The Glowing World

“If I expect to see red, I prepare myself to see red,” reads a red neon wall installation by Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, better known for using whites, grays and other neutral tones. Kosuth’s piece addresses some of the myriad ways we perceive color: our physical ability to see it and the role of our expectations, our experiences and our cultural, spiritual and stylistic associations. Kosuth is more concerned here with the idea of color than what a color looks like. Could he have used any other hue to the same end? How would we react if he wrote the same remark but used blue? Does this red require prior familiarity with the word and/or the color?

Philip Ball, in his erudite and breathtakingly fast-reading book, “Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color,” begins his exploration from a different perspective. He focuses on “the substance of color”--its physical attributes. This, he explains, is partly because he majored in chemistry and got a doctorate in physics. And though his fondest associations are not necessarily ours--”phthalocyanine,” he writes, “speaks to me of chlorophyll and blood.” And “vermilion conjures up the sulfur and mercury of the alchemists”--we are almost seduced. Giving color such tangibility is compelling. It appeals not only to the sense of sight but also to smell, touch and taste.

Ball’s excitement is infectious; his writing is clear and engaging, conveying the magic and logic of chemistry. And while much of the science and history of color have been dealt with elsewhere--not least in John Gage’s wonderful “Color and Culture”--Ball makes original and insightful connections between science and aesthetics. “Bright Earth” also traces color’s social history and its role in the annals of art history. It’s as if Ball’s scientific acumen gave him access to art’s inner sanctums.

Literate and literary, Ball quotes a 7th century Byzantine writer marveling at the colors of the peacock (“How could anyone who sees the peacock not be amazed at the gold interwoven with sapphire, at the purple and emerald-green feathers, at the composition of the colours of many patterns, all mingled together but not confused with one another?”

He cites Alexander Pope in “The Rape of the Lock” equating sylphs with insects (“While ev’ry beam new transient colours flings, / Colours that change whene’er they wave their wings”) but attributes the iridescent effect to simple light scattering. And he offers John Donne pondering, “Why grass is green, or why our blood is red/Are mysteries which none have reach’d into.” Or hadn’t yet.

Tracking the high points, accidents and curiosities of the evolution of color manufacture, Ball begins with the Stone Age, surprising us with how sophisticated the hunter-gatherers were about their materials. They would grind up hematite with a mortar and pestle, bind it with a medium like vegetable oil, and apply it (“a Stone Age oil paint,” Ball writes, adding, “And who was it who dreamed up the idea of spray-painting the pigment with breath blown through a tube?”).

The ancient Egyptians, who equated bright colors with wealth, used a pigment known as Egyptian frit, or Egyptian blue, that dates back to around 2500 BC. The mixture, made from chalk, malachite and sand, was fired in a kiln at temperatures of up to 900 degrees Celsius and then ground into a powder. It is, Ball claims, “the oldest synthetic pigment, a Bronze Age blue.”

We know less about the Greeks’ treatment of color. They were apparently more concerned with theory than practice. Aristotle, for one, said the true study of color was not to be found in mixing pigments but in studying rays of pure color, echoing Plato’s notion that the purer the color, the closer to its essence. Also, fewer colors allowed artists greater harmony of hue and mastery of light and shade.

The Romans, however, loved intense color and spared no effort or expense in obtaining it. The rich Tyrian purple of Imperial Rome was derived from shellfish--about 250,000 crustaceans yielded an ounce of the dye. No wonder manufacturing pigment outside the Imperial dye works could be punishable by death. And the Pompeiians used bright, complementary colors in their frescoes, composed of six coats of plaster, the first three made with increasingly fine grades of sand and the next three with ground marble, which were then polished and which retain much of their brilliance today.

But it was the Middle Ages that marked the apogee of color technology. Painting was a craft, and artisans had to know their materials. Pigment shades were controlled by degrees of grinding. Powders were mixed with binding agents, such as water, egg white or egg yolk, each of which produced a different tone. (Oils, which darken pigments, weren’t commonly used until after the 15th century.)

The fascinating chapter “Secret Recipes” explains how medieval alchemists discovered the important mineral acids, sulfuric and nitric. Before that, the only acid was vinegar, which was used to make white lead--the most prevalent white paint until the synthetics of the 19th century.

Another innovation central to medieval painting was the making of vermilion by uniting mercury and sulfur. Until the 11th century, using vermilion, which is made from the powdered root of brazilwood, to cover a page was as costly as using gold. It remained, however, the best red pigment until the 20th century.

