The World According to Colour with James Fox

[Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to this online event with the british library from wherever you're watching in the world my name is baron gibson and i'll be in conversation with art historian james fox about his brand new book the world according to color a cultural history a brilliant and often surprising exploration of something so central to the way we live in a huge part of all cultures james will shortly give an illustrated talk about the themes of the book filmed especially for this event and after that will be joining me for a live conversation and taking your questions if you'd like to send in a question at any point please go to the forum just below the video screen we'll get to as many as we can later on during the event if you're inspired to buy the book and you should please go to the books tab at the top of the screen where you'll find a link to the british library bookshop also at the top of the screen you'll see links that will enable you to give feedback about this event or support the work of the library finally a little more about a background about our speaker james fox is an art historian broadcaster and fellow of godville and geese college cambridge has many fascinating and widely acclaimed bbc television documentaries which many of you may have seen include programs on the history of cornish art british renaissance and the culture and politics of vienna in 1908 paris in 1928 in new york in 1951. now please enjoy this wonderful video by james thank you veron and thank you very much all of you for listening to me talk about my latest book the world according to color now this uh really has been a labor of love for me i uh first conceived it back in 2012 thinking it would be a really quick and simple project but as i began researching many of that research done in the british library in fact the subject got bigger and bigger and the research went on and on and in the end i think i spent about eight years working on this book though in some ways i've been working on it since i was a child um i know that's a strange thing to say but i first truly fell in love with colour at the age of six and i remember very vividly what happened it was a hot day i was sitting in my parents kitchen was drinking some orange juice when this huge fly came in through the window and rattled around the room for several minutes and when eventually it landed on the table my mum rolled up a magazine and crushed it beneath the magazine and i did what any child would do i lent in to examine the carcass which was spasming in a pool of body fluid and of course my initial response was disgust but then i started to look at it closely and i noticed the colors of that fly were just exceptional the the abdomen was a sapphire blue and emerald green the eyes were burgundy the wings were like little rainbows and i remember so vividly thinking well look if something as insignificant and small and ugly as a fly is actually this beautiful and this full of color close up i really start should start looking more closely at everything else and that is exactly what i did i over the following weeks over the following months of the following years i scrutinized the colors of pretty much everything that i encountered so i remember counting the reds and the rose petals i counted the grays in the clouds and i even discovered a few years later that if i in the middle of the night when it was pitch black if i closed my eyes and jab my eyelids extremely hard i could summon these extraordinary colors and patterns out of the darkness we we call them phosphenes in fact and i highly recommend people doing it themselves it's quite an extraordinary experience so we can see color and light in the darkness but the more i looked the the more questions i guess i had um you know why for instance was the sea blue but sea water colorless why did cooked beef turn red and cooked chicken turn white why did we say that white spirit and white wine and white people for that matter were white when clearly they weren't white and i think it was that curiosity about color that ultimately led me to become an artist orient and even today you know every time i look at the the blues of islamic architecture or the incredible myriad blacks of chinese and japanese inkwash painting or the dazzling reds of angry matisse i do feel like i am indulging a childhood addiction but anyway before i get started i think we really must answer a pretty fundamental question and that that question is what is color well in some ways i'm reminded here of um the us supreme court justice potter stewart who back in the 1960s he had to decide whether something was pornography or not and he concluded really quite famously by saying well i can't define pornography but i know it when i see it and you know i think that the very same thing is true of color we all see color all the time we all know what it is we know the difference between red and blue and yellow and green but as soon as we have to define it we run into trouble and that is because despite its ubiquity by despite its ever presence color is actually a really mysterious entity that raises all kinds of difficult physical philosophical questions and i think the main debate i suppose is whether color exists out in the world in light and in things or whether it exists inside us in our brains in other words whether color is objective or subjective now of course common sense tells us that color is objective that that objects this cut that i'm drinking this has a kind of color in it that is there whether we look at it or not but actually that's very often not the case i've got here a little prop this is one of my prized possessions this is a ulysses butterfly from australasia it's one of the most famous and very rare blue creatures in the world but when scientists actually ground down and examine the wings they discovered there wasn't a single piece of blue pigment in it it was all an optical illusion designed to make us think it is blue and of course what's more than that we all see colors differently many men are color blind so they see fewer colors than other people there are some women who by virtue of this a rare chromosomal condition might be able to see hundreds if not millions of more colors than anyone else and even if those of us with normal color vision see things differently i'm sure many of you will remember a few years ago when that photograph of a dress went uh surfaced online and it became a huge viral thing but i probably shouldn't use the word viral in the same way anymore but it became a huge viral sensation and the reason was because the world people couldn't agree whether that dress in that photograph was blue and black or white and gold and i think in doing so it it became a perfect example of how much of color resides in the eyes of the beholder how much of it is about the way that our retinas and our brains make sense of the waves of light the photons that vibrate and and bounce and rattle around us on this planet and color isn't only a visual phenomenon you know colors affect our minds and our bodies in all kinds of ways they help us understand when to go to sleep and when to wake up what to eat what to buy who to find attractive what emotions to feel so they're constantly shaping our moods and