Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Secret Lives of Color
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.kassiastclair.com/
CITY: London, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2017018076 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017018076 |
| HEADING: | St. Clair, Kassia |
| 000 | 00458nz a2200121n 450 |
| 001 | 10413942 |
| 005 | 20170330100942.0 |
| 008 | 170330n| azannaabn a aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2017018076 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |
| 100 | 1_ |a St. Clair, Kassia |
| 400 | 1_ |a Clair, Kassia St. |
| 670 | __ |a The secret lives of color, 2017: |b CIP t.p. (Kassia St. Clair; a freelance writer, a former assistant books & arts editor at The Economist, and writes regularly for Elle Decoration) |
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Bristol University, B.A., 2007; Oxford University, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Freelance writer and journalist; the Economist, assistant books and arts editor; Elle Decoration, columnist, 2013–; Always Take Notes podcast host.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including the Economist, House & Garden, Quartz, and New Statesman.
SIDELIGHTS
Kassia St. Clair is a London-based freelance journalist and writer of design, the arts, and culture. She was a former assistant books and arts editor at the Economist, and since 2013 has written columns for Elle Decoration. She also contributes to NPR’s Markeplace and Radio 4, and co-hosts the podcast Always Take Notes about writers and writing. St. Clair holds a degree in history from Bristol University and a master’s degree from Oxford University.
In 2017, St. Clair published The Secret Lives of Color, an examination of the historical significance of seventy-five colors, shades, dyes, pigments, and hues. For example, white was said to protect against the plague, Picasso entered a blue period, purple was the exclusive right of royalty, and black is associated with death in Western countries. Based on her column in Elle Decoration, the book explains color’s importance in art, war, fashion, and politics. In her “digestible anthology of chromatic origin stories, readers have a chance to join in St. Clair’s obsession,” according to Courtney Eathorne in Booklist.
Starting with white and ending in black, she organizes chapters based on color families. She provides origin stories of many colors, explains idioms from scarlet women to pitch black, and presents obscure names of colors like umber, gamboge, madder, taupe, and buff. She also answers questions like whether the fruit orange or the color name came first, notes that fuchsia is named after botanist Leonhard Fuchs, and explains how a shade of green that Swedish apothecary Carl Wilhelm Scheele developed from copper arsenite was used in wallpaper, fabrics, and artificial flowers until hundreds of people, perhaps even Napoleon Bonaparte, died from its toxicity.
She reveals how a Pantone 448 nauseating green-brown was chosen for cigarette packages, pink is used in prisons to pacify the unruly, early Protestants removed sinful colors like yellow and red from churches and wardrobes, and Henry Ford refused to make his new automobiles in any color other than black. Even after all the efforts to classify colors, they are still subject to interpretation of the human brain, as evidenced by the Internet obsession with whether a dress was white and gold or blue and black. St. Clair “delivers a mix of science, humor, and art history in this collection of bite-size essays” noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer who acknowledged her wit, anecdotes, and etymologies.
“This is a perfect gift for a colour enthusiast. Or just saturate yourself,” advised Cathy Dillion on the Irish Times Website. Praising St. Clair for her style, energy, and knowledge of a huge range of material, Stephen Bayley said in Spectator: “The Secret Lives of Colour is snappily designed and production values are attractively high. It presents its subject as an encyclopaedic Pantone swatch-book annotated with good-natured and diverting anecdotalism.”
Once derided as a distraction, color eventually gained prominence, especially when Isaac Newton developed a color wheel that ordered colors along the spectrum, which eliminates white and black. St. Clair wrote in an article on the Guardian Online: “The idea of complementary colours would prove to have a profound effect on the art that followed. Artists including Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch used them to give structure and add drama to their paintings.”
Writing online at Wall Street Journal, Laura J. Snyder commented: “Between these somber hues is a rainbow of colors and stories of the myriad ways they have tinctured human history.” Snyder added: “The history of colors, it turns out, is the story of science as well as art. Kassia St. Clair’s entertaining book brings them both into vivid relief.” Lily Le Brun said in the Economist: “These rainbow-edged pages also make the book easy to reference, matching its companionable, informative tone. A light and lively guide to sights so easily taken for granted, The Secret Lives of Colour offers plenty of fresh clues for the brain’s colourful calculations.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2017, Courtney Eathorne, review of The Secret Lives of Color, p. 4.
Publishers Weekly, June 19, 2017, review of The Secret Lives of Color, p. 100.
Spectator, March 18, 2017, Stephen Bayley, review of The Secret Lives of Color, p. 37.
ONLINE
Economist, https://www.economist.com/ (October 26, 2017), Lily Le Brun, review of The Secret Lives of Color.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (December 14, 2017), Kassia St. Clair, “The Secret History of Colour in Black and White.”
Irish Times Online, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (September 23, 2017), Cathy Dillon, review of The Secret Lives of Color.
Kassia St. Clair Website, http://www.kassiastclair.com/ (April 1, 2018), author profile.
Wall Street Journal Online, https://www.wsj.com/ (December 29, 2017), Laura J. Snyder, review of The Secret Lives of Color.
About
Kassia St Clair is an author, design and culture writer based in London. Her first book, ‘The Secret Lives of Colour’, was published in the UK by John Murray and by Penguin in America, and is being translated into eight other languages. She is a regular contributor to radio shows including NPR’s Marketplace and Radio 4. To find out more, visit the books and speaking tabs. She is currently working on her second book while co-hosting Always Take Notes, a podcast about writers and writing and giving talks about colour at venues including Tate Liverpool, the V&A and Soho House.
She also about design and culture for publications including The Economist, House & Garden, Quartz and the New Statesman. She has been Elle Decoration’s columnist since 2013, is a former assistant books & arts editor for The Economist, and has contributed to BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live, Woman’s Hour, RTE’s History Show, Monocle 24’s Section D and BBC Radio 5 Live. You can see a selection of her published work under the writing tab.
For commissions or other queries please email her.
The Secret Lives of Color
Courtney Eathorne
Booklist.
114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p4. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Secret Lives of Color. By Kassia St. Clair. Oct. 2017. 320p. Penguin, $20 (9780143131144). 155.9.
London-based journalist St. Clair sports a fetishistic love of color--more specifically, of the way color is described and translated across linguistic barriers. She first fell in lust while studying fashion and lifestyle trends of the eighteenth century. St. Clair found descriptions of color and hue downright titillating. In this digestible anthology of chromatic origin stories, readers have a chance to join in St. Clair's obsession. The collection of informative essays is organized by color family. For example, readers will learn about the vast differences between saffron, amber, and ginger in quick succession. Visual artists will relish the scientific exploration of pigments and stains, but every reader will enjoy the ample supply of answers to some of life's biggest questions, such as: Which orange came first, the color or the fruit? (The fruit.) Why do we call it "pitch" black? (Complete darkness tends to throw us off balance.) Including an index and suggested further reading, The Secret Lives of Color holds surprise and satisfaction at every striation of the rainbow.--Courtney Eathorne
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Eathorne, Courtney. "The Secret Lives of Color." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 4. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161421/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=3a8ff621. Accessed 21 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161421
1 of 6 3/20/18, 11:30 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Secret Lives of Color
Publishers Weekly.
264.25 (June 19, 2017): p100+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Secret Lives of Color
Kassia St. Clair. Penguin Books, $20 (320p) ISBN 978-0-14-313114-4
London-based writer St. Clair delivers a mix of science, humor, and art history in this collection of bite-size essays on the cultural and social lore of colors based on her column in British Elle Decoration. The author arranges her color commentary in blocks: color entries start with white and end with black; in between, St. Clair tells the stories of colors unglamorous (umber) and obscure (gamboge) with those that kill (orpiment pigment is around 60% arsenic) or change (verdigris is the green patina that results when copper is exposed to air). She explores etymologies (buff from buffalo) and sprinkles wit (taupe, French for mole, is "browner than a mole had a right to be") throughout the collection. Her sentences guarantee sustained reading: "Balthasar Gerard was the Lee Harvey Oswald of his day"; the word heliotrope fills "the mouth like a rich, buttery sauce." St. Clair's rhetoric beautifies the form of the brief essay. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Secret Lives of Color." Publishers Weekly, 19 June 2017, p. 100+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496643903/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=737678c3. Accessed 21 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496643903
2 of 6 3/20/18, 11:30 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The mysteries of colour
Stephen Bayley
Spectator.
333.9838 (Mar. 18, 2017): p37+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
The Secret Lives of Colour
by Kassia St Clair
John Murray, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 320 Chromaphilia: The Story of Colour in Art by Stella Paul
Phaidon, 29.95 [pounds sterling], pp. 326
When Australia imposed generic packaging in its war on cigarettes, there was consumer research into the most deterrent colour. Pantone 448 was chosen, a sort of sludgy green-brown. When it was described as 'olive', Oz's federation of olive growers formally complained.
Certainly, colours move us. Interior designers know that yellow makes people angry, while in the US Naval Correctional Center in Seattle, what's known as Baker-Miller Pink (after the officers who created it) has been found to pacify stroppy recidivists. Additionally, as Diana Vreeland averred, pink is the navy blue of India. Racing drivers think green unlucky, even if it is the British national colour in motorsport.
We sometimes see red and that means we are angry, but red is also the colour of love. Clare Quilty in pursuit of the nymphette Lolita in Stanley Kubrick's film drives an assertive bright red car. Red too was Dustin Hoffman's Alfa-Romeo in The Graduate, his desperate drive across the Bay Bridge surely one of cinema's greatest images of romantic yearning.
Our essential understanding of colour is still based on Isaac Newton's 1671 analysis of light, although artists and writers have, inevitably, made interpretations of their own. Goethe's Farbenlehre--translated by C.L. Eastlake, the first keeper of the National Gallery--opposed Newton in suggesting that darkness was something tangible rather than a mere absence of light: a poetic intuition, perhaps, of a Black Hole.'Blue,' Goethe thought most beautifully, 'is darkness weakened by light.'
