by David Kastan
There are lots of references to the House of Orange, which still today is officially part of the name of the royal family of the Netherlands (Orange-Nassau); but this use of “Orange” comes neither from the color nor the fruit. It takes its name from a region in southeastern France still known as “Orange.” The earliest settlement came to be known as Aurenja, after the local water deity, Arausio. There are no oranges in this story and nothing orange. (And although it is often claimed that orange carrots were bred to celebrate the House of Orange in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, that is an urban legend—although it is true, according to the historian Simon Schama, that in the 1780s, during the Dutch Patriot Revolution, orange “was declared the colour of sedition,” and carrots “sold with their roots too conspicuously showing were deemed provocative.”)8
Only in the seventeenth century does “orange,” as a word used to name a color, become widespread in English. In 1616, an account of the varieties of tulips that can be grown says that some are “white, some red, some blue, some yellow, some orange, some of a violet color, and indeed generally of any color whatsoever except green.”9 Almost imperceptibly (though of course it was entirely a function of perception), orange did become the recognized word for a recognizable color, and by the late 1660s and 1670s, the optical experiments of Isaac Newton firmly fixed it as one of the seven colors of the spectrum. It turns out to be exactly what (and where) Chaucer thought it was: the “color betwixe yelow and reed.” But now there was an accepted name for it.
What happened between the end of the fourteenth century and the end of the seventeenth that allowed “orange” to become a color name? The answer is obvious. Oranges.10
Early in the sixteenth century Portuguese traders brought sweet oranges from India to Europe, and the color takes its name from them. Until they arrived, there was no orange as such in the color spectrum. When the first Europeans saw the fruit they were incapable of exclaiming about its brilliant orange color. They recognized the color but didn’t yet know its name. Often they referred to oranges as “golden apples.” Not until they knew them as oranges did they see them as orange.
The word itself begins as an ancient Sanskrit word, naranga, possibly derived from an even older Dravidian (another ancient language spoken in what is now southern India) root, naru, meaning fragrant. Along with the oranges, the word migrated into Persian and Arabic. From there it was adopted into European languages, as with narancs in Hungarian or the Spanish naranja. In Italian it was originally narancia, and in French narange, though the word in both of these languages eventually dropped the “n” at the beginning to become arancia and orange, probably from a mistaken idea that the initial “n” sound had carried over from the article, una or une. Think about English, where it would be almost impossible to hear any real difference between “an orange” and “a norange.” An “orange” it became, but it probably should really have been a “norange.” Still, orange is better, if only because the initial “o” so satisfyingly mirrors the roundness of the fruit.
The etymological history of “orange” traces the route of cultural contact and exchange—one that ultimately completes the circle of the globe. The word for “orange” in modern-day Tamil, the surviving Dravidian language that gave us the original root of the word, is arancu, pronounced almost exactly like the English word “orange” and in fact borrowed from it. But none of this actually gets us to color. Only the fruit does that. Only when the sweet oranges began to arrive in Europe and became visible on market stalls and kitchen tables did the name of the fruit provide the name for the color. No more “yellow-red.” Now there was orange. And, remarkably, within a few hundred years it was possible to forget in which direction the naming went. People could imagine that the fruit was called an orange simply because it was.
Vincent van Gogh’s Still Life with Basket and Six Oranges is in a sense a painting about the confusion (Figure 11). There is always some confusion in any figurative painting between its radical materiality (that is, the fact that it is always just paint on canvas) and the representative claim it makes (that is, the image it represents). But here the confusion, or connection, between fruit and color becomes the painting’s very point. It is both a traditional still life with fruit and a radical experiment with color, but it wouldn’t work exactly the same way if it were a still life with a basket and six lemons. Lemons are yellow; oranges are orange.
FIGURE 11: Vincent van Gogh, Basket with Six Oranges, 1888, Private collection
FIGURE 12: Luis Egidio Meléndez, Still Life with Oranges and Walnuts, 1772, National Gallery, London
The modest kitchen scene is energized by the six balls of glowing orange sitting in the oval willow basket on a table. The orange seems not so much a color painted on the pieces of fruit to get their surface appearance right but a color emanating from deep within the circular forms. They are made not by coloring in the outlines of the six oranges but by allowing the orange color a life curiously independent of the fruit whose name it bears. They create a force field: the source of the orange light that dances on the blue wall to their left. And somehow their energy simultaneously is able to redirect the blue of the wall down through the gaps of the woven basket in which they sit. The scene pulses with radiant color, proving once again that great still lives are never quite still. They animate the inanimate.