our behaviors all the time even though we're not always aware of them doing so so red for instance is a good example red has been found to to raise heart rates to increase electrical activity in the brain to contribute to sexual arousal to improve the body strength speed and reaction time we even know from a number of studies that that sports teams or athletes wearing red strips are at an advantage by virtue of wearing red and blue by contrast is being found to reduce heart rates and blood pressure to promote relaxation to reduce crime to reduce levels of suicide and so it's a fascinating myriad amorphous protein entity colour but my book tells the story of human culture all of human culture in some ways through color so it begins with the origins of the universe 13.8 billion years ago and it runs all the way through to the environmental crisis we currently face and it covers societies on every different continent now i focus on seven major colors black red yellow blue white purple and green and i use each of them to tap into a particular phase or theme in human history because our culture has been intimately connected with color from the very beginning we have used it as a symbol as a metaphor as a language i suppose to communicate the most important ideas we have and what i thought i'd do over the next 20 minutes or so is essentially to try and do i know it sounds pretty ambitious in 20 minutes but to try and do a potted history of humanity through some of these colors so let's begin at the beginning because in many respects the first really salient color in human culture was red now maybe this shouldn't surprise us because of course after all beneath the surface all of us are made from red meat and red blood and it's a color that we have always associated with ourselves and you only need to think back on early creation myths you know stories that talk about the first creations of humans and there are many different stories from all over the world all with different narratives but many of them many of them stipulate that the first humans had been molded out of red materials whether it was red clay or red sand or red dust in fact this is one of the reasons why the first human of the old testament was called adam because adam in hebrew means red as well as earth and blood the materials from which he was made and i think what's so fascinating for me about this is that this this isn't simply a matter of myth archaeologists who are studying some of the earliest human societies in stone age africa have consistently found something remarkable everywhere they look every site they go to they find huge amounts of red pigments so a few years ago in south africa for instance archaeologists found an astonishing site they found what they believed to be a hundred thousand year old pigment workshop three times as old as the cave paintings where pigments were being manufactured red ochre was being brought from a quarry and processed and turned into paint and they even discovered on on this piece of red ochre one of the very first abstract designs ever made by humans now by the time of the upper paleolithic when the famous cave paintings were being made in europe red pigments were being used in figurative artworks and one of the really interesting things about that is that these figures were themselves in some ways color coded so in show vacay for instance which was discovered by accident by some explorers in the 1990s what we find is that animals are typically depicted in black charcoal and humans in the form of these palm prints and hand stencils are typically depicted in red pigments so this is a particularly interesting image you can see that the black line is the back of a of a bison that has been drawn in black and then on top of that or just within that we can see the human presence marked out with red so clearly there was some color coding with our species um so what did red mean you know why did we go to all these lengths to gain it what were we doing with it i mean the truth is we don't really know i mean it's so long ago we don't have many records but most anthropologists think that red was a symbol of blood and that like blood it symbolized life and death they think it was smeared over women's bodies to symbolize fertility we know for sure that it was buried with the dead probably to bring them back to life and that it would also have been applied to places and objects to invest them with a life force associated with blood so it's entirely possible that red was humanity's very first symbol representing that most important process of life and death and we know that in many indigenous communities around the world even today red pigments are still being applied to bodies and objects because of their spiritual power because of their life force now it's i think important to say that in in prehistoric times we didn't have that many colors to choose from we mostly had blacks whites and yellows and browns and reds the so-called earth colours because they could be easily extracted from the earth but in later centuries in the neolithic period especially we devised a whole new range of pigments and dyes and those colours became extremely important commodities luxuries and status symbols and perhaps the most luxurious of them all and the one that most people will have heard of is tyrion purple now this die was made around 1500 bc onwards in the near east and it was made from shellfish and what would happen is you would catch the shellfish you would take their their glands out you would extract the mucus then you could boil that mucus in salt water for several weeks apparently it was the most unbearable stench that the uh the process emitted and it was highly labor intensive you needed somewhere in the region of 10 000 molluscs to produce just a gram of dye and this made it extremely expensive so i found for instance in the process of my research a fourth century roman price list the price list of diocletian which listed all the prices of all the commodities in fourth century rome and what i discovered was that a pound of tyrion purple silk was more than twice as expensive as gold by weight and five times the price of a of a male slave that's how expensive it was and in fact as i trolled through this text i found that there was only one item on this list that was as expensive as a pound of tyrion silk and that was a male lion lion that had to be captured and imported from africa so this die obviously naturally became a status symbol and it was very quickly became associated really only with imperial rulers and under theodosius ii for instance anyone found buying or making or wearing or even owning this extraordinary purple color without permission could be charged with treason which was a crime punishable by death now different cultures prize different colors for different reasons so um in china for instance red became established as the most celebrated color uh in part because chinese philosophers had given it these bold bright and very auspicious connotations and and those associations remain absolutely with us today behind these people string up red lanterns to celebrate a new year they decorate their front doors with red paper to ward off bad luck they give newborn babies red clothes you see the chinese restaurants often have red signs chinese products chili oils