Contents
Introduction
6
Earth Colours
12
Red
42
Blue
72
Purple
102
Gold
130
Yellow
152
Green
176
White
200
Grey
224
Black
246
Coda
270
Glossary
280
Notes and further reading
282
Indexes and acknowledgements
287
Red
‘[Scarlet is] the first and the highest and the most important colour that we have.’ Fifteenth-century Florentine dyers’ manual
Not all colours are equal, and their values shift with cultural and chronological contexts. While earth colours are broadly ubiquitous, with red we explore concepts of rarity and exclusivity. With these come perceptions of taste, status, excess and control, all of which are wrapped in colour. Exotic or dangerous sourcing of red pigment, such as that used in frescoes at Pompeii’s opulent Villa of the Mysteries, provoked commentary and disagreement among ancient authors. In later European culture, the creation of colour sometimes entailed complex, semi-secretive procedures and belief systems, as in the connections
between vermilion and alchemy. The red dyes used to colour sumptuous cloth worn by the wealthy and powerful in societies from South America to Europe reveal habits of behaviour and associated colour regulations that controlled both industries and individuals. Murúa’s sketches of Peruvian royal costume are an analogue to images of luxurious red cloth shown in paintings by Fra Filippo Lippi and van Eyck. Further colour canons involving the use of red clothing are reflected in works by El Greco and Velázquez, having been codified in a religious context. A consideration of the function of colour in art should never be merely an examination of systems and rules, however. To reinforce the significant afterlife of great works of art in the creation of new art, paintings by Bacon and Finch analyze, appropriate and reflect on Velázquez to produce their own expressions in red. Artistic practice shapes and is shaped by ideology. In different cultures or periods, a particular characteristic of colour will be favoured. Fra Angelico’s uncorrupted, saturated reds reveal one of these intrinsic aspects of colour, and suggest underlying notions about purity that might inform ways that colours are mixed or kept separate. Different binders – in egg-based tempera paints versus oil paints – carry optical, aesthetic and philosophical effects, discussed here with Lippi and van Eyck, as well as later. Red in art is loaded with symbolic connotations that are both broadly cultural and idiosyncratically personal. Lorenzetti’s and Rubens’s reds play their role as approved metaphors for cherished values. El Lissitzky’s red, on the other hand, is redolent of revolution. For the other twentieth- and twenty-first-century works examined here, the varied meanings of red are fluid yet assertive perspectives of the individual artists. Whether representing personal or political histories, emotion or social commentary, red has a powerful metaphorical pull. As a counterpoint, some artists have taken a strong ideological stand about colour and yet resist its metaphorical expression. They include Mondrian, with his search for universal harmonies, and Newman, engaged in his own oppositional search. Judd’s use of red, in contrast to both, is a resolute rejection of all symbolic connections. When red is lightened by the addition of white, it becomes a completely different colour that carries its own coding. Pink’s evocations in art, from sex and play to threat and violence, take us to a new sphere, one associated with – yet no longer – red.
