Colour in Art ArtWords
Introduction
Colour is implicated in physics, in chemistry, in physiology and psychology, as well as in language and philosophy; yet it is visual art alone that has engaged simultaneously with most or all of these branches of knowledge and experience. Thus, to know art goes a long way towards knowing colour and, whereas in my earlier studies, Colour and Culture (1993) and Colour and Meaning (1999), I gave some attention to the sciences of colour, in this book I approach these other topics largely through the thought and practice of artists. But, of course, this thought and these practices were, and are, inflected by the prevailing intellectual and social climate of the day, just as they in turn contribute to it. Some philosophers in the ancient Greek world appealed to the experience of the painters’ use of pigments to explain their notions of the nature of colours and their mixture in matter; but, from Aristotle onwards, they were also very aware that the surface appearance of colours is very deceptive: ‘We do not see colours as they really are’, wrote the Peripatetic author of the only surviving early Greek treatise, On Colours, who knew that the surface appearance of colours is not to be trusted. This is an idea that means essentially that it is the context of colours as well as their immediate physical stimulus (the internal or surface structure of the objects that reflect some wavelengths of light and absorb others) that determine how they are seen. It is an idea which has continued to preoccupy artists, at least up to the Op Art of the 1960s, notably in Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color (1963), where the proposition that ‘In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is – as it physically is’ was demonstrated in the most elegant and visually exciting way.
Presented in this rather bland verbal formula, it is, however, a scarcely plausible notion, for the ‘physical’ element in colour is simply a set of wavelengths that impinge on the eye and have, as yet, no identity as what we understand as ‘colour’. This physical element is not ‘colour’, but variable types of radiant energy which are ‘really’ out there in the world, but invisible. Even the human visual system does not produce ‘colour’, since the mechanisms of the retina simply convert physical into electrochemical energy, which is fed into the nervous system, and ultimately into the cortex of the brain. One set of the retinal photoreceptors, called ‘cones’, is receptive to wavelengths of light around 420 nanometers (units of frequency); another, to wavelengths of around 530 nm; and a third, to frequencies of around 560 nm, corresponding roughly to our perceptions of blue, green and red. These are the ‘primary’ colours of light. Yellow, however, which appears at a wavelength of around 580 nm, and is usually regarded as an unmixed colour, is thought to result from the interaction of the ‘red’ and ‘green’ cones. The retina records and transmits sensation, not perception, and the recognition of even a single colour depends upon complicated cerebral processes, such as inference and memory. ‘Colour’ is thus, first and foremost, a question of psychology (see Chapter 2). The gap between colour sensation and colour perception can be illustrated by the fact that the human eye is capable of discriminating between many millions of colour stimuli (the fact that various researchers have put the number at between one and ten million suggests that these figures are not based on empirical studies, but are extrapolations from a limited database), but the brain chooses to perceive and record only a limited number. I shall have more to say on this in Chapter 5, on colour language.
The discovery in the early nineteenth century that there are as few as three different types of cone function in the retina depended on the much earlier reduction by painters of the distinct categories of colours to three ‘primaries’. These were not the primary colours of light, red, green and blue but red, blue and yellow, which, it was thought – with some justification – could generate the whole range of colours by mixing. Colour-mixing had been little practised in antiquity for largely ideological reasons: nature should not be interfered with by man; mixture produced change, which was a bad thing. But there were also good chemical reasons why it was risky, and it could produce unpleasant visual results. By the later Middle Ages, however, there were more examples of mixed colours – green from blue and yellow, for example – where specifically green pigments were rare and costly; and the tool for mixing, the painter’s palette, begins to make its appearance in Europe around 1400. The development of oil painting in the early Renaissance hastened the extension of mixing by inhibiting undesirable chemical reactions between particles of pigment, which were now sheathed in a film of protective oil. The new Renaissance interest in naturalistic painting depended on the capacity to match the various colours of nature with pigment mixtures. But artists were also fascinated by the idea that, symbolically as well as practically, the three ‘primary’ or ‘primitive’ colours could encompass the whole world of colour, an idea which appears for the first time in treatises on art in the second half of the sixteenth century. Chapter 1 looks at how the primaries themselves became tinged with ideology.
It is sometimes said, especially by artists, that colour cannot be described or discussed in words. It is true that the recent attempts by ethnolinguists to identify a universal ‘basic’ colour vocabulary have met with well-founded criticisms, but it is also true that the love of colour among artists has led them to be far from reticent about it, and in this book I have drawn heavily on their views, which have an immediacy and often a poetry that work in the opposite direction to the urge for simplification characteristic of philosophy and the natural sciences. What I propose to show is that artists have a great diversity of views even about similar aspects of colour, and exemplify this diversity in their work. Experimental psychologists who, since the beginnings of their science in the mid-nineteenth century, have been concerned with human (and animal) responses to colour, have rarely drawn on the experiences of artists, as opposed to small samples of the ‘general public’ (often in fact university students) and, as a consequence, they have drawn many conclusions – for example, on the question of colour preferences, which have, for the most part, remained stranded in the circular arguments of opinion polls and market research. In many parts of this book, but especially in Chapter 6, I look at the more open-ended treatment of colour meaning by artists.
Since many artists in the twentieth century, notably Matisse (1869–1954) and Kandinsky (1866–1944) at a time when the radical reshaping of modern art called for manifestos and extensive verbal commentary, have been remarkably articulate about their approaches to colour, I have drawn more heavily on them than on the pre-modern painters I looked at in my earlier books; and this means that I give here greater prominence to recent art than in those earlier studies. I have also extended the discussion into two new areas: to non-European art, where it seems to me that some colour issues are articulated more clearly than in the European tradition; and to media other than painting and sculpture – film, performance and other multi-media works – where there are new issues at stake and new ways of approaching the old ones. This book is concerned with the history of colour, but is not itself a history; rather, each chapter develops a theme from physics, or chemistry, or psychology, or linguistics, for example, which is intended to pinpoint that discipline’s relationship with art. Although it begins with physics and chemistry, and works through physiology, colour is primarily a psychological phenomenon. Hence, the issues raised are unlikely to be resolved, but instead will be successively reinterpreted and exemplified through the creative ingenuity of artists. I hope by the end of this survey to have conveyed some sense of this endless creativity.
The image shows 'Alignment' a Holograph by Sally Weber 1987. KarlErnst Osthaus-Museum, Hagen. Photo Achim Kukulies, Dusseldorf