The World According to Colour: A Cultural History

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The World According to Colour: A Cultural History

The World According to Colour: A Cultural History

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In 2014 I watched A Very British Renaissance on BBC Two. James Fox’s talent as a researcher and storyteller was captivating and this documentary series inspired me to pursue academia. After watching this series, I turned to Fox’s catalogue and watched a few of his previous documentaries. To this day, Fox’s A History of Art in Three Colours is one of my favourite documentary series and the episode on the colour blue will always stay in my mind. The Unknown Monet' is the first exhibition devoted to the pastels and drawings of Claude Monet. Eighty works are on show at the Royal Academy, which provide an insight into the working methods of one of the most popular and well-documented individuals in the history of art. From the point of view of art scholarship, this exhibition breaks new ground in exploring the role of draughtsmanship in Monet Creation myths from all over the world begin in similar fashion. Here is the Nasadiya Sukta, sometimes known as “The Hymn of the Dark Beginning,” from the Hindu Rigveda ( c. 1500 BCE): Augustine’s argument, so deeply informed by his Manichaean inheritance, is significant because it identified darkness not with evil—that connection was established long before the Gospels were written—but with absence. This is relevant to us because the same argument was, and is, used to denigrate the color with which darkness is always compared. It’s a “dance between subjects, objects, mind and matter”, that varies not only from person to person, but from species to species, and leads to the tantalising possibility that “if a tree fell in a forest and no one was there to see it, its leaves would be colourless.”

The general and the specific are woven together in an exploration of how “Artworks, poems, treatises, rituals and everyday idioms have slowly piled up into vast edifices of multi-coloured meaning.”

Reimag(in)ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art

Green Chlorophyll and agriculture. Gardens and the color most associated with Islam. Going green, the environmental movements and the various green political parties. There were two spirits, born in murkiness, one that established Heaven and the other that constructed Earth. The World According to Colour is not so much about colour as it is about our relationship to it. Colour itself remains surprisingly elusive. “For all colour’s ubiquity, for all humanity’s tremendous advances in understanding and manufacturing it,” writes Fox, “we can never truly possess it.” Indeed, it is a paradoxical phenomenon. As Isaac Newton observed in 1666, colour is not inherent in objects, rather it is a property intrinsic to light. When light hits an object, some is absorbed while the rest is reflected; objects thus take on the colour they don’t possess. Furthermore, it is the human brain that translates the reflected light into colour, as determined by its wavelength. In a sense, then, colour is a human invention. In the chapter on purple, we learn how this vibrant colour of the rich and powerful was brought to the masses thanks to William Henry Perkin, who in the spring of 1856 accidentally discovered the first synthetic purple dye. His breakthrough brought “mauve mania” to the British Isles and laid the foundation for the synthetic organic chemicals industry. But the love affair didn’t last; by the end of the 19th century, as the industrial revolution increasingly took its toll on the environment, the colour came to be associated with toxicity and pollution.

The vocabulary of these languages isn’t dictated by the prismatic spectrum but, once again, by what is happening inside their speakers’ heads. People generally name only the colours they consider socially or culturally important. The Aztecs, who were enthusiastic farmers, used more than a dozen words for green; the Mursi cattleherders of Ethiopia have 11 colour terms for cows, and none for anything else. Through meticulous research and authoritative writing, Fox helps us to see the world around us in a different light. Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20) Turner’s favourite colour was chrome yellow, leading one observer to joke that the artist had ‘sworn fidelity to the Yellow Dwarf’, while the Impressionists’ enthusiasm for artificial pigments such as violet and indigo outraged critics. ‘Make it clear to M Pissarro’, wrote a reviewer of the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876, ‘that the trees are not violet, that the sky is not a fresh butter tone, that in no country can we see the things he paints.’ J-K Huysmans dubbed the condition ‘indigomania’, while the German Max Nordau linked it to the decline of civilisation, arguing that the use of purple has a depressing effect and that ‘the violet pictures of Manet and his school’ were evidence of hysteria, neurasthenia, lassitude and exhaustion.

The World According to Colour: A Cultural History – book review

When it comes to colour-mania, it would be hard to beat Yves Klein. Having decided that blue ‘is beyond dimensions’, Klein went from producing monochrome canvases covered in his patented International Klein Blue (IKB) to lobbying the UN for permission to dye an entire lake with IKB and rename it ‘The Blue Sea’. He even wrote to the International Atomic Energy Agency suggesting that in the future atomic weapons should be made to produce IKB-tinted mushroom clouds. He shared his idea with the Dalai Lama, Pope Pius XII and Bertrand Russell. I’d give a lot to see the looks on their faces when they read Klein’s letter. For People Who Devour Books And this, from Polynesia—the ancient creation chant Kumulipo, whose title means “a source of darkness or origin”: The first narrative exploration of humans' extraordinary relationship with color, and the history of its meanings, associations, and properties that span cultures, continents, and languages. Ford Madox Brown, The Last of England, 1852-5. Oil on panel, 82.5 x 75cm. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. James takes the basic colours we see around us and looks at them from various angles to provide a fascinating mix of information that I thoroughly enjoyed. Through the lenses of archaeology and history we learn about how colour has been used through time, the lengths our ancestors went to to produce some of them, the significance of colour in society and art, and the prejudices and superstitions that have resulted.

Unsurprisingly, artists and paintings play a prominent part in the story, from the makers of those unsettling red handprints in Chauvet Cave to Howard Hodgkin, whose masterly Leaf (2007–9) consists of a single brushstroke of emerald green that took a few seconds to execute and two years of mental preparation. ‘Colour is colour,’ Hodgkin once said. ‘You can’t control it’ – although Leaf showed the artist making a pretty good stab at this. But this theory isn’t really true. Different wavelengths of light do exist independently of us but they only become colours inside our bodies. Colour is ultimately a neurological process whereby photons are detected by light-sensitive cells in our eyes, transformed into electrical signals and sent to our brain, where, in a series of complex calculations, our visual cortex converts them into “colour”. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. It was only a matter of time before the work of Robert Rauschenberg would again receive a star billing in Paris, and there could be no better venue than the Centre Pompidou. The reason is that the work literally benefits from the implied temporariness of the 'rooms' at the Centre. The text is incredibly ambitious and certainly successful in its endeavour. Fox traces a long period of art history, from the Bronze Age to present day. The World According to Colour explores many cultures and explores how the meaning of colour can change in different societies.

Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life. (John 8:12) Humanity’s twin fascinations with gold and the sun are explored in a chapter on yellow, via Olafur Eliasson’s Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern, the Aztecs, the Incas and Norse mythology. I came here to learn interesting facts, or at the very least interesting anecdotes... And I hate having my time wasted. If you don't have enough material to write a book, you honestly don't have to write it. Easy!



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