The World According to Colour: A Cultural History

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Considering that colour is notoriously difficult to understand, let alone describe, Fox has done a sterling job. The World According to Colour tells a compelling story yet is also a book you can happily dip in and out of. Though it doesn’t bring us much closer to a true understanding of colour, it gives a riveting account of how our experience of it has shaped our understanding of the world. 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. Blue was the 6th color term developed in most languages due to blue being distant, insubstantial - the sea, the sky, the horizon. Holding the blue sea in your hand yields translucent/clear (hopefully) water. The same with "holding' the sky. Few natural items are truly blue although the gemstone lapis lazuli yielded the brilliant pigment ultramarine - the "most expensive natural pigment" during the Renaissance.

There were two spirits, born in murkiness, one that established Heaven and the other that constructed Earth.While James focuses on the colours we can see the book could be expanded to cover the wavelengths beyond our sight that other creatures can perceive - infra-red and ultraviolet. Finally, while difficult to do, a closing summary bringing it all together would have rounded off the book nicely. These differences might even influence the colours they see. Debates about linguistic relativity – the extent to which our words shape our thoughts and perceptions – have been rumbling on for decades, and while many scholars have overstated the case for it, some have found persuasive evidence that if you don’t, say, have a word for blue, you will probably find it harder to distinguish. Most experts now agree that colour, as commonly understood, doesn’t inhabit the physical world at all but exists in the eyes or minds of its beholders. They argue that if a tree fell in a forest and no one was there to see it, its leaves would be colourless – and so would everything else. To put it another way: there is no such thing as colour; there are only the people who perceive it. Yet we are familiar with darkness and silence, and we can only be aware of them by means of eyes and ears, but this not by perception but by absence of perception … For when with our bodily eyes, our glance travels over material forms, as they are presented to perception, we never see darkness except when we stop seeing.19

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. It is nothing less than a portrait of the universe before it existed. Surrounded on all sides by the words “et sic in infinitum” (“and so on, to infinity”), the square depicts the shapeless matter that God would later knead into the cosmos. Looking at the same colours from the perspectives of nature, science and psychology gives us further insights to how important colour can be to life. From the green chlorophyll of plants to the red haemoglobin of our literal life blood, how nature uses colour to attract mates and pollinators, warn of danger and camouflage, the science of how we see colour and how we can use it to reflect and affect our moods and wellbeing. Sample of silk dyed with mauve by William Henry Perkin (1860). 17.8 x 5.1cm. Smithsonian National Museum. We all pretty much understand what color is - depending on which wavelength is being absorbed rather than reflected (the color we see is the one reflected). So to deal with a book on color, first the author needs to go into what color is as well as the scientific discoveries and biological physiology that enables animals to perceive color or shadings.

Ofelia Rodríguez: Talking in Dreams

A beguiling cultural history of colour by the BAFTA nominated broadcaster and art historian James Fox