On Color

by David Kastan

  Klein and Newman are in fact both very good at that (at decoration, that is; not modesty). But where Klein’s painting is a monochrome, Newman’s is a subtle undoing of the monochrome he almost commits to. His orange no less aggressively confronts us, but it stops and starts, disrupted by the yellow zips, and even more by the chromatic scruffiness at the left edge where the orange seems to begin—or maybe end. “I have never manipulated colors—I have tried to create color,” Newman once wrote, and The Third, whatever Newman intended the title to signify, seems to be a painting that presents us with an orange that might never have been before. No oranges were necessary as a precondition.25

  It is probably no mere arbitrariness of choice that neither Klein’s nor Newman’s greatest paintings are orange: Klein’s are blue, Newman’s red. William Gass once called orange “acquiescent,” not exactly the right quality for either of their massive artistic ambitions.26 Blue and red are better; they are more emphatic and self-assured. Pure color, it turns out, is never entirely pure: orange can’t quite escape the homeliness of carrots, pumpkins, and the no-longer-exotic oranges.

  Maybe the best that can be done is something like John Baldessari’s droll Millennium Piece (with Orange) (see Figure 10). The photograph is of an orange. Not orange, just an orange: an orange, suspended in space, freed from any physical or social context. Or maybe not. The space isn’t empty; it is black. So it would be better to say that the photograph is of a black square (not the last we will see) with an orange placed in the middle. The orange glows. It energizes the black around its edges. It is still unmistakably an orange. It won’t be reduced to pure color. Its resistant particularity—the slight irregularity of its shape, its dimpled rind, and the insistent stub of its stem—­proclaim it an orange. And hardly a perfect specimen. It is an ordinary orange, but an ordinary orange formally rendered abstract and iconic, not least by existing in a black square. The sly Baldessari reunites the color with the fruit that gave it its name, magically repairing the separation that must be seen as much a part of the history of the English language as a part of the history of modern art. Baldessari turns an orange into the orange and then finally into orange itself.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The pale yellow composition is not my skin;

  it is only what my brothers would have me believe.

  FRANCIS NAOHIKO OKA, “Blue Crayon”

  Yellow

  PERILS

  FIGURE 14: Byron Kim, Synecdoche, 1991–­present. Oil and wax on lauan plywood, birch plywood, and plywood, each panel: 25.4 × 20.32 cm (10 × 8 in.); overall installed: 305.44 × 889.64 cm (120¼ × 350¼ in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington

  Sometime early in 1515, Tomé Pires sent a detailed account of his three years of Asian travel to the Portuguese king Manuel I. The manuscript remained unpublished until 1550, when a section of it appeared anonymously in the first volume of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Delle navigatione et viaggi (Of voyages and travels), a large collection of European travel narratives. Pires describes the Chinese people he had encountered on his journey and declares that they are “white, just like we are.”1

  And the very few Asians who visited Europe in the sixteenth century also looked “white” to European eyes. In 1582, four young Japanese aristocrats, along with two servants and a translator, left Nagasaki and traveled to Lisbon, Rome, and Madrid, returning to Japan in July 1590. The members of this so-called Tenshō embassy met with both Pope Gregory XIII and his successor, Pope Sixtus V, as well as with King Philip II of Spain. Their visit was widely reported all over Europe, and the young men were inevitably described, as in the account of their visit to Madrid in November 1584, as “white” and, a bit patronizingly, also of “very good intelligence.”2

  A few Europeans understood that Asians in fact were of different skin tones. In a compendium of Portuguese travelers’ accounts translated into English in 1579, the people living near Canton are described as “tawny,” looking much like those who live “in Morocco,” though “all within the land are of the color like to the people of Spain, Italy, and Flanders, white and red & of good growth.”3 And the Spanish Augustinian Juan González de Mendoza wrote that some Chinese were “of brown color” and that some others, for example, the “Tartarians,” looked “very yellow and not so white”; but he also insisted that the great majority of them “were white.”4

  Mendoza’s is one of the few early accounts (perhaps it is the first in print) in which any Asian is described as yellow. For the most part, however, the Chinese, like the Japanese, appeared white to European eyes in the sixteenth century, exactly as Marco Polo had described them over two hundred years earlier—and as travelers would do in the seventeenth century, like the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, who even after living in China for more than twenty-five years, still insisted that the Chinese people were “in general white.”5

  And so it remained, as scholars like Michael Keevak and Walter Demel have shown.6 In 1785, a close friend of George Washington wrote to him about a group of Chinese sailors and commented on their various skin colors. Those from the north were lighter skinned than those from the south, he told the soon-to-be American president, but “none of them are of the European complexion.” Washington wrote back with some surprise: “Before your letter was received I had conceived an idea that the Chinese … were white.”7

  Most educated Westerners, almost none of whom had any personal experience of East Asian people, had “conceived” the same thing. For about five hundred years—from the end of the thirteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, they almost all believed, like Washington, that Asians “were white.” Even as late as 1860, a French diplomat could still write of the Japanese that they are “as white as we are.”8

  Of course the East Asians were never actually white, any more than those of a “European complexion” are white. But soon the Chinese became yellow, which, of course, they weren’t either. By the time of the publication of the magisterial eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910–11), a considerable range of skin colors would be recognized among the large population of China, but the encyclopedia would insist that “yellow, however, predominates.”

