing of the various reds shows. They are just not demarcated in terms of what most people today usually think of as color.