3 of 6 3/20/18, 11:30 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
In 1841 artists' colours first appeared in portable tubes, liberating painters to work outdoors and in this way being better able to observe and capture the effects of nature. Turner was the ultimate observer of natural colour and liked Goethe so much the German is namechecked in several paintings: 'Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory)--The Morning After the Deluge--Moses writing the Book of Genesis' was painted in 1843 and is now in Tate Old Fashioned with surely the most portentous title in the whole history of art.
Kassia St Clair writes with style, energy and knowledge, working through a huge range of material and explaining many mysteries of colour succinctly and wittily: a regular tomato, for example, is not red. Tomatoes appear red because that's the very wavelength of light their skin does not absorb. A 'red' tomato lies to tell the truth. The Secret Lives of Colour is snappily designed and production values are attractively high. It presents its subject as an encyclopaedic Pantone swatch-book annotated with good-natured and diverting anecdotalism.
Chromaphilia is similar in that its chapters are based on colour groups, but the tone is rather different: Stella Paul is an educator at New York's Metropolitan Museum and her voice is a didactic one. Sometimes it becomes effortfully academic. 'Newton will be further explored later in the book,' she writes--and indeed explore Newton we do. While St Clair has no pictures, Paul has a gorgeous and eclectic abundance of them: from the obvious shrieking Munch (who 'used colour and form to expose internal states') to the nicely obscure Nardo di Cione.
We are not going to have a new taste; nor are we ever going to have a new colour, even if physicists at Randall Moore University in West Virginia recently claimed to have found one when they shone light through supercold sodium atoms and carbon nanotubes. It was blue. And
4 of 6 3/20/18, 11:30 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
in the Home Counties, Surrey Nanosystems has achieved the blackest black yet, a 'superblack' that reflects only 0.035 per cent of light and sucks photons like Charybdis sucked water. Paint something superblack and it disappears.
Yet colour may not be entirely scientific: Paul says Yves Klein's famous blue had a 'velvet finish', but St Clair sees 'clarity and lustre'. For my part, I once saw the novelist Anthony Burgess settle down at a concert grand, put a reproduction of 'The Fighting Temaraire' on the music stand and play the picture in a camp, but straight-faced, demonstration of synaesthesia. As ever with Burgess, you were not quite sure if he was taking the mick.
But our enlarging appreciation of colour tracks the growth of civilisation. The ancients had to be content with Tyrian purple, carmine, lapis and black. Gladstone, in a scholarly exercise that shames today's more narrow and busy politicians, once counted all the references to colour in Homer, finding that black predominated and blue did not seem to exist.
And did the ancients really see the sea as 'wine-dark'? What colour was their wine? Thanks to Farrow & Ball, our chromatic and emotional spectrum has been widened to include Mouse's Back, Radicchio, Stiffkey Blue, Dead Salmon and Nancy's Blushes. Thus are the new emotional possibilities of haut suburbia indicated by tins of paint.
As if in response to a subtle but insistent command, there have been several monographic studies of colour published recently: Michel Pastoureau's Blue, Spike Bucklow's Red and Simon Garfield's Mauve. While these all tend to a microscopic fanaticism, and are none the worse for that, St Clair and Paul are more synoptic and more ambitious, covering the whole spectrum, but authoritatively too. Nicely, each has its chapters' edges dipped in colours. The competition between these excellent, innovative books is between idiosyncratic cultural history and traditional art history. Each will colour your thinking.
Caption: 'The Ladder of Divine Ascent', 12th century, from St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai, Egypt. (This image and one overleaf from Chromaphilia, by Stella Paul)
AKG-IMAGES/ERICH LESSING
5 of 6 3/20/18, 11:30 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bayley, Stephen. "The mysteries of colour." Spectator, 18 Mar. 2017, p. 37+. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498485999/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=57f3ea7a. Accessed 21 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498485999
6 of 6 3/20/18, 11:30 PM
The Secret Lives of Color
by Kassia St. Clair
Which color was named after a battle near Milan? It was a shade of pinkish-purple, and one of the 75 hues explored in Kassia St. Clair's exuberant, encyclopedic The Secret Lives of Color, which details the strange and entertaining narratives of colors.
St. Clair, a columnist for Elle Decoration, opens with a crash course on color vision, reviewing the basics of the visible light spectrum, rods, cones, color blindness and the variability of color interpretation. Next, she offers background on artists' pigments, cultural contexts of colors, their politics and the effects of language on perception. But the bulk of The Secret Lives of Color lies in its brief yet delightful histories behind the hues St. Clair has curated. Just as delightfully, the book's pages themselves burst with color, tangible tints alongside tales.
St. Clair organizes her work in terms of color family, beginning with white and moving into shades of yellow, orange, pink, red, purple, blue, green, brown and black. She culls heavily, but not exclusively, from European history, delving into art, fashion and politics. She explores the notion of gendered colors and their effects, noting "the pink tax," the shift in military uniforms marked by the adoption of khaki, and the anthropological curiosity that was "mummy brown," made from ground-up human bodies (naturally). There's also the somewhat recent 1980s' acid yellow and stories of rusty red hematite dating to the Paleolithic era in almost every continent.
And as for the color named after the battle near Milan? Magenta. --Katie Weed, freelance writer and reviewer
Discover: This kaleidoscopic collection compiles the captivating and surprising stories behind many of the colors right in front of our eyes.
Penguin Books, $20, hardcover, 320p., 9780143131144
The secret history of colour in black and white
It was once seen as sinful, and used to encode social class. Kassia St Clair reflects on colour’s colourful past
Kassia St Clair
Mon 14 Nov 2016 10.17 EST
Last modified on Wed 14 Feb 2018 16.20 EST
True colours: Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette, the last French queen, in the 2006 biopic.
True colours: Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette, the last French queen, in the 2006 biopic. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
A distaste for colour runs through western culture like a ladder in a stocking. Many classical writers were dismissive. Colour was a distraction from the true glories of art: line and form. It was seen as self-indulgent and, later, sinful – a sign of dissimulation and dishonesty.
The bluntest expression of this comes from the 19th-century American writer Herman Melville, who wrote that colours “are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified nature absolutely paints like a harlot”.
But arguments like these are very old indeed. Protestants, for example, once expressed their intellectual simplicity, severity and humility in a palette dominated by black and white; bright colours like red, orange, yellow and blue were removed both from the walls of churches and their wardrobes. The pious Henry Ford refused for many years to bow to consumer demand and produce cars in any colour other than black.
In art, the tussle over the respective merits of disegno (drawing) versus colore (colour) raged on through the Renaissance and, although somewhat muted, into the present day. Disegno represented purity and intellect; colore the vulgar and effeminate. In an imperious essay from 1920, tellingly entitled Purism, the architect Le Corbusier and his colleague wrote: “In a true and durable plastic work, it is form which comes first, and everything else should be subordinated to it. Let us leave to the clothes-dyers the sensory jubilations of the paint tube.”
The pious Henry Ford refused for many years to bow to demand and produce cars in any colour other than black
Even among those who accepted the value of colour, the ways in which they were conceptualised and ordered had an impact on their relative importance. The ancient Greeks saw colours running along a continuum from white to black: yellow was a little darker than white and blue was a little lighter than black. Red and green were in the middle. Medieval writers had great faith in this light-to-dark schema, too. It was only in the 17th century that the idea emerged of red, yellow and blue as primary colours, and green, orange and purple as secondary ones. Most iconoclastic of all was Newton and his spectrum, an idea he wrote about in 1704 in Opticks. Suddenly white and black were no longer colours; the spectrum no longer ran from light to dark. Newton’s colour wheel also imposed order on colour pairs – for example, green and red, blue and orange – that were found to resonate strongly with each other when placed side by side. The idea of complementary colours would prove to have a profound effect on the art that followed. Artists including Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch used them to give structure and add drama to their paintings.
Sign up for Lab Notes - the Guardian's weekly science update
Read more
As colours came to take on meanings and cultural significance, attempts were made to restrict their use. The most notorious expression of this was through the sumptuary laws. These were passed in ancient Greece and Rome – with examples in ancient China and Japan, too – but found their fullest expression in Europe from the mid-12th century. Such laws could touch on anything from diet to dress and furnishings, and sought to encode the social strata into a clear visual system. The peasants, in other words, should eat and dress like peasants, craftsmen should eat and dress like craftsmen, and so on. Colour was a vital signifier in this language – dull, earthy colours like russet were explicitly confined to the meanest rural peasants, while bright, saturated ones, like scarlet, were the preserve of a select few.
The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair is published by John Murray at £20. To order a copy for £16.40, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
Topics
Book Review: The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair
11 Sep 2017
Newsletter Issue Number:
#139 September 2017
Author:
Analiese Treacy
This book by Kassia St Clair, a freelance writer for Elle Decoration and a former arts editor at The Economist, is a most fascinating read. As the title suggest, the book captures some of the weird and wonderful stories associated with over 75 different shades, dyes and hues, some of which you may never even have heard of. Opening with a quote from John Ruskin ‘The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most’, Kassia delves into the into some fascinating stories such as that of Scheele’s Green, the toxic copper arsenate which became used in the mass production of 19th Century wallpapers almost poisoning a generation of British home owners with its toxic fumes. St Clair provides insights into the use of Kohl, the black colour used by the Egyptians as eyeliner. Believed to have magical properties in making the whites of the eyes stand out, the Pharaohs valued it so much they buried themselves with it so as to wear it in the afterlife. The quality of Kohl depended on the wealth of the wearer, with the poorer versions made from a combination of animal fats and soot and the richer versions made from mixtures of galena, powdered pearls, gold, coral or emeralds bound with oil or milk and scented with saffron, frankincense or fennel. In 1979, Baker Miller Pink, first painted on the walls of a US Naval Correctional Centre in Seattle Washington, was praised for its undeniable calming effect on inmates reducing levels of violence within the centre significantly. The success of this colour in taming the most ferocious and anxious of minds, gave it something of a pop like status in the US, with its use seen creeping over the seats of buses, houses and even sports locker rooms. More stories such as that of Heliotrope, varying shades of which were worn during the Victorian era to denote periods of ‘half mourning’ and the accidental discovery of Mauve in the search for a cure for Malaria, keep the reader engaged and definitely wanting more. While by no means comparable with the Pigment Compendium, this book is intriguing, fun and entertaining and definitely worth a read if you are an unwavering lover of colour!
The Secret Lives of Colour, Kassia St Clair, Murray Publishers, 2016
Review: Chromatic Experiences
A catalog of 75 colors and their histories, from lead white to pitch black. Laura J. Snyder reviews ‘The Secret Lives of Color’ by Kassia St. Clair.
Aerial view of rows of colorful tulip fields
Aerial view of rows of colorful tulip fields Photo: Getty Images
By Laura J. Snyder
Dec. 29, 2017 4:24 p.m. ET
6 COMMENTS
The Swedish apothecary Carl Wilhelm Scheele was studying the element arsenic in 1775 when he came across the yellowish-green compound copper arsenite and recognized its commercial potential as a pigment. Soon “Scheele’s green” was used to produce wallpaper, fabric, and artificial flowers and fruits. Charles Dickens was keen to redecorate his entire house in the fashionable shade. Fortunately, he reconsidered. People were dying from the arsenic-laced items: a child who sucked on fake grapes, a flower maker—even, reportedly, Napoleon Bonaparte, who perished in exile on St. Helena island in a damp room covered in green wallpaper.
Kassia St. Clair, a freelance journalist and a former books and arts editor at the Economist, recounts the tale of this perilous pigment in her charming book “The Secret Lives of Color.” The book’s short chapters—“something between a potted history and a character sketch for the 75 shades that have intrigued me the most,” as she puts it—grew out of a column she writes for Elle Decoration and retain the appealing conversational tone of a design magazine.
The Secret Lives of Color
By Kassia St. Clair
Penguin, 320 pages, $20
The impulse to catalog colors goes back at least to the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic in the 1600s, an era when people obsessively collected and classified shells, fossils and insects and displayed them in “cabinets of curiosity.” In 1692 a Dutch artist named A. Boogert created a sort of cabinet of color: a volume of 800 pages filled with hand-painted color swatches. Today’s version is the Pantone Color Guide, first published in 1963 and now the standard color matching system used by artists, printers and designers.
After briefly introducing some basic concepts related to color and vision, Ms. St. Clair takes her readers on a whirlwind tour through her own color cabinet, starting from lead white, a pigment that caused the deaths of women using it to enhance their pale complexions, and ending with pitch black, “the most fearsome kind of darkness,” a shade that evokes our fear of dying. Between these somber hues is a rainbow of colors and stories of the myriad ways they have tinctured human history.
Visitors to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art can admire the small ceramic figure of a bright green-blue hippopotamus (known affectionately as “William”) that was buried in a tomb on the banks of the Nile almost 4,000 years ago. At a time when the only readily available pigments were the earth-tone colors made from soil and clay, the ancient Egyptians made the first synthetic inorganic pigment. Although their recipe is no longer known, producing “Egyptian blue” probably involved a complicated process of heating chalk or limestone with sand and a copper-containing mineral such as malachite. The Egyptians used this color lavishly on walls, in papyri and as a glaze on objects—such as William—that were placed in sarcophagi as talismans.
When Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, it destroyed a city and its inhabitants but also preserved a room containing extraordinary murals painted on a background of vermilion, an intense red. The chamber’s inscrutable images—a nymph suckling a goat, a winged figure whipping a young woman—have earned it the sobriquet “Villa of Mysteries.” The extravagant use of the coveted color—made from finely ground cinnabar, a mineral form of mercury sulfide—indicates that the room was intended to produce awe, perhaps as a site for religious rites. By the fourth century, alchemists had begun to forge vermilion from mercury and sulfur. Because the volatile process by which they were combined released poisonous fumes, Venice banned the production of vermilion in 1294. The pigment was favored by medieval artists illuminating manuscripts and was, for a time, as expensive as the gold leaf they also used.
When Leonhard Fuchs, a Bavarian, was studying to be a physician in the 1500s, the systematic study of plants had been stalled for half a century. To rectify this, Fuchs created a garden filled with plants sent to him by friends and fellow scientists around the world. In 1542 he published a finely illustrated book depicting more than 500 plants, including many never seen by Europeans, such as the chili pepper. Almost 140 years after Fuchs’s death in 1566, an admiring botanist honored him with a plant name. Found originally on the island of Hispaniola, the fuchsia plant has double-skirted flowers in a variety of hues: white, pink, purple and red. The name fuchsia was adopted for the bright purplish-pink color of some blooms, and thus the botanist’s name lives on in a color he never saw, found on a plant he didn’t discover.