And yet how different it is from another still life with oranges. Look at Luis Egidio Meléndez’s Still Life with Oranges and Walnuts, painted a little over one hundred years before Van Gogh’s not-so-still life (Figure 12). Obviously the oranges here aren’t as central as they are in Van Gogh’s painting. They are set off to the sides, chromatically separated from the various stolid browns of the boxes, the barrel, the jug, the chestnuts, and even the greenish brown melon that sit on the wooden table. Meléndez’s still life celebrates the solidity and seeming permanence of a world of bourgeois commodities; Van Gogh’s celebrates a momentary flashing forth of glory in the simple scene. A few brown spots on Van Gogh’s oranges subtly register the evanescence of the moment. “Nothing gold can stay,” as Robert Frost said. But the essential difference between the two paintings is that Meléndez represents objects so as to conceal the fact that they are made of paint; Van Gogh represents objects as an opportunity to explore and extol what paint can do. Meléndez paints volume; Van Gogh paints color. Meléndez is painting oranges; Van Gogh is painting orange.
Or, rather, Van Gogh is painting orange next to blue, fascinated by the interaction of the two complementary colors. In a letter to his brother, Theo, written in 1885, he talks about the “poles of electricity” set up by placing “orange and blue next to each other, that most glorious spectrum,” testing on the canvas what he had been enthusiastically reading in the color theorists with whom he had become obsessed.11 Increasingly convinced that “the laws of colour are inexpressibly splendid,” not least because “they are NOT coincidences,” Van Gogh allows them to play out on his canvases, as he began to escape the preference for the dark and dusky shades that had initially appealed to what he called his “Northern brain.”12
In 1883, while living in The Hague, he had begun anxiously to wonder why he was “not more of a colourist,” and over the next five years he moved ever farther south in search of color: Brussels, Paris, and finally Arles, where, as he wrote to his brother, “you feel colour differently.”13 There he would fulfill his desire to become, as he would say, “an arbitrary colourist,” for whom color was not a way of accurately rendering the things he painted but the very subject of the paintings themselves.14 Their stubborn realism turns out to be largely a ruse. Van Gogh’s Basket with Six Oranges turns the banality of the kitchen scene into something rich and strange, by making the painting about the color orange rather than about the orange fruit—and confirming this commitment with his angled signature, “Vincent,” in the lower left of the canvas, taking its color from the energy of the six incandescent balls of orange that brings the painting to life.
Lat
er he would write his brother that signing his paintings seemed to him “silly,” but that in a recently painted seascape he had included “an outrageous red signature,” but only because he “wanted a red note in the green.”15 It was always about the color. It is worth noting that in his wonderful letters, the adjectives indicating color often fail to agree with the nouns they are meant to qualify. It may merely be that, as a non-native French speaker, he makes insignificant and forgivable grammatical errors; but in the “ungrammatical” sentences that result, it is as if the color has taken on a life of its independent of the objects that carry it.
Color for Van Gogh does have its own reality, as the paintings insist, though he could not quite pull himself completely away from representation and the world. The word “abstract,” of course, literally means “pull away from,” and Van Gogh wasn’t quite ready to become an abstract painter. He was eager to loosen the grip of the object upon his use of color but not ready to release it entirely: “Instead of trying to render exactly what I have before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily to express myself more forcefully.”16 But there was a step beyond that he could not take. And he knew it. In 1888, he presciently wrote to his brother: “The painter of the future is a colourist such as there hasn’t been before.”17
Van Gogh wasn’t ready to be that colorist; he wasn’t yet able to be the artist for whom color would be freed from its dependence upon any material presence other than itself. Yet somehow he knew what was coming: that there would be a new art of color; but this would be an art that could only “really begin,” as the French artist and designer Sonia Delaunay would say about forty years later, “when we understand that color has an existence of its own.”18 That is, when orange no longer needs its oranges.
Looking backwards at the history of art, that independence seems inevitable. The freeing of color from depiction is one of the major story lines of twentieth-century painting. But it wasn’t yet inevitable in 1927 when Delaunay wrote, and what that freedom might look like on the canvas wasn’t fully imaginable in the 1880s when Van Gogh was painting. Yet color now “has an existence of its own.” It has been liberated from the color of things, free to become what Oscar Wilde called “mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form.”19
In the hands of artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, Lee Krasner and Ellsworth Kelly, Anish Kapoor and Yves Klein (and that is just the Ks), color, which once was what allowed painting to mimic reality, came to express the reality of what painting is. For some, like Kandinsky, it provides an almost mystical vocabulary of spiritual reality; for others, like Krasner, color at once registers and provokes otherwise inexpressible emotional experiences; and for still some others, like Klein, it could be just (just?) color.
It was arguably Klein who would become the most extreme version of Van Gogh’s “painter of the future.” Klein would himself indulge in prediction. “In the future” that Klein imagined in 1954, “people will start painting pictures in one single color, and nothing else but color.”20 Some indeed would (and some indeed already had), but his own career would make this a self-fulfilling prophecy, mainly as he devoted himself to blue, even giving his name to one of its shades, the intoxicating ultramarine pigment now known as International Klein Blue (more about which in Chapter 5). But it is easy to forget that he began with various “monochromes,” as he called them. The first important one was orange.
In 1955, Klein submitted a large, orange monochrome painting for the annual exhibition at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris. The matte orange panel, titled Expression de l’univers de la couleur mine orange (mine orange is the French term for the pigment known in English as “orange lead,” the same pigment Van Gogh had used in his still life), was, however, rejected by the organizing committee, unwilling, at least in Klein’s hardly disinterested account, to accept a painting that was just one solid color (une seule couleur unie). “You know,” as Klein reported (or, better, parodied) what he was told about the jury’s reasoning, “it’s just really not sufficient; if Yves would agree to add at least a little line, or a dot, or simply a spot of another color, then we could show it, but a single color, no, no, really, that’s not enough; it’s impossible!”21
But the impossible was exactly what Klein sought, as when he announced in 1958 that his paintings were now “invisible” but that he would nonetheless “show them in a clear and positive manner.”22 Earlier Klein’s ambition was only a little less impossible: the desire to escape all the limitations of art by focusing only upon color. “All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.” Klein’s monochromes are his “landscapes of freedom,” paintings of pure color emptied of line. They are his Get Out of Jail Free card.
But was this all just a game, or was it a serious artistic and philosophical quest? It is often hard to tell if Klein was a conceptual artist or just a con artist. Or maybe he was always both. The monochromes with their intense, saturated color still dazzle, but monochrome painting has become a cliché of modernist art, often now an empty gesture. A large, matte orange panel might be only a large, matte orange panel. Today the major risk of what Klein called the “l’aventure monochrome” is that nobody will care. Nobody will care, that is, unless it is by Klein.
It isn’t just the intense saturation of the color that makes his paintings matter; it is the crazy risk he took in his commitment to them. This is painting, not as the abstraction of reality, but as the repudiation of it—painting at its most minimal and most extreme. Color is everything; color is the only thing. In the making of a painting of a color with that color, Klein collapses the medium and the message, the object and the image, the personal and the universal, even the artist and the art. He would sometimes refer to himself as “Yves the Monochrome.”23 Van Gogh’s oranges become Klein’s orange, as Klein becomes Van Gogh’s colorist such as there hadn’t been before.
The problem—and there is a problem—is the danger not of monotony but of its easy repeatability. Doing it once is audacious and exhilarating. Doing it again isn’t very hard, and often isn’t very interesting. The first cut is the deepest; after that they start to lose their sting. Or maybe monotony is after all the problem—at least for the orange monochrome. In that case, the organizing committee of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles might well have been right.
FIGURE 13: Barnett Newman, The Third, 1962, Walker Art Center
Barnett Newman’s The Third might easily be thought to be a large-scale version of Klein’s salon entry that would have satisfied the jury’s desire for “at least a little line, or a dot, or simply a spot of another color” to be added to the orange field—and it seems to be a better painting than Klein’s (which is not, of course, the same thing as a more significant one) (Figure 13).
It, too, is a large field of flat, saturated orange color (though this one is substantially larger than Klein’s: about 8½ × 10 feet to Klein’s roughly 3 × 7½ feet). But Newman’s has two narrow yellow bands that run top to bottom several inches in from each side edge, and at the far left the color space before the yellow vertical seems to be either unfinished or disintegrating. The two yellow “zips,” Newman’s name for these vertical stripes, divide the canvas into three sections, though none is proportionately “The Third” the title seems to promise. Perhaps the title implies that the central orange expanse is merely “The Third” that we are able to see completely; maybe the zips initiate two potentially equivalent spaces incompletely articulated on the canvas.
Or, just maybe, the title suggests something less formal and more profound. It could be an obscure suggestion of presence of the Divine, as in T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland: “Who is the third who always walks beside you?” Eliot refers to the story in the Gospel of Luke about the Resurrection, where two disciples come to the sepulcher after the Crucifixion and find it empty. Dispiritedly walking back to town, they are joined by an unknown third person; they sit to eat, and
only then “their eyes were opened and they knew him” (Luke 24:31, KJV). The well-read (though Jewish) Newman, who often made use of allusive, enigmatic titles, was likely to have known Eliot’s poem, if not Luke’s Gospel (although the only copy of Eliot’s poems in the artist’s library, now preserved at the Barnett Newman Foundation, is a 1920 edition, and The Wasteland was written in 1922). Almost certainly the idea of the mysterious presence of the divine would have appealed to him. There was always a spiritual dimension to his painting, and The Third might be his indication of the content to which Newman’s abstraction would give form.
Not unlike Klein’s expanses of color (remember the title of his orange painting: Expression de l’univers de la couleur mine orange), Newman’s canvas expresses a no less hubristic ambition for transcendence and perhaps a no more convincing claim for the aesthetic as a domain of the spiritual. Both painters would turn the beautiful into the sublime. And yet sometimes they both make us wearily wish for the appealing modesty of Henri Matisse’s “I’m for decoration,” as the French painter once said to his daughter.24