by David Kastan
18. Wassily Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: Da Capo, 1994), 181.
19. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours [1810], trans. Charles Locke Eastlake (1840; reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006), 171.
20. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 224.
21. Cennino d’Andrea Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook [Il libro dell’arte], trans. Daniel V. Thompson (New York: Dover, 1954), 36.
22. Peter Stallybrass, “The Value of Culture and the Disavowal of Things,” in The Culture of Capital: Properties, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Henry Turner (New York: Routledge, 2002), 275–92.
23. In 1957, Klein wrote, “L’époque Bleue fait mon initiation” (The Blue Period was my initiation); Yves Klein, Le Dépassement de la problématique de l’art, ed. Marie-Anne Sichère and Didier Semin (Paris: École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 2003), 82.
24. Robert Southey, Madoc (London: Clarke, Beeton, 1853), 40.
25. William Gibson, Zero History (New York: Putnam, 2010), 19–20.
26. Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting” [1915], in Essays on Art, 1915–1933, ed. Troels Andersen, vol. 1 (London: Rapp and Whiting, 1969), 19.
27. Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Working with Mayakovsky” [1939], quoted in Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader, ed. Jason Gaiger and Paul Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 101.
28. Yves Klein, quoted in Gilbert Perlein and Bruno Cora, eds., Yves Klein: Long Live the Immaterial!, exh. cat. (Nice: Musée d’Art Moderne and d’Art Contemporaine, and New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2000), 88.
29. Thank you to the film’s producer, James Mackay, for this information and other accounts of the film’s production; to Keith Collins, who has been so very generous with Derek Jarman’s notebooks, the script of Blue, and additional materials; and to Donald Smith for so many kindnesses that enabled the writing of this section.
30. This, like so much of what is heard in the film, appears both in the chapter “Into the Blue,” in Derek Jarman, Chroma: A Book of Colour (London: Century, 1994), 103–14, and in the text used for Blue, which was created both from Jarman’s chapter and other materials from his diaries. All quotations used here appear in both.
31. Journal entry; see Tony Peake, Derek Jarman: A Biography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 362, 472.
32. See Peake, Derek Jarman, 526–27.
33. Jarman, Chroma, 104.
CHAPTER SIX
Dy(e)ing for Indigo
1. Isaac Newton, draft of “A Theory of Light and Colours,” MS Add. 3970.3, fol. 463v, Cambridge University Library: “The originall or primary colours are Red, yellow, Green, Blew, & a violet purple; together with Orang, Indico, & an indefinite varietie of intermediate gradations.”
2. Walter Scott, Marmion [1808], canto 5, in The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1841), 132.
3. Philip Miller, “Anil,” in The Gardeners Dictionary, vol. 1 (1731; reprint, London, 1735), 67–68.
4. See Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (New York: Ballantine, 2002).
5. See Jenny Balfour-Paul, Indigo: Egyptian Mummies to Blue Jeans (London: Archetype, 2007), 140. Anyone who writes about indigo is heavily indebted to Balfour-Paul’s work, as of course are we, and not least for the wonderful photograph introducing this chapter that she has generously allowed us to use.
6. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, The Six Voyages of John Baptista Tavernier, trans. John Phillips (London, 1678), 93.
7. Tavernier, Six Voyages, 93.
8. See Jenny Balfour-Paul, Indigo: Egyptian Mummies to Blue Jeans (London: Archetype, 2007), esp. 11–39; see also Victoria Finley, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (New York: Random House, 2002), 318–51; and Catherine E. McKinley: Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).
9. Herodotus, The Persian Wars, trans. A. D. Godley, vol. 1 (Loeb Classical Library 117; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 257. Given that he is describing figures painted on wool clothing, it seems unlikely that this is actually a reference to indigo.
10. Pliny the Elder, The Historie of the World: Commonly called The Natural Historie, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1603), book 35, chap. 27, 531.
11. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, the Venetian, trans. William Marsden (London: John Dent, 1926), 302.
12. John Bullokar, An English Expositor, Teaching the Interpretation of the Hardest Words Used in our Language (London, 1616), sig. I3r.
13. Sharon Ann Burnston, “Mood Indigo: The Old Sig Vat, or Experiments in Blue Dyeing the 18th Century Way,” http://www.sharonburnston.com/indigo.html.
14. Jean de Thévenot, The Travels of Monsieur de Thevenot into the Levant, trans. Archibald Lovell (London, 1687), part 2, 34–35. See also Jenny Balfour-Paul, Indigo in the Arab World (London: Routledge, 1997), 99–101.
15. Bernard Romans, A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida [1775], facsimile ed., ed. Rembert W. Patrick (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1962), 139.
16. Romans, Concise Natural History, 139.
17. Romans, Concise Natural History, 103.
18. Romans, Concise Natural History, 105, 107.
19. Romans, Concise Natural History, 75.
20. Romans, Concise Natural History, 108.
21. Michael Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 136. See his chapters “Color and Slavery” and “Redeeming Indigo,” 130–58, to which we are indebted.
22. Romans, Concise Natural History, 136.
23. Quoted in James A. McMillan, The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 4.
24. Quoted in W. W. Sellers, A History of Marion County, South Carolina: From Its Earliest Times to the Present (Columbia, SC: R. L. Bryan, 1902), 110.
25. See Hennig Cohen, “A Colonial Poem on Indigo Culture,” Agricultural History 30 (1956): 41–44. For a richly textured account of the complex set of collaboration and coercions that determined the cultivation of indigo in the American South, see Amanda Feeser’s wonderfully named Red, White and Black Make Blue: Indigo in the Fabric of South Carolina Life (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013).
26. Romans, Concise Natural History, 106.
27. See Balfour-Paul, Indigo, 56–57, and Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of Color, trans. Markus I. Cruse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 124–33. Pastoureau’s appealing and wide-ranging cultural histories of various colors are, of course, indispensable resources for research.
28. Romans, Concise Natural History, 138.
29. See Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 58.
30. Scribner’s Magazine, July 1897, 92, quoted in E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 102.
31. James Roberts, The Narrative of James Roberts, a Soldier Under Gen. Washington in the Revolutionary War, and Under Gen. Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, in the War of 1812 (Chicago: Printed for the author, 1858), 28.
32. See Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred?, 136–37; see also Laurent Dubois, The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 21–28.
33. See Balfour-Paul, Indigo, 58, and Pastoureau, Blue, 158–59.
34. See Anthony S. Travis, The Rainbow Makers: The Origins of the Synthetic Dyestuffs Industry in Western Europe (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1993).
CHAPTER SEVEN
At the Violet Hour
1. Émile Cardon, “Avant le Salon: L’exposition des révoltés,” La Presse, April 29, 1874, 2–3. See Dominique Lobstein, “Claude Monet and Impres
sionism and the Critics of the Exhibition of 1874,” in Monet’s “Impression Sunrise”: The Biography of a Painting (Paris: Musée Marmottan Monet, 2014), 106–15.
2. Louis Leroy, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” Le Charivari, April 25, 1874, 80, reproduced in Monet’s “Impression Sunrise,” 111. On the relation of the painting to the term “Impressionist,” see Paul Tucker, Claude Monet: Life and Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 77–78.
3. See Oscar Reutersvärd, “The ‘Violettomania’ of the Impressionists,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 9, no. 2 (1950): 106–10.
4. Jules Claretie, La Vie à Paris, 1881 (Paris: Victor Havard, 1881); the quotation is often attributed to Claude Monet, but Claretie is discussing “M. Edouard le révolutionnaire Manet” (225–26). Joris-Karl Huysmans, “L’Exposition des indépendants en 1880,” in L’Art Moderne (Paris: V. Charpentier, 1883), 182.
