by David Kastan
5. Isaac Newton, Opticks; or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light (London, 1704), 90.
6. Newton, Opticks, 90.
7. Newton, Opticks, 111. Objects are able to “suppress and stop in them a very considerable part of the Light. … For they become coloured by reflecting the Light of their own Colours more copiously, and that of all other Colours more sparingly.”
8. Some people think that the mind is just a mystification of the neural activities of the brain. But for a series of interesting essays considering the difference, see Torin Alter and Sven Walter, eds., Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
9. See Mazviita Chirimuuta, Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
10. Galileo Galilei, “The Assayer” [“Il saggiatore,” 1623], in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, ed. and trans. Stillman Drake (New York: Random House, 1957), 274.
11. Walter Benjamin, “Aphorisms on Imagination and Color,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 48.
12. There is a famous thought experiment by the Australian philosopher Frank Jackson in which he imagines a brilliant scientist named Mary who knows everything possible about how and why we experience color but who has never herself experienced it, and Jackson considers what (if any) new knowledge Mary would have if she were suddenly exposed to colors. See “What Mary Didn’t Know,” Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 291–95. See also the collection of essays responding to Jackson: Peter Ludlow, Yujin Nagasawa, and Daniel Stoljarm, eds., There’s Something About Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
13. Bertrand Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” in The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 25. Mark Johnston could be credited with the term “revelation theory”; see his influential “How to Speak of the Colors,” Philosophical Studies 68 (1993): 221–63. See also Galen Strawson, “Red and ‘Red,’” Synthese 78 (1989): 193–232. Color has become an important and highly contested topic for philosophy, arguably triggered by C. L. Hardin’s Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1988).
14. Ellen DeGeneres, quoted by Terence McCoy, “The Inside Story of the ‘White Dress, Blue Dress’ Drama That Divided a Planet,” Washington Post, February 27, 2015.
15. For color as a con job, see Harry Kreisler, interview with Christof Koch, “Consciousness and the Biology of the Brain,” March 24, 2006, Institute of International Studies, University of California at Berkeley, transcript, 4.
16. Jonathan Cohen, The Red and the Real: An Essay on Color Ontology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 29, 28.
17. For a sophisticated and provocative argument differentiating the idea of having color vision from seeing colors, see Michael Watkins, “Do Animals See Colors? An Anthropocentrist’s Guide to Animals, the Color Blind, and Far Away Places,” Philosophical Studies, 94, no. 3 (1999): 189–209.
18. Mohan Matthen, Seeing, Doing, and Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), 163–64, 202.
CHAPTER TWO
Orange Is the New Brown
1. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). This influential work has provoked a large bibliography of qualification, critique, and reconsideration; see, e.g., Don Dedrick’s thoughtful Naming the Rainbow: Colour Language, Colour Science, and Culture (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998).
2. Quoted by Luisa Maffi and C. L. Hardin, Color Categories in Thought and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 349.
3. Félix Bracquemond, Du Dessin et de la couleur (Paris: Charpentier, 1885), 55.
4. Derek Jarman, Chroma: A Book of Colour (London: Century, 1994), 95.
5. Claudius Aelian, A Registre of Hystories conteining Martiall Exploites of Worthy Warriours, Politique Practises of Civil Magistrates, Wise Sentences of Famous Philosophers, and other matters manifolde and memorable, trans. Abraham Fleming (London, 1576), 88.
6. Anthony Copley, Wits, Fittes, and Fancies (London, 1595), 201. The book is an unacknowledged adaptation of a similar jest book by Melchor de Santa Cruz, Floresta española (Madrid, 1574).
7. Thomas Blundeville, M. Blundevile his exercises: containing sixe treatises (London, 1594), 260.
8. Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 105.
9. Charles Estienne, Maison Rustique, or The Countrey Farme, trans. Richard Surflet and rev. Gervase Markham (London, 1616), 241.
10. For a smart and supple essay on “a world before ‘orange’” and a world after oranges, see Julian Yates’s “Orange,” in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 83–105.
11. Vincent Van Gogh, Letter 534, October 10, 1885, in Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition, ed. Nienke Bakker, Leo Jansen, and Hans Luijten, 6 vols. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), 3:290.
12. Van Gogh, Letter 450, mid-June 1884, and Letter RM 21, May 25, 1890, Letters, 3:156, 5:320.
13. Van Gogh, Letter 371, August 7, 1883, Letters, 2:399.
14. Van Gogh, Letter 663, August 18, 1888, Letters, 4:237.
15. Van Gogh, Letter 660, August 13, 1888, Letters, 4:235.
16. Van Gogh, Letter 663, August 18, 1888, Letters, 4:237.
17. Van Gogh, Letter 604, May 4, 1888, Letters, 4:76.
18. Sonia Delaunay, in The New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, ed. Arthur A. Cohen (New York: Viking, 1978), 8. Quoted by Phillip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 301.
19. Oscar Wilde, quoted in Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl E. Beckson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 69.
20. Yves Klein, quoted in Hannah Weitemeier, Yves Klein (1928–1962): International Klein Blue (Cologne: Taschen, 1995), 9.
21. Klein, quoted in Yves Klein (1928–1962): A Retrospective, ed. Pierre Restany, Thomas McEvilley, and Nan Rosenthal (Houston: Rice University, Institute for the Arts, 1982), 130.
22. Klein, quoted in David W. Galenson, Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 170.
23. Yves Klein, Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, trans. Klaus Ottmann (New York: Spring, 2007), 185.
24. Henri Matisse, quoted in Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909–1954 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005), 428.
25. Barnett Newman, Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John O’Neill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 249.
26. William Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (Boston: David R. Godine, 1975), 75.
CHAPTER THREE
Yellow Perils
1. Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Delle navigationi et viaggi, vol. 1 (Venice, 1550), 337v (“bianchi, si como siamo noi”).
2. The wording here comes from the translation of a newsletter recorded in Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, vol. 19 (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1916), 137.
3. Bernardino de Escalante, A discourse of the nauigation which the Portugales doe make to the realmes and prouinces of the east partes of the worlde … , trans. John Frampton (London, 1579), 21.
4. Juan González de Mendoza, The historie of the great and mightie kingdome of China … , trans. Robert Parke (London, 1588), 2–3. González de Mendoza had not traveled to China, and he based his descriptions on the journals of Miguel de Luarca.
5. Marco Polo describes both the Chinese an
d the Japanese as white. See Ramusio’s translation and edition of Marco Polo’s travels, included in Delle navigationi et viaggi, vol. 2 (1559), 16v, 50v; and see Matteo Ricci, De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas suscepta ab Societate Jesu [Of the Christian mission to China by the Society of Jesuits], expanded and trans. Fr. Nicolas Trigault (Augsburg, 1615), 65 (“Sinica gens fere albi coloris est”).
6. See Michael Keevak’s essential Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), to which we are much indebted; and Walter Demel, “Wie die Chinese gelb wurden,” Historische Zeitschrift 255 (1992): 625–66, and an expanded version in Italian, Come i chinese divennero gialli: Alli origini delle teorie razziali (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1997). See also D. E. Mungello, “How the Chinese Changed from White to Yellow,” in The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800, 4th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2012), 141–43.
7. George Washington, “Letter to Tench Tilghman,” in The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, ed. John C, Fitzpatrick, vol. 28 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1940), 238–39.
8. Marquis de Moges, Souvenirs d’une ambassade et Chine et au Japon, 1857 et 1858 (Paris: Hachette, 1860), 310 (“aussi blancs que nous”).
9. For a reproduction of the painting and an account of its allegory, see the London Review of Reviews (December 1895): 474–75. On “The Yellow Peril,” see Keevak, Becoming Yellow, chap. 5, esp. 124–28. Keevak reproduces the engraving as it appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1898. See also Stanford M. Lyman, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ Mystique,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 13 (2006): 683–747; Richard Austin Thompson, The Yellow Peril, 1890–1924 (New York: Arno, 1978); and John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yates, eds., Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (London: Verso, 2014).
10. Quoted in Keevak, Becoming Yellow, 128.
11. Jack London, “Revolution,” and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 282.
12. Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu (New York: McBride, Nast, 1913), 23. See also Christopher Frayling, The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu-Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia (London: Thomas and Hudson, 2014).
13. See, e.g., Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), and R. John Williams’s chapter “The Teahouse of the American Book,” in The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 13–44.
14. Percival Lowell, The Soul of the Far East (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888), 37, 113.
15. See, e.g., Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); and Frank M. Snowden Jr., Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
16. Carl Linnaeus, Systema Naturae (Leiden, 1735).
17. Byron Kim, “Ad and Me,” Flash Art (International Edition), no. 172 (1993): 122.
18. Daniel Buren, “Interview with Jérôme Sans,” in Colour: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. David Batchelor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, and London: Whitechapel, 2008), 222.
19. Byron Kim quoted in Ann Tempkin, ed., Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 188.
20. Josef Albers, The Interaction of Color (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 1.
21. See Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, trans. Emily McVarish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Kim, it might be noted, was an English major as an undergraduate at Yale.
22. Byron Kim, Threshold: Byron Kim, 1990–2004, ed. Eugenie Tsai (Berkeley: University of California Press, Berkeley Art Museum, and Pacific Film Archive), 55.
23. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (London: Edward Arnold, 1924), 65.