for instance often have red labels because it's a color of good luck and the meanings of red are so positive in china that the chinese stock market shows rising stocks in red rather than black which is the opposite of almost every other country in south asia by contrast it was yellow really that emerged as the most desirable color and in india for instance yellow colorants and they had many but yellow colorants including saffron and turmeric were linked to buddhist monks hindu gods and turmeric in particular is still used widely used in fact in marriage rituals so in many parts of india you will splash turmeric over the bride and groom over their clothes over the wedding invitations over the guests over the food all to bring about good luck for the for the wedding in the future and in islamic cultures the middle east uh green i think it was the color uh that reigned supreme it was said to be muhammad's favorite color the hadith tells us that he wore green a lot he talked about green vegetation a lot the quran tells us quite explicitly that paradise itself was green that it was filled with green plants with green cushions that people who lived there wore green clothes and in fact not many people know that the shortest verse in the whole of the quran is just one word long and that word is green it's a specific kind of deep dark rich green that exists only on the trees in paradise itself so what of europe then well i mean i think unlike the people of asia europeans didn't particularly like yellow since antiquity and certainly throughout the middle ages they linked it to all kinds of outcasts so we often see artists painting judas the the apostle who obviously portrayed christ in yellow garments and officials meanwhile often made prostitutes debtors heretics and of course most famously jews wear yellow garments or symbols to mark them out as other and of course this is something that nazis revived in the early 1940s insisting that jews in particular wear these yellow badges but the color that emerged i suppose with with most credit in medieval europe was blue now blue is a really funny one because blue is now the most popular color in the world in every single color country survey after survey shows the blue is by far the most popular color by a huge margin 30 or 40 percent of people rate blue as their favorite color but it actually played a very marginal role in earlier societies um it was one of the last basic colors to be named in every human language for much of history people didn't even have a word for it so it's well known for instance that homer of iliad and odyssey fame never once used the word blue he called the the blue mediterranean sea he called it wine dark instead and we see a similar absence in in art and culture as well you know the thing about blue is that though blue is everywhere in some ways we have blue skies and blue seas and blue horizons there are actually very few tangible blue things in nature there are very few blue plants or blue minerals blue animals and so because of that it became very very difficult to manufacture really good blue colors uh by the middle ages there were some blue dyes there was indigo and woad for instance there were some blue pigments azerite and cobalt but none of them were quite right and it was only really in the second half of the middle ages when uh europeans i think discovered this new blue pigment that surpassed even tyrion purple uh for splendor and i think everyone knows what i'm talking about i'm talking about this product called lapis lazuli this was an extremely rare stone that for much of its history could only be found in one mountain in afghanistan and you know lapis lazuli really does look when you look at it raw as it comes out of the the quarry it really looks like a fragment of the sky it's got this beautiful deep blue uh celestial color it's got these white calcite clouds these golden pyrite stars so it really does look like a fragment of the firmament and europeans were convinced that this this celestial stone had miraculous properties so they they used it almost always unsuccessfully it must be said to uh heal warts and ulcers to manage menstruation and urinary tract infections to treat fevers and cataracts and depression and of course it was also the sole source of this exceptional blue pigment although extracting that pigment from this very impure stone was extremely difficult so around 1200 this new recipe emerges that involves grinding the stone into a powder mixing it with resin and gum and linseed oil and wax to form a dough kneading the dough for several days then submerging it in a light solution and trying desperately to get only the blue bits out of the solution but when they did that after days and days of work the results were extraordinary and and the product when finished was given what is probably the most i suppose evocative name in the history of color it was called atsura ultra marino ultramarine as we know which in italian meant overseas because the raw material lapis lazuli came from a long way away in afghanistan and like other exotic products like tyrion purple it did not come cheap it you know it cost up to a hundred times more than other pigments on the market in fact i did some more digging to try to work out the prices and i found that in 1515 the florentine artist andrea del salto paid five florins for an ounce of ultramarine uh and i did some calculations and i worked out that that equated just for one ounce of ultramarine that equated to five years rent for a laborer living outside the city so that gives you an impression of how out of reach some of the most exotic pigments once were for ordinary people now the most famous use of ultramarine in history uh is probably this barnstorming painting in the national gallery um titians bakas and ariadne and it captures the explosive moment when bacchus leading this ragbag of revelers first sets eyes on a heartbroken ariadne she has just been abandoned by theseus who on the left of the picture sails off across the horizon without her backus falls instantly in love with her he marries her on the spot he transforms her into a deity like himself so it's an exuberant and romantic picture but i think it's popularity its enduring popularity is above all ode to color but titian was given a huge amount of money by his patron to to paint this picture so he spent it on the most expensive pigments that money could buy in 16th century dennis so we have them all here on on the canvas so the the trees are made from a very expensive green called malachite green there's a little yellow cloth in the foreground called it's made from the very highest best lead tin yellow the oranges are made from grialgar and orpam these beautiful exotic expensive but quite toxic oranges from china the finest crimson is used on bacchus is cloaked the finest vermilion is used on ariadne's sash and of course the the king of colors in this picture is ultramarine uh which covers what almost a third of the canvas the the blue sky and it is actually as far as scholars have worked out it's one of the purest examples of the pigment ever discovered in the history of art so the cost alone would have been astronomical and it must have been so exciting petition to be able to take this elusive color of the sky and the sea and this extraordinarily luxurious expensive product and then to use it with such abundance in his art and yet in some ways despite the despite the obvious delights of color some europeans opticians generation had already started to i suppose turn their backs on color by this stage many of them have been inspired by the rediscovery of ancient greek and roman statues now greek and roman statues as we all know now were originally brightly colored but over the years they lost those colors and when they were rediscovered in the in the renaissance and in the in the in the subsequent centuries most of them were back to their sort of plain unadorned pale marble and i think because of this a number of artists and michelangelo as a famous example started to advance this aesthetic of whiteness the plain whitish things were the best things to make and of course since ancient times white had been associated with moral and spiritual and physical purity but in europe really from the 16th century onwards and growing in the 17th and 18th centuries it also became associated with good taste so you know many philosophers many theorists repeatedly argued that bright colors were childish feminine primitive while simple white things were really noble and sophisticated now it was a completely ludicrous assertion but i think in some ways it it does remain with us because you know i think we still do harbor a view that a minimalist white interior or an austere abstraction or a colorless white device uh or appliance is somehow is somehow classier than one that comes in gordy and garish colors we still i think believe ultimately with regards to color at least that less is more um but of course it's important to say that you know the european taste for whiteness didn't only have aesthetic aesthetic consequences it had huge social and political ramifications as well particularly with regard to race maybe that's something we can discuss later on now if europeans went through a period of what some have called chromophobia this fear of color this resistance to color through the 16th 17th 18th centuries really by the 19th century they've very much emphatically come out of it now they've only been i think a few real um how can i put it quantum leaps in the history of color so one might have come in ancient egypt perhaps in medieval china perhaps in renaissance venice but perhaps the most fundamental leap of all took place actually in 1850s europe and probably to be more specific 1850s london because that was when the modern chemists and the the subcanni businessmen of the industrial revolution work together to completely transform the range of colors available to us and i think that breakthrough moment is often believed to have come in the spring of 1856 when an 18 year old amateur chemist called william henry perkin conducted was conducting some experiments in his parents spare room in shadwell when he by mistake invented this extraordinarily bright purple synthetic dye now he originally named it tyrion purple as you would um but by the beginning of 1858 he was mass producing the product under the name move now move became a sensation you know queen victoria started wearing it empress usually started wearing then the aristocracy started wearing then the middle classes by 1859 it was everywhere it was being likened to a contagious disease punch magazine was uh writing about um move mania you know it was being used in morning suits and store uniforms and and and wallpapers and leather-bound books and sweets and confectionary even billions of postage stamps were being printed in mode and i think it's interesting because for so long purple light blue to some extent had been this rare luxurious color a color that was really hard to produce but in the 1860s all kinds of purples or purpley synthetic dyes appeared from move to magenta to regina purple to palma violet and you know something we we often think that the past is less colorful than the present partly because i think we're so used to seeing it in black and white photographs um but i think the inventions of the 1850s and 60s give the lie to such assumptions they remind us that the 19th century was saturated with color and particularly purple and by the end of the 19th century purple um which was once an ancient imperial color with all those connotations of tyrion purple had become a symbol really important symbol i think of the industrial revolution itself for good and for that so you know on the one hand it captured the brilliance and ingenuity of modern science and manufacturing but on the other hand it epitomized a world of capitalist extravagance and toxic chemicals and so that is why in the years around 1900 you start to see people really associating purple with pollution with toxicity and there's one book i discussed uh in in in my book a remarkable novel called the purple cloud written by a very strange man called mp shiel i think in 1901 it describes this huge purple cloud that spreads across the world and kills pretty much the entire human population so there's a real sense of purple being toxic by the end of the 19th century and being a form of pollution although not everyone was worried um you know claude money for instance for his part he traveled to london to paint the pollution to paint the purple smog he saw hanging over the city and he thought it was one of the most beautiful things he had ever witnessed i think this brings us quite smoothly to uh the final color in my book and this talk i think and the color i think that in many respects represents the defining issue of our own time because the industrialization of human society i've just discussed had as we all know now a momentous impact on our planet and one that's growing with every passing year the color green of course has has long been associated with nature more for more than a billion years in fact because chlorophyll the pigment responsible for photosynthesis in plants is green um but it's really only in the last 50 years or so that we have come to identify the color green the color of chlorophyll with the environmental crisis the environmental revolution you know the so-called green movement has been gathering momentum since the late 1960s early 1970s and it's now virtually impossible to avoid green's environmental connections we are perpetually behind aren't we to buy green to go green to think green and i think really green has become a key word of our times an ideology of our times loaded in the way that gender or sexuality or nation race or ethnicity are but it's funny though when we when we think of climate change we typically think of the world becoming less green and yet the opposite so far is the case because over the last 35 years or so largely as a result of warming temperatures and rising co2 levels 18 million square kilometers of new vegetation has appeared on this planet that's an area roughly twice the size of the united states so the earth surprisingly is greener today than it has been for millennia for all the wrong reasons of course but it is greener today than it has been for many thousands of years although what color it will turn in the long run remains uh deeply uncertain and will in part depend on how we change our behavior i fear i have uh pretty much run out of time but i thought i would just conclude by by trying to say what do i hope readers will take from this book well above all i think i want readers and anyone to look at the world more closely uh as a result of reading this book you know the philosopher jean-jacques rousseau he once said that um the hardest things to see are the things we see every day and i think color is one of those things uh it's so ubiquitous it's so much a part of life and technology has made colors so plentiful and so easily reproduce that we take color for granted you know we can buy products in almost any color we like home decorators have so many colors to choose from that that they can't even have sensible names for them you know think of elephant's breath for instance um and i've got one other example here this is my son's box of crayons let me open it there you are a few centuries ago a product like this which reproduces pretty much every color in the spectrum and lines it up and puts it in a box that you can buy would have sent alchemists and emperors into raptures artists would have gone crazy for it people might have fought wars over it nowadays it's little more than a children's toy so i do hope that after reading this book people will find more wonder in their surroundings even in banal things like boxes of crayons or the myriad greens and a piece of broccoli or the shades of brown on a flat white or indeed the the colors of an annoying fly and i think in the end we should never forget that we as humans are ultimately inseparable from color because every hue we see around us is actually manufactured within us it's manufactured in the same gray matter that forms our language that stores our memories that stokes emotions that shapes thoughts that gives rise to consciousness itself and to pardon the pun color is a pigment of the imagination that we paint all over the world and i think it might well be the greatest human creation of them all thank you that was such a fascinating conversation that covers so many different areas and and before i get into my own questions with james i just want to remind everyone to please do send them your questions down below and so yeah let's get right into it because there's so many different things to cover and it's it's just really interesting and the first thing i noticed is that there was one color of the kind of main colors of the rainbow i guess that was missing and that's orange and i was just wondering if you could explain why maybe orange didn't make the cut i would have loved to write about orange i would have loved to write about gray i would have loved to write about brown um but in the end i i made the decision that the number of chapters i wanted to write was seven and i did that for a reason i did that because i think seven is a particularly meaningful color in human history you think of uh you know the seven days of the week the seven ages of man the seven cardinal sins the seven virtues and of course the seven colors that isaac newton uh identified on the spectrum so i thought seven had seven felt like the right color at the the right number of colors to choose um but what i did try to do a where possible was to allude to other colors within those colors i've chosen so my chapter on yellow does deal with quite a lot of orangey substances so i deal with saffron for instance which is probably more orange than it is yellow i deal with gold which is a you know not strictly yellow either and in purple i deal with colors all the way through from magenta through to indigo so i do try to allude to the broader range of colors but you know this book took me so long to write had i added some extra chapters i think you know it'd have been another 10 years to write it yeah that's fair enough i'm sorry and so i guess now i think it would be interesting to talk about um colors and relationships to maybe some artists so for example you mentioned titian space and ariadne and there's so many colors in there and aside from the blue that you mentioned that are really interesting and i also have heard of titian red which is uh he's associated with that hair color that he used in his work is now a name for that um and i'm just wondering are there other artists that come to mind if someone says ah blue red black um that artists at work are known to work with those colors yes i think that i think many artists have had color preferences as we all do i mean one of the one of the most fascinating things i discovered in in my research was in an archive a manuscript a piece of paper that from the 1860s that um recorded the outcome of a uh an after-dinner game that was played quite a lot in the victorian period and this game was called my favorite things and what would happen is you would bombard a particular person with a series of quick fire questions saying what's your favorite food what are your favorite clothes what is your favorite activity and um and one of the the people who played this game was the very great victorian artist ford maddox brown and at one point he was asked what's your favorite color and he wrote magenta which was actually a very new color it had only been invented a few years earlier and when you actually look for max brown's work you see a lot of magenta in his work one of his most famous paintings is the last of england it's got the most incredible magenta ribbon in it that took him four weeks to paint on its own and so i think that you do find a number of artists being identified with certain colors through history particularly in the modern period so turner admitted you know that that yellow was his favorite color uh the impressionists i've already shown mono but the impressionists were were famed for their association with violets and purples manet was a big fan of black as he was inspired by velasquez he was also a fan of black and then in the 20th century you get artists with real monomanias devoted to to particular colors you could think of you know ben nicholson's whites and uh robert ryman's whites and um uh you know ad reinhardts blacks pierre soulages blacks eve klein blue gustav klimt's gold so i think that as you go through time particularly the modern period artists are um often particularly um uh affectionate towards specific colors not always but some are yeah and klein blue is definitely one of the first one that that comes to your mind he got his name on a color you know and it's still to this day quite hard to get your hands on a true kind of ultramarine blue it's still an expensive color to get yes i mean you know klein was a huge fan of ultramarine a huge fan of blue and but he felt that there was some problems with it so actually ultramarine which i talked about which was very hard to get very hard to make in the early 1800s there was a competition in france to try and create a synthetic version of ultramarine and someone did ultimately crack several people actually at the same time cracked this synthetic ultramarine that's the color we still use today when you see in your box of oil paints you see ultramarine that's synthetic ultramarine but eve klein felt that when you actually put that pigment on on canvas it was slightly deader than he wanted it to be so he spent a year in the late 1950s with a remarkable legendary color man called edward adam to try and devise a new way of suspending that pigment so that the whole thing was more was more resonant and vibrant and when you do actually see ikb blue the the color that he patented i think in 1959 it is just so explosive and resonant it's the most magnificent it's nearly neon i mean it's not quite a neon but there's there's like a yeah you know the way that neon colors have a glow to them i find that true ultramarine has that sort of glow to it it really does and when you look at those paintings closely and he applied them in very clever ways to enhance the effect but when you look at those paintings i mean your retina can't really land on the color it's so it's so um oscillating and vibrating that it's uh it's quite an unsettling experience but a but a magnificent experience as well it sounds to me that um describing what you find in the blue and the move and things like that also the processes that you described it sounds like very hard work again boiling all those mollusks and all of those things were the people creating these pigments very precious about their recipes because it sounds like it's a real commodity a lot of money to be made if you're the only person that knows how to make this desirable color absolutely before you know we've got to remember that for most of history you couldn't just go to a shop and buy a box of mass-produced paint you had you you were often making it yourself in your workshop you had your own specific recipe that might have been passed down by uh your your you know by your ancestors and you would guard it jealously and it was an important part of your intellectual property it was a part of your signature style as an artist and so people really really were very possessive about their colors in the 19th century when we when we see the emergence of move and all those purples i mean it was unbelievable the amount of court cases that took place to try for when people tried to stop other people using their recipes or mass or producing their colours without permission there i mean i've actually described some of those court cases uh in in the book and of course this process this this kind of competition still goes on today i remember a few years ago uh the british sculptor anish kapoor got into real trouble when he signed an exclusivity deal with a company for the so-called blackest black ever made so he went down there to the fact i actually went down to see this product myself to the factory and it's an incredible black um and he signed this deal with them so no other artist could use it and of course this made artists furious so it's still happening even today yeah that's the vantablack is that right so you have you've seen it in person i have seen it in person i went down shortly after it for the research of this book actually and uh shortly after they've dead announced it it's a very strange it's not really even a pigment it's a material that is uh grown in a very dense uh like a very dense forest of nanotubes and they're so dense that when light hits them the light gets trapped between the carbon nanotubes and hardly any of that light comes back and when you see it next to another black product you are uh it makes the other black project pop product look gray by comparison it's that dark yeah you know that's interesting that you mentioned that about shades black because i think it's one of those colors that you think of as being like how can there be shades if there are shades then it's gray right um but if you've ever like tried to mix and match black clothes you know very well that there are these undertones and things so that's actually really interesting to think about shades did you talk much about that in the book yes i mean black is the i think the most misunderstood color in some ways and that so often people think of it as a as a as a as a non-color um as a as a form of darkness you know they think of black as pitch dark the truth is it's not it's not dark really i mean actually the the color of pitch darkness absolute darkness is not black it is grey so if you go into a room and there is absolutely no light you see something called eigengrowl you see something called brain gray black is actually a contrast effect so in order to have blackness you need to have light to create that contrast so that was one of that's one of the biggest misunderstandings of all is that black is an absence of light you need light to see black and of course as many artists have shown you think of artists like um pierre soulage as i've mentioned before he's someone who shows that color with black which contains all the colors is the most unbelievably luscious rich generous color of all and i should say that people people knew this before people you know the very word black it originates in the proto-indo-european word bleg which means shine or bright or gleam so black you know even even though even in terms of our language it's linked to brightness and light that's so interesting because like you say everyone thinks of it as the opposite so that is really interesting and so you mentioned with marv we called it like a quantum leap um and i'm wondering are there other moments that stand out in your mind that you researched and wrote about that um really felt like big advances in color development yeah as i say as i said in my talk then they're not that many they're i would say there are there are a handful of moments when we make this great leap forward in terms of how many colors we can produce i think the first one is probably right at the beginning when humans first start creating pigments they first start burning woods and stones and bones to make charcoal they start excavating and processing red ochre then you get in the neolithic period the development of colours like vermilion in spain and indigo and south america and um and uh egyptian blue in ancient egypt an early synthetic blue han purple in china and then you get massive developments in dye manufacturing in venice in the late middle ages in the renaissance and then of course in the 19th century i've mentioned it already you get the synthetic revolution when you get all these extraordinary pigments that are being manufactured in the lab and these are the pigments these are the dyes that we still use today you know as i say you know if you find an ultramarine in your paint palette that's a synthetic ultramarine if you see your genes have died with indigo that synthetic indigo that was invented in the 19th century um so i think that the synthetic revolution is the one that that shapes i mean it's the one that has dyed all the colors on those beautiful books uh behind you farah and those are all synthetic colors yeah um then as you were talking and especially when you were talking about um purple and toxicity and things it made me think how many of these colors and pigments were poisonous because you hear about women um putting on makeup and like like queen elizabeth maybe to get the white on her face and then it was like poisonous so is was there a bit of danger involved oh yes of course i mean many of these colors were were made from various toxic chemicals that greens were particularly toxic i mean it's it's quite an irony actually the green synthetic dyes that we use today are some of the the least environmentally friendly so all those recyclable green bags that are supposed to be good for the planet are actually pretty bad compared to various other pigments because they use a lot of chlorine to make them lead white is the most famous uh toxic white and you know killed many people people put this white on their skin and on their bodies and they painted their houses in it and you know that was found to be toxic realgar and orpament which i mentioned in the titian those had arsenic in them uh vermilion beautiful red had arsenic in it as well so lots of these pigments were were made from chemicals that that weren't necessarily very good for us so interesting to think of how um [Music] in a way because as you mentioned it's all around you almost um if you're a person who you know sees all the colors just take them for granted but then you start to hear the kind of risk involved in reducing the colors the amount of money that went into acquiring the colors it's like this quietly very important cultural thing that's happening but also kind of not really talked about that much but good for you in terms of meaning to have been right about to write this book and talk absolutely yeah absolutely i think maybe we can take some questions and let's see what we have here someone says loving this thank you um do we see a rise and mention citations and usages of the word blue this question is from benji in europe that corresponds with the arrival and growth of lapis lazuli based pigments well not not necessarily then however one of the things i um i discovered in uh my research was i was able to with regard to us of uh with the help of a phd thesis from from the 19th century was able to do this calculation and there are two graphs in the book uh that show how the uh incidents the number of uses of blue in english in english literature uh in novels and poetry rose dramatically from the 15th 14th 15th century to the romantic period so chaucer hardly ever uses the word blue shakespeare uses a little bit more but by the time you get to byron and keats and shelley it's it's one of the most if not the most oft used colors so i think you do see a massive rise in the the use of the the color the word blue uh throughout this period i don't think it's due to ultramarine i think it's due to probably broader cultural phenomena about describing nature and describing skies it's also about the word just becoming more common as i said before you know blue arrives very late in most languages and there are still many languages around the world that don't have a word for blue yet uh or don't have a word for blue uh at all um so uh it takes time to get to get the the word for the color blue but then obviously as i said with regard to the um the popularity blue then takes over everything well it makes you wonder how do you come up with a name for something that's never had a name um i guess some some languages are still wondering yet yeah i mean that's what my my theory is the reason it comes late is you don't need to name it i mean if if you're not dealing with blue things in your life uh in nature on a regular basis uh but you're but but the sky is blue and the sea is but you don't need to name those things as blue you can call them a sky you can call them the sea but it's when you're actually manipulating and dealing with things and making distinctions between things that's when you need color terms whether it's dark and light or red fruit and yellow fruit or particular kinds of green leaves or not i think of color i guess in a hierarchy hierarchical way in terms of their primary colors so red blue yellow it feels like that's the starting point because the other colors come from a combination of that so to think that blue is kind of like at the end it's interesting well culturally speaking anthropologists will tell you that the primary colors are black white and red these are the colors that are the kind of the if you like the fundamental archetypal colors in human culture they are the first three colors we get that human language gives names to and all the others green yellow blue purple elephant's breath um they come later on in in society um all right let's do another question um has your research on color caused you to reevaluate the meanings of specific works of art that's coming from well that's that's a really good question yes i think it has and i think that when you uh when you look at you know works when you when you realize how the meanings of color change over time and colors that we might find appealing um are were unappealing at a given point in time uh you begin to realize that those were chosen for a meaning so chosen for a reason i always for instance in in jotto's arena chapel i always really admired that picture i showed of the kiss of judas it's the most extraordinary confrontational picture and i always admired that beautiful golden yellow cloak that that judas was wearing but it's only when you look back and you think well what did that color mean back then that you realize that it would have been something that anyone who walked into that chapel before they even saw the picture before they even saw judas's face they would have known that that meant he was not to be trusted so i think that yeah when you start to think about how meanings of color change over time it's it's inevitable that uh it will it will change your response to the pictures yeah i think it does unlock something in the way that you can look at art the more you know about color and their potential meanings and it makes me think about there's a scroll um a chinese scroll that shows um the emperor on this journey it's a southern tour and all of these things and you can immediately find him because he's wearing yellow and that's the emperor's color so once you have that context it just unlocks that you know little bit of information which i think is really interesting yeah um one another question this time from david uh it was interesting to hear your views on the relationship between the centrality of red and art and the earth can the links between our biological reactions to color and our use of color and art be quantified i'm not sure if they can be quantified i think that it's it's certainly true that some of these connotations seem very deep rooted and this is one of the things i try to talk about in the book is that obviously in some ways meanings of color are ever changing uh they're you know there's they're not universal they're not consistent they're constantly on on the move and yet we also see these these these particular kinds of associations and correlations just sticking around and so one is that yeah that connection between red and blood you know you see it from the start it sounds like a cliche but that's because we it's it's so hard wired we see it from those earliest cave paintings all the way through to you know if you look at schindler's list or uh or american beauty or um alfred hitchcock's film marnie blood that that symbolism of red as blood is still the case the same is true of black and darkness we see it very very early on in human society we still have it today even though as i say black and darkness are not the same thing uh so i think that there are certain deep-rooted uh connotations that i wouldn't want to quantify um them i but i do think they are they they are hard to ignore there does certainly seem to be something to it because you find that hospitals are sometimes painted in certain colors um fast food restaurants often use similar colors and go down the cereal aisle the boxes might ease so there must be some kind of physiological response yes i mean well but that's definitely true i mean there's certainly certainly true that lots of studies have found that for instance um that red and yellow are appetite stimulants and so that's why a lot of fast food places will have red and yellow signage because it's more likely when you see it to think i want to eat they've also found that blue is associated with stability and loyalty and so therefore we often see banks financial service companies choosing to have blue purple is often associated with extravagance and so if if brands want to present themselves as luxurious you know whether it's liberty or whether it's uh particular chocolate companies then uh purple will be the color they go for we've also got studies that um that you know people are more likely to trust a doctor if they're wearing white a white coat even though we know now that white coats are great carriers of disease and that's why at the nhs for instance doctors aren't allowed to wear white coats i didn't know that well it's only because people weren't washing their doctors weren't washing their white coats regularly so that's why the nhs guidance is no white coats but people prefer to be told information by a doctor wearing a white coat we also also causes fear for some people does it yes they call it white coat syndrome yeah there is there is fear there's also trust as well and when you talk about the color of hospitals another study found that people are believed to recover more quickly from surgery if they have uh if they're either in green rooms or have access to or can see green uh vegetation green trees green landscapes outside their their windows so there are these interesting studies i think we have to take some of them with a pinch of salt um but i think there is certainly something in them i think we've got time for just a couple more questions um this jp says have you explored musical tones related to certain colors as with synesthesia my experience is that those affected see the same tones per color well i mean farron you'll probably know more about this than i do but so you did a fantastic podcast on the on the subject but i think that it's certainly true that people have linked colors and music uh many for for a long time i mean the most famous example is kandinsky of course uh vasily kandinsky could hear color he could see sound he had particular correlations uh that he thought for instance a cello sounded dark blue i think in a violin sounded pale blue there's a there is one study that showed that many people think of trumpets as red although i don't think of trumpets as red but that is uh supposed to be something that lots of people think of um synesthesia is obviously a fascinating phenomenon i think actually most of us experience it on to a lesser degree but then of course there are wonderful writers and artists who are able to exploit it and make something from it yeah i think it's interesting as well that that it kind of has infiltrated art history synesthesia because with kandinsky he started making what he called compositions right from hearing music and then he would make these paintings and he called them composition borrowing the term from music and now it's quite normal to talk about compositions of artworks and things like that so it's quite fun um synesthesia is really interesting i i don't have it but i find it really fascinating especially people who have it with like tastes and things like that yeah now it could be if you if you had it quite strongly it could be a bit burdensome yeah and we've got another one last question and i'm gonna combine two questions here um one of them was what is your favorite color and the other is if you could only see one color for the rest of your life what would you choose well um i mean i think that i'm extremely unoriginal in this and i would say that my favorite color is is blue and as i say that's what many many people think but is it just regular blue you know is there is there a specific i think i think give me an ultramarine i generally like the deeper the deeper tones of every color the richer tones of every color but deep deep ultramarine blue and that's the blue that has a slight violet tinge to it uh not a greeny blue don't like a greeny blue um although you know turquoises and eggshells and lovelets and those kinds of colors are wonderful but i don't like a sort of i've never liked prussian blue which is a kind of dull greeny blue but a beautiful violety blue i think is a really really desirable experience there it has a depth to it it you feel like you can fall into it in a way that you can't with other colors um blue recedes from the from the eye so some are some colors advanced towards as yellows and reds advanced to the eye uh blues and purples recede and i think actually that that that the color that draws you into it in that sense i find particularly appealing so yes blue would be would probably be my choice but as i say 30 to 40 percent of people would choose would make the same decision yeah i have to admit i do really love ultramarine blue i also like ochre i think yogurt is a really it has a similar uh gives me similar good feelings is when i see the ultramarine yeah and then if you could only see one color that sounds pretty intense like what's this i'm not sure i think i maybe i'd go for something like gray i mean i wonder if you go if you can have shades of grey and we're so used to seeing the world seeing things through black and white photographs black and white films that perhaps it would be less unsettling than uh than seeing the world in only one other color um but obviously what about just wearing one color maybe that seems more like if you can only you know wear one color decorate your house you know my house is blue i have a bunch of songs if you if everything was one color that you used what would you go with oh i think black black or gray probably we recently renovated our house and we went for a we we went for some murky mid-tone grey i'm ashamed to admit and i i do quite like it because you don't really almost you don't really notice it so maybe gray or black yeah i think if you wear black all the time you could you just shake then right yeah well that's the other thing about black actually although it has these these negative connotations going back thousands of years of you people think of it connected to darkness it did emerge particularly in the early 20th century as the most chic color and this the color that was somehow timeless and stylish and we still use that phrase you know x is the new black again and again and again yeah i can't thank you enough for taking the time to uh have this conversation with me this is so interesting i hope everyone has enjoyed this as much as i have and had your questions answered don't forget to click that link above to buy the book because james does talk about these things and more and in greater detail and there's so much pop culture and art and so many things discussed in the book it's really interesting so thank you so much thank you fair and thank you everybody for for listening in on a friday night yeah good times [Music] you

Channel: The British Library

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Length: 64min 1sec (3841 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021