5. Théodore Duret, “Les Peintres impressionnistes” [1878], translated in Monet: A Retrospective, ed. Charles F. Stuckey (New York: Park Lane, 1985), 66.
6. George Moore, “Decadence,” Speaker 69 (September 3, 1892): 286, and see also Moore, A Modern Lover, vol. 2 (London, 1883), 89; Huysmans, L’Art moderne, 183 (“Leurs rétines étaient maladies”).
7. August Strindberg is quoted in Reutersvärd, “‘Violettomania,’” 107, as is Cardon, whose comment appeared in his “Avant le Salon,” 3.
8. Alfred Woolff, review of the second Impressionists’ show in 1876 in Figaro, April 3, 1876, quoted in John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, 4th ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 368.
9. Alfred de Lostelot, “Exposition des oeuvres de M. Claude Monet,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 28 (April 1, 1883): 344.
10. Émile Zola, His Masterpiece, trans. Ernest Alfred Vizetelly (London: Chatto and Windus, 1902), 122.
11. Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Oscar Wilde: The Major Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 233.
12. Wilde, “Decay of Lying,” 233.
13. Jules-Antoine Castagnary, “L’Exposition du boulevard des Capucines: Les Impressionistes,” Le Siècle, April 29, 1874, 3.
14. Donald Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular,” Artforum 32, no. 10 (1994): 110.
15. Quoted in Claude Roger-Marx, “Les Nymphéas de M. Claude Monet,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 4th ser., 1 (June 1909): 529, imagining or recording a conversation with the painter. This long review of the exhibition at Durand-Ruel is translated by Catherine J. Richards in Charles F. Stuckey, ed., Monet: A Retrospective (New York: Beaux Arts Editions, 1985), 267.
16. Philippe Burty, “Exposition de la Société anonyme des artistes,” La République Française, April 25, 1874, 2.
17. Canvases have multiple layers of paint, and according to art critic Octave Mirbeau, writing in the literary journal Gil Blas (June 22, 1889), a painting might take up to “sixty sessions” before it was finished. See Robert Herbert, “Method and Meaning in Monet,” Art in America 67 (September 1979): 91–108.
18. Claude Monet, quoted in John House, Monet: Nature into Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 221.
19. Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, trans. Christopher Pemberton (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 220.
20. Jules Claretie, in La Vie à Paris, 1881 (Paris: Victor Havard, 1881), 226, reports the observation as something Manet excitedly said to some friends, though the observation has often been attributed to Monet, no doubt because of the prominence of violet in his palette. See, e.g., Philip Ball’s usually reliable Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 184, 347n15.
21. Quoted in Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 178, from a conversation reported by René Gimpel, Diary of an Art Dealer, trans. John Rosenberg (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1966), 57–60.
22. The phrase, now often used by art historians, seems to have been given currency, if not coined, by Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism; or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 22, though he uses it with greater precision and effect than many of those who have picked it up from him.
23. Quoted by Lilla Cabot Perry, “Reminiscences of Claude Monet from 1899–1909,” American Magazine of Art 18, no. 3 (1927): 120.
24. León de Lora, Le Gaulois, April 10, 1877, quoted in T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 20.
25. A. Descubes [Amédée Descubes-Desgueraines], “L’Exposition des Impressionnistes,” Gazette des Lettres, des Sciences et des Arts 1, no. 12 (1877): 185.
26. Osip Mandelstam, “Impressionism,” in The Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, trans. Burton Raffel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973), 209.
27. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (1914; reprint, New York: Dover, 1977), 50.
28. David Brewster, The Kaleidoscope: Its History, Theory, and Construction (London: J. Murray, 1819), 135. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 116.
29. Marcel Proust, “The Painter; Shadows—Monet,” Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, trans. John Sturrock (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1988), 328.