red
43
Jan van Eyck (c.1395–1441)
Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) 1433, oil on panel, 26 x 19 cm (10¼ x 7½ in) National Gallery, London
red
5
When these pictures were painted, sumptuous, deep red cloth was generally dyed with kermes, a dye extracted from Old World scale insects (females of the genus Kermes, which feed on the Kermes oak) related to the New World cochineal beetle (see p.49). Vivid dyes were the purview of the wealthy, extracted from exotic substances at great expense and made into colourants that required special expertise and long processing to become intense and colourfast. The young woman wears an extravagant scarlet wool dress and an elaborate red swag on her headdress. She is dressed in the kind of costume a bridegroom might have provided for his betrothed, often costing almost much as the dowry paid by her family. The exuberant head covering worn by van Eyck’s sitter, a fancy style popular in fifteenth-century Venice, represents an abundance of fine red cloth. The dyeing industry throughout Europe was strictly regulated and compartmentalized in the fifteenth century, controlled by law and by powerful guilds. Dyers were licensed to produce cloth of one particular colour, such as red, or a set of acceptable related colours (red plus yellow, for example). A dyer of red would never work in blue. Prohibitions against mixing colours were regulated rather than being simply aesthetic considerations. Such restrictions may be seen as an outgrowth of mandates for separation that go back to the Bible and even further: controls against violating what was perceived as the natural order of things. In the hierarchy of coloured cloth, scarlet took high rank. A fifteenth-century dyers’ manual from Florence calls it ‘the first and the highest and the most important colour that we have’. The word ‘scarlet’ originally referred to the cloth itself rather than its hue, which might be anything from red to blue to black. By the time these two portraits were painted, however, the association with red was settled. Pigments for painting were sometimes generated as by-products of allied technologies, as is the case with kermes dye and red lakes, its counterpart in artists’ pigment. Van Eyck’s red headdress exploits this pigment’s properties of transparency, with its thin washes of red lakes applied as glazes over other colours (some of which might be more opaque), such as vermilion. The effect – clear but darkly coloured shadows quietly reverberating in jewel-like hues – is achieved through masterful handling of pigment that has been mixed with oil as its binder. Lippi’s portrait uses a different binder – egg yolk 50
Fra Filippo Lippi (c.1406–69)
Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement c.1440, tempera on panel, 64.1 x 41.9 cm (25¼ x 16½ in) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
– to make pigments into paint. The medium used to bind coloured powder into workable paste or liquid will affect its refractive or optical properties, the manner in which it dries and the way it can be handled with brushes or other implements. Opacity or transparency, viscosity, thickness and glossiness are altered according to a paint’s binders. Oil paint dries slowly and can be worked extensively; strokes of paint can be blended. Egg tempera dries quickly and cannot be blended; in tempera painting, fine strokes of individual colour are often juxtaposed side by side or hatched in marks to produce optical blends rather than physical blending. The same pigments might perform differently depending on the medium in which they are suspended. Colour might be intense and opaque in one medium but semi-transparent in another. According to the Tuscan artist-historian Giorgio Vasari, writing in the early 1600s, the Northern Renaissance artist Jan van Eyck invented the ‘secret’ of oil paint, which spread south to Italy in the fifteenth century though contact with a Sicilian painter, Antonello da Messina, quickly to supplant tempera painting. This is merely legend: the process was actually longer and more nuanced. Artists in the north had been aware of oil paint since the twelfth century. Among other references, the monk Theophilus mentions oil as a drying medium in his treatise On Divers Arts. South of the Alps, in his practicum from the late fourteenth century, Cennini mentioned German techniques for painting with oil-based media on walls or panels. With the fifteenth century, there is evidence that artists other than Antonello da Messina saw examples of oil technique and gradually began to incorporate the medium into their work. One of these was Ferrara-based painter Cosmè Tura. Works by northern painters found their way into southern collections, and were seen and studied by artists under the patronage of those collectors. Moreover, artists travelled, and art objects, ideas and techniques were transmitted and intermingled. Nor was egg tempera entirely abandoned in favour of the new oil-based medium. Many pictures in fifteenth-century Italy use both kinds of paint. Underpainting might be in egg tempera with finishing layers in oil, or a picture might include some passages in oil with others in tempera. The coexistence of oil paint and egg tempera is long-standing and fluid – a fact sometimes invisible to the eye, revealed only through microanalysis of paint samples. 51