In the 17th century, the English philosopher Francis Bacon recommended a gruesome remedy for the “stanching of blood”: ground mummy. The substance bitumen, found in mummies, had been used as a medicine starting in the first century. Expeditions were sent to mummy pits to supply the apothecaries. Since both curative powders and color pigments were sold by them, Ms. St. Clair notes, “it is not so surprising that the rich brown powder also found itself on painters’ palettes.” The fine dust was mixed with a drying oil and amber varnish and used as translucent glazing layers for skin tones and shadows. Most artists did not realize that “Mummy brown” came from actual mummies. The Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones was so horrified when he found out that he insisted on giving his tube a decent burial.
In 1856, William Perkin, an 18-year-old student at London’s Royal College of Chemistry, was trying to make his name and his fortune by deriving a synthetic version of tree-bark-derived quinine—the only known treatment for malaria—from coal tar. He failed to produce quinine but succeeded in getting rich by distilling the first synthetic dye: a pale purple-pink with gray overtones. Mauve became the favorite dress color of Empress Eugénie of France, bringing royalty-obsessed English society into “the grip of the Mauve Measles,” as the satirical magazine Punch declared in 1859. Thirty-two years later Oscar Wilde warned, “Never trust a woman who wears mauve.” By then, the shade was finished for the fashion-conscious.
Gamboge, the color of “old earwax,” was the solidified sap from the Garcinia tree in Cambodia (or Camboja, as it was once known). When the crushed pigment was “touched with a drop of water,” Ms. St. Clair writes, “these toffee-brown blocks yielded a yellow paint so bright and luminous it almost seemed fluorescent.” J.M.W. Turner and Joshua Reynolds dipped their brushes into gamboge. William Hooker, the botanical artist of the London Royal Horticultural Society, mixed it with Prussian blue to create the perfect color for depicting leaves. In 1926, the French physicist Jean Perrin won the Nobel Prize for experiments using the pigment: By showing that tiny yellow gamboge particles danced around in water, moved by its tiny constituents, he proved the physical reality of molecules.
The history of colors, it turns out, is the story of science as well as art. Kassia St. Clair’s entertaining book brings them both into vivid relief.
—Ms. Snyder is the author, most recently, of “Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing.”
The Curious Histories of Colors, from Beige to Heliotrope
These stories about the origins of hues makes for a colorful read.
Claire VoonNovember 6, 2017
Popular
Banksy Blitz Continues in NYC with New Murals in Brooklyn
Kid Cartoonist Pushes Scholastic Art Contest to Reconsider Its Copyright Policy
Banksy's 14th Street Rat Already Taken Down by Building Owners
Sprechen Sie Kunst? How to Speak German in the Art World
The Difficult Work of Decolonizing Culture, from the Whitney Biennial to Gentrification
Sponsored
Meet the Next Generation of Creative Thinkers at MICA’s 2018 Grad Show
Virginia MOCA Presents Inka Essenhigh: A Fine Line
‘The Secret Lives of Color’ by Kassia St. Clair, published by Penguin Random House (GIF by the author for Hyperallergic)
Which pigment led to the discovery of a 20th-century art forger? Which color was made from ground-up human bodies?
In a riveting new book, freelance design journalist Kassia St. Clair shares the vivid origins and histories of 75 colors, from seductive vermilion to the malodorous Indian yellow. The Secret Lives of Color, published by Penguin Random House, takes you on a whirlwind journey through the visible color spectrum — beginning with white and ending with pitch black — that is replete with anecdotes certain to make you an expert in color trivia. The answers to the above questions, if you were wondering, are, respectively, cobalt, used by forger Han van Meegeren as a synthetic substitute for ultramarine, in his fake Vermeers; and mummy, a rich brown pigment made from crushed remains of — you guessed it — Egyptian mummies.
Cover of ‘The Secret Lives of Color’ by Kassia St. Clair, published by Penguin Random House (image courtesy Penguin Random House)
Presenting a truly exhaustive history of colors might be impossible. Instead, St. Clair presents bite-sized profiles of colors packed with some of the most curious stories across art, science, fashion, politics, and more. The book is organized by broad color families, broken down into shades, each of which she devotes two to four pages to dissecting. A number of these are obscure, such as gamboge — a bright yellow used by artists in Asia for centuries — or heliotrope — a purple named for the blossoms of a plant with a cherry pie-scent.
As St. Clair writes in an introduction, “What I have tried to do is provide something between a potted history and a character sketch for the 75 shades that have intrigued me the most.” Aside from these mini profiles, she has also penned six short essays on topics such as the science behind color perception, the evolution of artists’ palettes, and Western culture’s distaste for color. St. Clair has long been captivated by color and has spent years studying their lives; The Secret Lives of Color grew out of a monthly color column she has written for ELLE Decoration since 2013.
The 320-page book is diligently researched (made evident through a lengthy bibliography and list of further reading), and while some artists, historians, or color connoisseurs may be familiar with some of its tales, other ones will certainly surprise.
St. Clair researches the diverse meaning of colors across cultures and centuries, highlighting the significance of celadon in Chinese art, of obsidian in Native American rituals, and of madder red to the ancient Egyptians. She shares vivid stories about the socialite who introduced shocking pink to the world, the first person named a “dumb blonde,” and the merchant who figured out how to create archil from lichens. For most colors, she also explains the typically labor-intensive processes required to produce them.
We also learn about colors beyond their physical appearance. St. Clair examines the etymologies of many names: buff, for instance, comes from “buffalo;” sepia, from sepia officinalis, or the common cuttlefish, which produces ink that can be neutralized and converted into artistic medium. She also considers how color has seeped into the English language, through terms such as “whitewash” and “yellow journalism.”
Whatever your opinion of a shade, The Secret Lives of Colors provides some illuminating perspectives on it. Even beige, which St. Clair herself declares is “boring,” has a fascinating anecdote. As astronomers from John Hopkins University determined in 2002, beige is actually the average color of our universe — although, they, too, thought that beige fails to excite people, and eventually came up with a jazzier sounding name: cosmic latte.
The Secret Lives of Color is available through Penguin Random House.
Share
Tags
Kassia St. ClairPenguin Random HouseThe Secret Lives of Color
Related
A Collection of 3,000 Pigments Made from Cow Urine, Shells, Insects, and More
February 23, 2018
The Colorful Stories of 5 Obsolete Art Pigments
July 2, 2013
The Bird-Based Color System that Eventually Became Pantone
September 22, 2016
The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair
Browser review
World of colour: a tray of baked Rainbow Bagels at The Bagel Store in Brooklyn. Photograph: Yana Paskova/The Washington Post via Getty Images
World of colour: a tray of baked Rainbow Bagels at The Bagel Store in Brooklyn. Photograph: Yana Paskova/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Cathy Dillon
Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 00:00
First published:
Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 00:00
Book Title:
The Secret Lives of Colour
ISBN-13:
978-1473630833
Author:
Kassia St Clair
Publisher:
John Murray
Guideline Price:
£12.99
Journalist Kassia St Clair has been writing a column for Elle Decoration on colours since 2013. Every month, she picks a hue and regales her readers with its story – dipping into art, science, history, politics, myths, legends and more. Now she has picked 75 of the most interesting and put them together in this lovely compendium. The main categories: white, yellow, orange, pink, red, purple, blue, green, brown and black are subdivided into shades and tints – including unusual ones such as madder, gamboge and Isabelline. St Clair reveals, among other titbits, that the reason silver was originally chosen for tableware is because it was thought that poison made it change colour, and that the black kohl ancient Egyptians used to outline their eyes contained lead chlorides which helped protect against infections that could cause blindness. Even the introduction contains a fascinating – and slightly worrying – fact: that Issac Newton’s “rather arbitrary” slicing up of the rainbow into seven colour segments was just done so that it would echo his theories on music. This is a perfect gift for a colour enthusiast. Or just saturate yourself.
Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 00:00
First published:
Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 00:00
The secret lives of colour
By Ross Stewart6 December 2016
No comments
Save Article
Kassia St Clair
Hodder & Stoughton
2016 | 320pp | £12.99
ISBN 9781473630819
Buy this book from Amazon.co.uk
The Secret Lives of Colour
Colour isn’t often confronted as a subject in its own right, but when it is, the results tend to be fascinating. The secret lives of colour does not disappoint – a vivid exploration of the world of colour and our colourful world.
In introductory sections, Kassia St Clair gives us a solid grounding in the science of colour for those of us who’ve wondered why mixing light of different colours produces white, while mixing paint of different colours produces a dark sludgy mess. We’re also introduced to surrounding metaphysical debates, doomed attempts to catalogue colours, and the troublesome zone where language and colour perception overlap. Suitably sensitised to the intriguing and mysterious world of colour, we’re ready for the main event.
St Clair takes 75 shades, hues, pigments and dyes, and gives us a few punchy pages on each. She finds colourful threads running through the tapestry of history, gives them a tug, and follows them into interesting and unexpected realms.
This really is an effective structural conceit and St Clair is able to dance effortlessly through an astonishing range of subjects. The most commonly touched-upon area is, unsurprisingly, the history of art, since many of the colours discussed are pigments. For example, Indian yellow, a mysterious pigment now lost, was probably produced from the boiled urine of ill-nourished cows fed on a diet of mango leaves; and cochineal, a crimson-like dye, is produced by crushing the tiny insect Dactylopius coccus – 70,000 for one pound of colourant. Beyond the history of art, we touch on physics, chemistry, biology, history, astronomy, folklore, classics, mythology, psychology, literature, linguistics, philosophy, semiotics, etymology, fashion and religion. It’s impossible not to thrill at the scope and to marvel at the connective threads.
Picking up a hardback copy of The secret lives of colour, you’re likely to notice two things. First, it’s a beautifully produced book: each of the 75 colours appear as a vivid strip in the outer margin, your eye always falling on the colour under discussion. And each page has a coloured fore-edge, meaning the book, when closed, displays the visible spectrum. If production quality isn’t something you’d normally notice, this book may be the exception, particularly as St Clair discusses the difficulties in reproducing colours with accuracy.
Second, you’re likely to notice the blurb’s declaration that The secret lives of colour is ‘a unique study of human civilisation’ – something you might initially have scoffed at as a overblown claim, but which now seems not so absurd. What The secret lives of colour offers really is, in some sense, a flash portrait of human civilisation, a zigzagging and unpredictable exploration of how significantly colour has shaped histories and disciplines, fuelled empires, changed the nature of war and caused species to flourish or face extinction.
olour in historyRainbow-hued
A detailed look at the relationship human beings have with colour
Oct 26th 2016
The Secret Lives of Colour. By Kassia St Clair. John Murray; 320 pages; £20. To be published in America by Penguin Press in autumn 2017
Get our daily newsletter
Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.
Latest stories
Will the justices strike down California’s abortion notification law?
Democracy in America
9 hours ago
China is seeking to become a “cyber superpower”
Graphic detail
11 hours ago
Mike Pompeo’s evangelical zeal could complicate his new diplomatic life
Erasmus
12 hours ago
Beware of performance figures
Buttonwood’s notebook
12 hours ago
The mysterious reggaeton bangers of Mexico’s election
Prospero
13 hours ago
Economic and financial indicators
16 hours ago
See more
IN FEBRUARY 2015, millions of people were bewildered by a dress that appeared in a photograph that was widely shared online to be white and gold, but was in fact blue and black. The mass uncertainty, scientists counselled, was a vivid illustration of just how subjective colour can be. The brain interprets colour not simply using the wavelengths rebounding off an object, but with the help of additional clues such as surrounding light and texture. Culture complicates the perception of colour even further; filters ranging from superstition to symbolism all play a part in helping the brain complete the picture.
“The Secret Lives of Colour” delights in such mysteries and histories that lie behind what we see. In a kaleidoscope of charming, discursive essays that stem from a monthly column she wrote for Elle Decoration, a British magazine, Kassia St Clair gives “something between a potted history and a character sketch” for 75 colours that interest her most.
Ordering the shades in a rainbow of colour families, Ms St Clair, formerly of The Economist, dares to deviate a little from Isaac Newton by including white, black and brown on her spectrum, which runs from lead white to pitch black. Nor does she restrict herself to pigments that might be found on a painter’s palette, preferring to take her cues from curiosity alone. Pieces on blonde, acid yellow and gold are nestled within the yellow family, for instance, while under the black subheading, the secrets of kohl, obsidian, ink and melanin are divulged. Learning from past efforts by scientists, artists and designers, she has not tried to pin down every possible colour. “Because colours exist as much in the cultural realm as they do physically,” she writes, “such attempts are somewhat Sisyphean”.
The Ancient Greeks, like most early cultures, saw colour on a gradient of darkening tones. To Homer, honey was green, sheep were violet and the sea was wine-dark; he never mentioned blue. Ancient Vedic chants from India devoted thousands of lines to imagery of the heavens; vagaries of weather, the reddening dawn and deepening dusk are all evoked in great detail, yet not once is the sky described as blue. In Europe, only at the start of the 18th century was colour slotted into the rainbow wheel that we know today. Newton’s “Opticks”, published in 1704, removed black and white from the ranks altogether.
Newton’s theories later lent artists from Van Gogh to Vuillard the clashes and contrasts that give their paintings such effervescence. But the history of colour, as this book shows, has a far broader scope than the history of painting. The tale of ultramarine, for example, leads from a monastic pilgrimage in 630 AD to the colossal Buddha statues in Afghanistan all the way to post-war Paris, where the avant-garde artist Yves Klein patented his own colour, International Klein Blue.
A colour can also neatly describe a pocket of time. Puce, a shade that hovers between brown, grey and pink, found its name at the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Attempting to curb his wife’s sartorial extravagances, the king observed that a silk taffeta robe she was trying on resembled couleur de puce—the colour of fleas. “The next day”, Baronne d’Oberkirch recalled, “every lady at court wore a puce-coloured gown, old puce, young puce, ventre de puce [‘flea’s belly’], dos de puce [‘flea’s back’]”. Of the three dresses that Marie Antoinette took with her to prison 17 years later, one was a puce taffeta gown.
Most interesting of all, in pulling colours apart at the seams, “The Secret Lives of Colour” unpicks some stubborn stereotypes. The piece on pink unearths a New York Times article dating from 1893, advising “always give pink to a boy and blue to a girl”. Only a few generations ago, pink was seen as a variation of red, which, being the shade of soldier’s jackets and cardinal’s cassocks, was deemed more masculine than blue, the colour of the Virgin Mary’s robes. As the author alludes, this makes the recent news that women’s products—often branded pink—cost more than those for intended men, seem even more arbitrary than it does already.
Smart and clear design adds to the visual nature of this book. Framing each text is a thick stripe of the colour under scrutiny—invaluable when faced with something like orchil, mummy or heliotrope. These rainbow-edged pages also make the book easy to reference, matching its companionable, informative tone. A light and lively guide to sights so easily taken for granted, “The Secret Lives of Colour” offers plenty of fresh clues for the brain’s colourful calculations.—LILY LE BRUN
*Our policy is to identify the reviewer of any book by or about someone closely connected with The Economist. Lily Le Brun is a London-based arts writer.