30. Carol Vogel, “Water Lilies, at Home at MoMA,” New York Times, March 5, 2009.
31. Wassily Kandinsky, quoted in John Hollis, Shades—Of Painting at the Limit (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998), 67.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Basic Black
1. Quotations from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, screenplay by George Axelrod, from a novella by Truman Capote, are from http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/BreakfastatTiffany’s.pdf. The film was released by Paramount Pictures in October 1961. The novella was published in Esquire in November 1958 and then in book form as Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories (New York: Random House, 1958).
2. Axelrod, Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
3. Wallis Simpson, often quoted and possibly apocryphal, but see Greg King, The Duchess of Windsor: The Uncommon Life of Wallis Simpson (London: Aurum, 1999), 416.
4. Elizabeth Hawes, Fashion Is Spinach (New York: Random House, 1938), 58.
5. Henry Ford’s oft-cited quotation (“Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black”) appears in his My Life and Work (written with Samuel Crowther [New York: Doubleday, Page, 1922]), 72. Ford says that he announced the policy at a meeting in 1909 but admits, “I cannot say that anyone agreed with me.” For the subsequent color history of the Model T, see Bruce W. McCalley, Model T Ford: The Car That Changed the World (Iola, WI: Krause, 1994).
6. Hawes, Fashion Is Spinach, 58. See also Valerie Steele, The Black Dress (New York: HarperCollins, 2007); Amy Edelman, The Little Black Dress (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997); and Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (New York: Viking, 1978).
7. Henry James, The Awkward Age, ed. Patricia Crick (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987), 91.
8. Henry James, The Wings of The Dove, ed. Millicent Bell (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2008), 133.
9. See Michel Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color, trans. Jody Gladding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 100–104; and John Harvey, Men in Black (London: Reaktion, 1995), 74–82.
10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours [1810], trans. Charles Locke Eastlake (1840; reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006), 181. See John Harvey, The Story of Black (London: Reaktion, 2013), 242–44.
11. Charles Locke Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1869), 236.
12. Charles Baudelaire, “Salon of 1846,” in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. E. Charvet (Cambridge: Cambridge Un
iversity Press, 1972), 105.
13. Brigid Delaney, “‘You Could Disappear into It’: Anish Kapoor on His Exclusive Rights to ‘the Blackest Black,’” Guardian, September 25, 2016.
14. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Game of Chess,” in Dreamtigers, trans. Mildred Boyer and Howard Morland (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 59.
15. Joaquin Miller, As It Was in the Beginning: A Poem (San Francisco: A. M. Robinson, 1903), 4.
16. Anish Kapoor, as told to Julian Elias Bronner, “Anish Kapoor Talks About His Work with the Newly Developed Pigment Vantablack,” 500 Words, Artforum.com, April 3, 2015.
17. Frida Kahlo, quoted in Into the Nineties: Post-Colonial Women’s Writing, ed. Ann Rutherford, Lars Jensen, and Shirley Chew (Armidale, Australia: Dangaroo, 1994), 558 (“nada es negro, realmente nada es negro”).
18. Arthur Rimbaud, “Voyelles,” in A Season in Hell [1873], trans. Patricia Roseberry (London: Broadwater House, 1995), 56 (“A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue”). “Voyelles” was first published in 1871.
19. Henri Matisse, Matisse on Art, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 166.
20. Aleksandra Shatskikh, Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism, trans. Marian Schwartz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 105.
21. Quoted in Yve-Alain Bois, “On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman,” October 108 (2004): 8. Used there by permission of the Barnett Newman Foundation. The italics for Abraham are not in the letter.
22. Bois, “On Two Paintings,” 10.
23. Kazimir Malevich, Essays on Art, 1915–1933, ed. Troels Andersen (London: Rapp and Whiting, 1968), 26.
24. Alfred H. Barr Jr., “U.S. Abstract Art Arouses Russians,” New York Times, June 11, 1959.
25. Varvara Stepanova, quoted in Margarita Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 9.
26. Malevich, quoted in Artists on Art: From the 14th–20th Centuries, ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves (London: Pantheon, 1972), 452.