8
Francis Bacon (1909–92)
Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1953, oil on canvas, visible image 152.1 x 117.8 cm (60 x 46½ in) Des Moines Art Center, Iowa
Diego Velázquez’s penetrating rendering of Pope Innocent x (p.53) continues to attract and inspire later art and further investigation of the ways that art colours and psychological study intersect. Francis Bacon claimed never to have seen the famous painting in the flesh, but he kept reproductions of it in his studio and it became a subject on which he drew repeatedly. Asked about Velázquez’s painting, he suggested that the image stimulated his imagination, inciting complex emotions and even haunting him as a sort of muse to be revisited over and again. Bacon’s 1953 vision of estrangement and alienation reshapes Velázquez’s pope, who is shown with a screaming, open mouth, imprisoned in ‘shuttering’ veils of drapery. The artist changed Velázquez’s colour, too. Bacon’s red is tinged with cool purple undertones, whereas Velázquez’s hotter hue extends even beyond the papal vestments to his throne and the drapery in the room behind. Bacon’s red is more shadowy; it retreats where Velázquez’s advances, exuding a menacing background presence that was surely deliberate. While Bacon boasted of riffing from the imagination, Spencer Finch’s approach to reconfiguring a celebrated masterpiece from the past is to engage in immersive, analytical observation. Finch unmoors Velázquez’s masterful expanses of reds – shiny, velvety, matt, glistening variations on a colour – from the objects they depict. Unfettered by the obligations of mimetic description, red stands alone as carefully observed colour. Finch analyzed each of the red nuances Velázquez produced in his portrait, abstracting the results in his own work, where they are represented as ink blots in the twenty-one different shades of ‘Velázquez’ red. Finch’s art reflects on his experience of the work he studied, as well as his investigations into the actual optical composition of Velázquez’s reds. In Red (After Vel‡zquez), optics, perception and memory conjoin in an abstract rendering of specific, tangible colour effects.
9
I was walking along the road with two of my friends. The sun set – the sky became a bloody red. And I felt a touch of melancholy – I stood still, dead tired – over the blue-black fjord and city hung blood and tongues of fire. My friends walked on – I stayed behind – trembling with fright – I felt the great scream in nature.
Edvard Munch (1863–1944)
The Scream 1895, pastel on paper on cardboard 79 x 59 cm (31 x 23¼ in), Private collection
Spencer Finch (b.1962)
Edvard Munch (1863–1944)
Red (After Velázquez)
Despair
2011, ink and watercolour on paper, 141 x 119.4 (55½ x 47 in), Private collection
1891–2, charcoal and oil and paper 37 x 42.2 cm (14½ x 16½ in), Munch Museum, Oslo
red
54
Munch’s image of a fiery-red sky is a searing record of memory and emotion, not a naturalistic transcription of external realities. Here, bold colour directly narrates internal feelings. The theme of a lone individual confronting a roiling sky was one that Munch reiterated and evolved in a group of pastels, drawings and prints. To underscore the impetus behind the work and reinforce his personal colour associations, he added written words to an early drawing of the subject in 1891 and affixed a handwritten plaque to the gilt frame of his later pastel of 1895:
Munch used colour and form to expose internal states of being that lay behind appearance and penetrated outward semblance. In his words, he was interested in painting what he saw rather than what he sees. His interest was in the residue of emotional impact, impressions left after extraneous details had been stripped away to leave only the essential elements. Such impressions he described as imprinted on his inner eye in lines and colours, so that he could capture in paint exactly what he recalled, stripped of the details that had fallen away in the process. His friend, the poet Sigbjorn Ostfelder, wrote: ‘Munch writes poetry with colour… His use of colour is above all lyrical. He feels colours and he reveals his feelings through colours; he does not see them in isolation. He does not just see yellow, red and blue and violet; he sees sorrow and screaming and melancholy and decay.’ In The Scream, the undulating, coloured line throbs with melancholy, anxiety, vulnerability. Munch’s vision of ‘the great scream in nature’ includes red even in a largely black-and-white charcoal drawing. In the pastel version, he used pastel sticks or crayons bluntly, each linear stroke intact, one intense grainy band of colour against another. Reds, oranges and yellows ripple as ‘blood and tongues of fire’, to use the artist’s words. The powdery medium of pastel is not blended to fuse into soft atmospheric effects; it stays sharp in this visualization of rawness. Munch’s colour is subjective and intuitive, not programmatic or scientific. Yet he was conversant with 55