Gold became the most desirable color in the 14th century--and it couldn’t be cooked up. It was royal, holy, stable and strong and would be applied to gessoed panels in thin sheets (made by hammering gold coins). The gold would adhere by means of a water mordant and would then be rubbed to a high polish. Ball quotes the medieval monk Heraclius advising, “Make it very brilliant with the tooth of a savage bear.”

The shift from anonymous medieval monks making illuminated manuscripts as a devotional activity to the individualism of the Renaissance artist who could concentrate on design and composition led to increasing specialization and to patronage. Patrons would determine not only subject matter but also the kind and quality of pigments--for example, whether an artist used cobalt, smalt or indigo, ultramarine or azurite, the latter two the most expensive blues. Fortunately, the Florentine craftsmen’s guild would not permit artists to use inferior materials.

In the Renaissance, “truth to nature” displaced the medieval desire to use expensive pigments as devotional offerings. By the 15th century, artists showed objects in relief. Leonardo explained, “Painting is a combination of light and shadow in close mixture with the diverse qualities of all the simple and complex colors.” His style encompassed a somber palette, highlights revealing a source of light and sfumato (or “smokiness.”) Giotto had opened the way for three-dimensional representation. “The observer is not reading the image ... ,” Ball explains, “but is present in the scene.” Time and linear perspective are suddenly relevant, conveyed through the device of light and shade. The scenes contain real, not idealized, people.

But then along came the Mannerists in the 16th century. They aimed at a kind of strangeness (that looks kitschy to our contemporary sensibility), marked by distortion and acidic colors in disturbing combinations. Painters, not the least of them Veronese, El Greco and Tintoretto, would use bright colors to appeal to the emotions.

By contrast, Baroque artists such as Correggio, Caravaggio and Rembrandt turned to “autumn’s colors”--earthy browns--the dark shades adding a kind of naturalism, albeit a highly theatrical one. For Rembrandt, color expressed emotional and psychological subtleties. Ball tells us he used just half a dozen pigments and eschewed strong contrasts to create his subtle effects.

When artists turned to landscape painting in the 16th century, they sought new shades of green. They began mixing pigments themselves (Velazquez combined azurite and yellow ochre to make green). By the 17th century, the Netherlands had become a major center for pigments. Ball tells of how there were two kinds of yellow pigments in 17th century Dutch painting and late 18th century English painting. When it was discovered in the late 19th century that one of the pigments was made in India from cow’s urine--in particular, cows fed exclusively on mangos, a diet that didn’t make for healthy cows--the practice became illegal. So much for Indian yellow.

Until the 19th century all colors were derived from naturalmaterial. But industrial chemistry changed that. In 1841, the American portrait painter John Rand invented the tin tubes that replaced pigs’ bladders for storing oil paints. This led to the brilliantly colored paintings of the pre-Raphaelites who created a hyper reality with their unblended jewel tones, and the Impressionists, who daubed paints from the tube, letting viewers’ eyes do the color mixing.

Artists could now obtain almost any color they could imagine, and this led them to want something else. For the 20th century French painter Yves Klein, it was the kind of intensity that could only come from pigment without binding agents. Klein claimed that once powders were mixed, “the affective magic of the colour had vanished.” (Others continue to agree, including Conceptual sculptor Anish Kapoor, who covers his objects in raw pigment to dramatic, inscrutable effect.)

“Klein,” Ball explains, “longed to find a means of retaining the intensity of pure color and so realize its full potential to awaken the emotions of the viewer”--at the same time as he wanted to undermine its purely decorative potential. In 1955 he came up with a solution: to work principally in one color--at that time, ultramarine.

He was after the idea, as were Kosuth and so many other contemporary artists. “For him, the technical achievement involved in realizing this blue was a means to a conceptual end. Thus his patenting of the new color, International Klein Blue . . . [was] a formal validation of the metaphysical idea that his medium represented and ... insurance against the possibility that others would use it in ways that corrupted the ‘authenticity of the pure idea.’ ”

The artist who seems to have most confounded Ball is Mark Rothko, whose massive works aim at transcendental effects. To achieve this end, he thinned his paints to the point where they were stains. Ball laments that Rothko and other artists in the Color Field movement expressed an intensity of feeling but “did not make for very practical men.” Rothko’s paintings deteriorated, a byproduct of his indifference to materials.

Contemporary artists no longer understand their materials the way the artisans of the Middle Ages did. Nor do many care, since deterioration as an element of chance is built into the concept of their work. “For the twentieth-century artist, the medium carries its own message,” says Ball.

*

(PHOTO INTRODUCTION)

A stroll through the history of civilization as seen through the prism of color and the materials used to add hue and shade to art: