Agreement on the naming of colour is really complex and varies from one language to another. For instance the Greeks didn’t have word for ‘blue’ (Pastoreau). Apropos, where is the perceptual boundary between a blue-green and a greenish blue?
Possibly the best book on these aspects of colour and language is Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour It might seem a daunting read, but it’s not difficult, simply consisting of many simple but fascinating questions about colour and language that are posed with the linguistic simplicity/clarity of a great philosopher.
I used to buy s/h copies dirt cheap on Abe Books and hand them out art students who might benefit from that sort of thinking. It’s an easy but fascinating read
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I haven’t read this but now ordered a slightly used copy online. Thank you for the recommendation!
I have always been intrigued by how differently people ‘see’ or react to colours and combinations of colour. To my mind, colours and beauty are entwined in a ballet of aesthetics.
Personal history, culture, travel and fashion have a great impact in how we perceive colour and its connotations at any given time, filtered by that other elusive called ‘taste’.
Camel/beige is and always has been a Ralph Lauren Black Label led upper east side uniform. Indigo blue denim is never anything but levelling, whether for jeans or wittily used to recover an old wing chair. Red shouts wherever it is and needs to be on something (or someone) worth the attention. Green says more to some than others, particularly when a hat (戴绿帽子). The Tiffany Blue is more of a robin’s egg pale turquoise but carries luxury connotation. As does in the right place, Hermès orange. President Macron is currently altering the blue of the drapeau de France to a darker, arguably more elegant hue. A risky move.
I may have mentioned before that Manuel Canovas said, “There are no wrong colours, only wrong combinations of colour.” I didn’t realise at the time but he may also have meant misusing a colour in a particular place or purpose.
Actually, I would say there is no ‘wrong’, only maybe so particular as to be unique and pleasing only to a very few, or just one person. Colours are generally appreciated or disliked by consensus. Therein lies philosophy. Or, should that be phenomenology?
Fun thread drift!
I hope you find it an interesting read. Thought provoking, but not to be rushed!
A very different book on colour that I found fascinating and beautifully produced is Michel Pastoreau’s, Blue the History of a Color (originally published in France as *Bleu d’histoire d’une couleur). It’s a Western cultural history of the colour blue written from the perspective of a French historian of dyes and is full of fascinating insights and connections.
For instance he charts the virtual absence of the colour during the first Christian millennium because there weren’t stable blue dyes or good artists’ pigments. This situation changes In the first part of the second millennium firstly through the appearance of stained glass, Chartres blue and the aesthetics of light.
Secondly, iconographic depiction of the Virgin Mary stabilise (previously she was dressed in red or the black of mourning and iconographically derived from earlier Egyptian representations of Isis sat enthroned with the infant Horus on her knee) through the rise of the Marian cults and her new more important status in the Catholic Church which is reinforced by artists starting to use expensive exotic Afghan lapis lazuli pigment.
Thirdly, new blue dyes are invented whose fabrics remain blue (unlike those dyed with woad). As a result the dominant colour of aristocratic clothing changes from red to blue.
There’s also a very good section on Goethe’s colour theory and Romanticism – ‘blue draws us after it into the distance’ tying together many diverse cultural strands from Kandinsky to Rudolph Steiner.
Pastoreau later wrote books on other colours, but I think this is the richest. I’m fortunate to have the sumptuously produced first edition that’s now worth about forty times what I paid for it, but there’s a 2018 US 2nd edition that’s probably no different to the original.
Lastly, a mention, rather than a must have, UK art historian John Gage’s mammoth encyclopaedic Colour and Culture is still the definitive Eng lang work on that subject.
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Good video, @vero - thank you. For anyone interested, I can recommend a book called Eye and Brain, by R L Gregory. It’s the book that started my interest in the subject when I was in school. It’s still a good read today.
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