  Indeed it does, though not among the population, but in how they are described by others. The Chinese and other East Asians had slowly but unmistakably become yellow in the Western imagination, so much so that the most authoritative encyclopedia in the English language could make its carefully calibrated claim as a seemingly neutral assertion of fact. But it isn’t that. Perhaps one might say that it is a jaundiced opinion, seeing yellow where it isn’t there.

  And yet “white” people had already begun to see it everywhere—and see it as a threat. The German emperor Wilhelm II is usually credited with coining the phrase “the yellow peril” (“die Gelbe Gefahr”) in 1895, though it almost certainly was being used earlier. Kaiser Wilhelm, however, gave it currency, insisting on the need for “the white race” to be prepared to resist “the inroads of the great yellow race.” A large oil painting with the title The Yellow Peril was commissioned by Wilhelm, showing white, female warriors, led by the archangel Michael, bathed in light from a radiant cross, mustering to defend Europe from the fierce storm that was thought to threaten it from the East. Wilhelm had multiple copies of the painting made, which he then sent to other European heads of state as well as to the American president William McKinley, while engravings of the image were quickly made and widely circulated in popular magazines.9

  The large number of Chinese people arriving in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century had already raised the specter of a dangerous immigrant crisis threatening the West, but with the Japanese military defeat first of China in 1895 and then of Russia in 1905, the perceived threat refocused and intensified. “Remember my picture,” the kaiser wrote to the Russian tsar in 1907, “it’s coming true.”10 Ironically, however, within seven years there would indeed be a devastating world war, though not the apocalyptic clash of civilizations that th
e kaiser had imagined but a war of a divided Europe, primarily pitting Germany and Austro-Hungary against Russia, France, and the United Kingdom.

  But it would have been easy to envision the global conflict, which Kaiser Wilhelm felt was inevitable, breaking out along cultural fault lines. Asians were homogenized and demonized, as Jack London infamously wrote in 1904 for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, becoming “that menace to the Western world which has been well named the ‘Yellow Peril.’”11 Already by then a cliché of xenophobia and racism, the phrase would continue to be variously deployed and variously envisioned. Asians were depicted as a numberless “horde” of faceless yellow bodies; or memorably individualized in “inscrutable” fictional villains like Fu-Manchu (“the yellow peril incarnate in one man,” as his creator said); or stylized into sinister metaphors, as in Erich Schilling’s striking cartoon of a grinning, slant-eyed yellow octopus, encompassing the entire globe in its grasping arms (Figure 15).12

  To oversimplify (but not very much), Asians looked white to Western eyes mainly when they seemed to be candidates for conversion to Christianity, as with the sixteenth-century Jesuit missions to China and Japan; they became yellow only when they seemed to be a threat to Western moral values and economic interests. Imagined moral qualities somehow got mixed into the imagined color of their skin. They become yellow, but not the highly saturated, cheerful yellow we are all familiar with (think of “happy faces”), instead a yellow that seems sallow and sickly, darkened less by melanin than by misgivings: by a set of associations projecting Western anxieties and bias. Yellow is the color of corruption and cowardice, of duplicity, degeneracy, and disease. In any case, their yellow was. It was a color produced by prejudice and not by pigmentation.

  Once, however, Asians “were” yellow, the color could be naturalized. It became a seemingly objective fact instead of an objectionable judgment. And then it sometimes became possible to escape the bias that had produced the color in the first place. Yellow they still were, but soon it was a yellow different in affect if not in hue.

  A European and American avant-garde would come to find in Asian cultures an elegance, delicacy, and subtlety it both admired and imitated—and that it found lacking in its own. The poise and simplicity found in things like Japanese gardens, the tea ceremony, calligraphy, haiku, and woodblock prints all came to influence the artistic imagination of the West almost at the very moment that Japan and China became the yellow peril dominating the popular imagination. Indeed the history of artistic modernism could be written as a history of East-West cultural relations, or at least of the West’s appropriation of Eastern modes and motifs: Van Gogh’s fascination with Japanese prints, Ezra Pound’s interest in Chinese poetry, Louis Comfort Tiffany’s attraction to Japanese and Chinese styles of ornamentation, Frank Lloyd Wright’s adaptation of Eastern architectural design features and philosophies. And not just individuals but whole movements—the Arts and Crafts Movement, art nouveau, art deco—were enthusiastically and self-admittedly “orientalist,” as were other modernist movements only a little less explicit about their indebtedness.13

  FIGURE 15: Erich Schilling, The Japanese “Brain Trust,” Simplicissimus 39, no. 44 (1935)

  But even when viewed positively, Asians remained yellow. In 1888, Percival Lowell (the brother of the poet Amy Lowell) wrote an influential, if deeply ambivalent, book called The Soul of the Far East, which found in “the yellow branch of the human race” an all-pervasive commitment to “devices for the beautifying of life.”14 This is a culture, he argued, in which “art reigns supreme” and where every object and activity reflects a “nameless grace” (though he confessed that for him “Japanese food is far more beautiful to look at than to eat,” an opinion that, had it been widely shared, might have saved the bluefin tuna from the risk of extinction). Lowell’s book was published with a cover designed by a talented artist and designer, Sarah Lyman Whitman, who beautifully gives its central conception visual expression: simple and clean, it reproduces that nameless grace in the delicacy of its abstract shapes and its hand-designed letter forms, all in yellow.

  Asians clearly but not inevitably became yellow, and similar stories could be told about how the indigenous population of North America became red, or Africans black, or even about how Caucasians came to be thought (or to think themselves) white.15 The color coding of race now seems to us more or less natural—at least until we look. People are variously colored, but they never are colored with the color that putatively identifies them racially. We are all colored people; we just aren’t the colors people say we are.

  “Colored people” has, of course, become a derogatory term, though oddly “people of color” has not. Perhaps only in the name of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the term not negatively charged, but the organization quickly became known mainly by its initials: NAACP.

  The politics of color are always complicated; and often they become toxic. “Colored people” is almost always a phrase that white people have used to describe other racial groups (although in South Africa and its neighboring countries, the phrase refers specifically to people of mixed ethno-racial background). However it is used, it marks exclusions and it divides. “People of color,” on the other hand, is a term that nonwhite people have chosen to describe themselves; it includes and it consolidates. It is designed to bring those people together, aimed at calling attention to their common political interests and establishing their solidarity of purpose. Remember Martin Luther King’s phrase “citizens of color” in his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. It seems that it is not only the politics of color that are complicated; so is its syntax.

  But in no context does either “colored people” or “people of color” include “white” people. They don’t count as colored, and yet white people certainly aren’t colorless. On the other hand, neither are they white. In 1962, it suddenly dawned on the people running Crayola that the crayon they had been unselfconsciously calling Flesh since 1949 (and had earlier called Flesh Tint from the appearance of its first box of crayons in 1903) was the approximate flesh tone only of white people’s flesh, and they changed the name of the color to Peach (Figure 16).

  FIGURE 16: Crayola crayons: Flesh and Peach

  Color turns out to be a remarkably inexact index of racial identity, perhaps the least telling of the biological markers that have been used to build our taxonomies of race, and yet it is still the one we most commonly employ.

  This has, like everything else, a history. European racial theory begins in the eighteenth century (before the middle of the eighteenth century “race” was a common word though almost always meant lineage), but the observation of human differences must have begun almost as soon as there were humans to observe one another. The categorization of these differences would necessarily wait for a long time, but sometime around 400 B.C.E., Greek medical science held that individuals were composed of combinations of four basic “humors”: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. These were associated with specific colors—red, white (or blue), yellow, and black.

  And it didn’t take much of a leap for the nascent ethnology to develop taxonomies dividing human beings into groups based then upon color, which would soon come to be thought of as distinct “races.” By 1735, Carl Linnaeus, one of the world’s great systematizers, would subdivide the genus Homo into four species: Europaeus albescens (whitish); Americanus rubescens (reddish); Asiaticus fuscus (dusky); Africanus niger (black).16 People became colored people, with accompanying traits of temperament. And in 1758, in the tenth edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, published in Stockholm, Asiaticus fuscus was changed to Asiaticus luridus (pale yellow). For Europeans, Asians now officially were yellow, with all the sensationalist connotations of the English word “lurid” attaching to them.

  Over the next two centuries, sociologists and anthropologists would continue to argue about color and race. How many races were there, and how was skin color dist
ributed across them? Scientists and philosophers debated whether color was an infallible indicator of racial difference (Immanuel Kant thought yes, Gottfried Leibniz no). In any event, racial difference became color coded, sometimes benignly, but more often not.

  In the complicated and often corrosive politics of pigmentation, color is almost always a social fact more than it is a visual one. But perhaps the visual one is both more interesting and more consequential in the consideration of race than we usually allow. Maybe we should think seriously about color as color, as a contemporary American painter, Byron Kim, has invited us to do. He is interested both in color and in race. Perhaps the interest in color came first, but in 1991 Kim began work on a remarkable project entitled Synecdoche. It is a large, rectangular grid of color tiles (or “panels,” as he calls them), each measuring 8 inches by 10 inches (see Figure 14). It has been shown in various iterations as installations with different numbers of these panels. Its first major showing was at the Whitney Biennial of 1993 with 275 panels; it was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s 2008 exhibition Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today; and in 2009 the painting, having grown to 429 panels, was purchased by the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

  In many ways Synecdoche represents a familiar formal gesture of contemporary art. It looks like an abstract color painting, similar in concept and design to more familiar works like Ellsworth Kelly’s 1978 Color Panels for a Large Wall or Gerhard Richter’s 256 Farben (256 Colors) from 1974. In each of these, color is seemingly freed from context (freed to be “just” color, as Van Gogh had predicted) by the reduction of form to flat color patches inserted into a rigid grid. Color is its subject, and color appears as an object detached from representation or signification. At first glance, Synecdoche appears to differ from the work of Kelly and Richter only in the mutedness of the color choices Kim has made.