24. For a brilliant account of Ligon’s work, see Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 201–54.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mixed Greens
1. Norman Bean [Edgar Rice Burroughs], “Under the Moons of Mars,” serialized in All-Story Magazine, February–July 1912 (published in book form in 1917).
2. James Delingpole, Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors (New York: Publius, 2011).
3. Arthur C. Clarke, quoted in James E. Lovelock, “Hands Up for the Gaia Hypothesis,” Nature 344 (1990): 102.
4. Wallace Stevens, “Repetitions of a Young Captain,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1954), 309.
5. Hamid Dabishi, The Green Movement in Iran (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011). See also Misagh Parsa, Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 206–43.
6. Seyyed Mir-Husein Mossavi, Nurturing the Seed of Hope: A Green Strategy for Liberation, ed. and trans. Daryoush Mohammad Poor (London: H and S Media, 2012). Thanks to Hamid Dabishi for reading and commenting on this section.
7. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, and W. W. Pratt (1824; reprint, London: Penguin, 1996), canto 16, stanza 97, p. 551.
8. Campaign buttons for both Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960, for example, were red, white, and blue, as they were for both Republican and Democratic candidates in every American election through the twentieth century.
9. See Tom Zeller, “Ideas and Trends: One State, Two State, Red State, Blue State,” New York Times, February 8, 2004.
10. Jean Jaurès, Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française, 4 vols. (1901–4; reprint, Paris, Éditions Sociales, 1968), 2:700, quotes an entry from Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette’s memoir from June 20, 1792, reporting on a meeting he had attended at which a red flag with this inscription was displayed but apparently not unveiled until August 10.
11. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working-Men’s Association (London, 1871), 21.
12. Maria Hayward, Dress at the Court of Henry VIII (Leeds, UK: Maney, 2007), 44.
13. Lincoln A. Mitchell, The Color Revolutions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
14. James Connolly, “The Irish Flag” [Workers’ Republic, April 8, 1916], in James Connolly: Selected Writings, ed. Peter Berresford Ellis (London: Pluto, 1997), 145.
15. The notion of opponent colors was first suggested by a German scientist named Ewald Hering, who in 1892 had observed that if we look at a red circle for sixty seconds and then switch our gaze to a plain white space, we see an afterimage of blue-green circle in the white area, and noted also that we do not see reddish greens (or yellowish blues) in the world but we do see yellowish greens, bluish reds, yellowish reds, and so on. These two ideas led him to hypothesize a notion of color opponency (red-green, yellow-blue, white-black) as a kind of neural color-mixing by the visual system, as an alternative (or addition) to the traditional understanding of the operation of the color channels provided by the rods and cones of the retina.
16. Josef Albers, The Interaction of Color: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
CHAPTER FIVE
Moody Blues
1. James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer; or, The First Warpath: A Tale, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1841), 176.
2. William Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (Boston: David R. Godine, 1975), 75–76. See also Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (Seattle: Wave, 2009), and Carol Mavor’s Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour (London: Reaktion, 2013).
3. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Complaint of Mars,” l. 8. George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sins, 1866), 122; Herman Melville, “Merry Ditty of the Sad Man,” in Collected Poems, ed. Howard Vincent (Chicago: Packard, 1947), 386. The
poem was left unpublished at the time of Melville’s death in 1891.
4. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1857), 257.
5. David Garrick to Peter Garrick, July 11, 1741, in Letters of David Garrick, ed. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 26; John James Audubon to Lucy Audubon, December 5, 1827, in The Audubon Reader, ed. Richard Rhodes (New York: Everyman Library, 2015), 213.
6. See Peter C. Muir, Long Lost Blues: Popular Blues in America, 1850–1920 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 81.
7. Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig, eds., Conversations with August Wilson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 211.
8. Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: An Intimate Portrait, trans. Angel Flores (New York: Prentice Hall, 1948), 67.
9. Pablo Picasso, quoted in Richard Wattenmaker and Anne Distel, Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Early Modern (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 192.
10. Marilyn McCully, ed., Picasso: The Early Years (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1997), 39.
11. Charles Morice, review of a show at the Serrurier Gallery in Le Mercure de France, March 15, 1905, 29 (“dèlecter à la tristesse”; “sans y compatir”).
12. Oscar Wilde, “Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Ian Small, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 140.
13. Wyndham Lewis, “Picasso,” Kenyon Review 2, no. 2 (1940): 197.
14. Wislawa Szymborska, “Seen from Above,” in Map: Collected and Last Poems, trans. Clare Cavanaugh and Stanislaw Barańczak (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Mariner, 2015), 205.
15. John Ray, A Collection of English Proverbs (London, 1678), 230.
16. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 21.
17. John Ruskin, Lectures on Architecture and Painting [Edinburgh, 1853], in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, vol. 12 (London: George Allen, 1904), 25.