{"id":2587,"date":"2013-04-15T20:08:59","date_gmt":"2013-04-15T20:08:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=2587"},"modified":"2013-05-15T10:39:19","modified_gmt":"2013-05-15T10:39:19","slug":"colour-mainly-blue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=2587","title":{"rendered":"Colour (mainly blue)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Flower<\/a>
\n 
\nMy conversion to blue occurred in May 2005, in the attic of a stone terraced house in the Crookes area of Sheffield. My sister and I had an appointment there with a Colour Me Beautiful consultant, who worked from her home. The stairs up to the top floor opened directly into a large open room, full of bales of material, swatches of samples, and bottles and pots of cosmetics. CMB promises a personal transformation. On its current website, it proclaims that \u2018wearing colours that complement your colouring can make you look healthier, more vibrant and younger\u2019. The consultant establishes what your dominant colouring is, and how this determines what clothes and make-up you should wear. I was identified as a \u2018cool winter\u2019 person; the little folder of 29 swatches of material I came away with is dominated by teal, periwinkle, aqua, and royal, medium and Chinese blues, together with reds and greens with blue tints, and the instruction to go for an \u2018overall look\u2019 of blues (with eye pencils in \u2018marine\u2019). On the few occasions in the past I had deviated from black and other neutral colours in my clothing choice, I had never even considered blue. It turned out to be excellent advice. And outside the world of fashion, I already knew quite a bit about the history of the colour in western art.
\n 
\n<\/p>\n

Cennino Cennini, early 15th century: \u2018Ultra marine blue is a colour illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect, beyond all other colours; one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would not still surpass.\u2019<\/p>\n

Goethe, 1810: \u2018As the upper sky and distant mountains appear blue, so a blue surface seems to retire from us. But as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.\u2019<\/p>\n

Kandinsky, 1911: \u2018Blue is the typical heavenly colour. The ultimate feeling it creates is one of rest. When it sinks almost to black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human.\u2019<\/p>\n

Yves Klein, 1957: \u2018What is blue? Blue is the invisible becoming visible… Blue has no dimensions. It \u201cis\u201d beyond the dimensions of which other colors partake.\u2019<\/p>\n

William Gass, 1976: \u2018Praise is due blue, the preference of the bee.\u2019<\/p>\n

Julia Kristeva, 1977: \u2018Thus all colors, but blue in particular, would have a noncentered or decentering effect, lessening both object identification and phenomenal fixation. They thereby return the subject to the archaic moment of its dialectic, that is, before the fixed, specular \u201cI\u201d.\u2019<\/p>\n

Derek Jarman, 1993: \u2018Blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"Blue<\/a>
\n 
\nPress release, 10 December 2007: \u2018Pantone, Inc., the global authority on color and provider of professional color standards for the design industries, selected PANTONE 18-3943 Blue Iris, a beautifully balanced blue-purple, as the color of the year for 2008. Combining the stable and calming aspects of blue with the mystical and spiritual qualities of purple, Blue Iris satisfies the need for reassurance in a complex world, while adding a hint of mystery and excitement.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"pantone<\/a>
\n 
\nAnd, for good measure (and perhaps rather surprisingly), Michel Pastoureau, 2000: \u2018All of the studies focusing on the \u201cfavorite color\u201d question conducted since World War I show, with striking regularity, that more than half the people polled in Western Europe and the United States indicate that blue is their favorite color.\u2019
\n 
\n<\/p>\n

Ideas about the effects of a certain colour, its associations and symbolism, are far from uniform cross-culturally and even in the West. In addition, the naming of colours is almost impossible to clarify for earlier periods and for other cultures. It is not simply a problem of translation from another language, as Michel Pastoureau has explained:<\/p>\n

It is difficult to determine which Greek or Latin words designate blue because both languages lack basic, recurring terms for it, whereas white, red, and black are clearly named. In Greek, whose color lexicon did not stabilize for many centuries, the words most commonly used for blue are glaukos<\/em> and kyaneos… During the classical era, kyaneos meant a dark color: deep blue, violet, brown, and black. In fact, it evokes more the \u2018feeling\u2019 of the color than its actual hue. The term glaukos<\/em>, which existed in the Archaic period and was much used by Homer, can refer to gray, blue, and sometimes even yellow or brown.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Philip Ball tells us that blue and yellow are categorized together in some Slavic languages as well as in other languages in northern Japan, East Nigeria, and among some northern Californian Native Americans.\u00a0 And in Western Europe since the medieval period there are plenty of examples of shifting meanings of colour terms.\u00a0\u00a0 According to John Gage, the medieval colour terms bloi<\/em> and caeruleus<\/em> could each refer to blue or yellow, perhaps because of the technologies that produced them, in which mid-stage colours are transformed into others.\u00a0 All these authors are careful to warn us that unnamed colours are not necessarily unseen; or, rather, that the distinctions our language makes may be just as visible to those whose words do not identify and differentiate in the same way.\u00a0\u00a0 Linguistic difference does, though, have implications for the use and status of particular colours in that culture.\u00a0 And it does remind us that our own categorizations and hierarchies (primary, secondary, complementary) are in an important sense arbitrary.\u00a0 Wittgenstein said as much in 1950, when he insisted that identification of colour is always a language-game.<\/p>\n

If the identification and recognition of colour cannot be assumed across place and time, then neither can any intrinsic meaning or symbolism of a colour.\u00a0 Blue, says Pastoureau, was considered a warm colour in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and only began to be seen as cool in the seventeenth century.\u00a0 Kandinsky, mapping out his theories of the spiritual qualities of colour and colours, believed that blue was associated with the circle (red with the square, yellow with the triangle);\u00a0 his contemporary Adolph Hoelzel, on the other hand, had thought red circular, blue rectangular, as did the artist Oskar Schlemmer.\u00a0 William Gass (On Being Blue<\/em>) and Alexander Theroux (The Primary Colors<\/em>) each free-associate for pages on the meanings and associations of the colour.\u00a0 The radically diverse associations of colours with shapes and meanings lead John Gage to conclude that \u2018colour symbolism has always remained inescapably local and contextual\u2019.<\/p>\n

And yet it is possible that there are pre-social factors in play.\u00a0 Colour itself is the effect of the electromagnetic field of light on the eye, where different sets of retinal photoreceptors are receptive to different wave lengths. Blue, with a wave length of 420 nanometers, has a higher frequency than green, red and yellow.\u00a0\u00a0 Julia Kristeva suggests that this quality of blue produces a special reception, which she explores in relation to frescoes by Giotto in Padua:<\/p>\n

Blue is the first color to strike the visitor as he enters into the semidarkness of the Arena Chapel…The delicate, chromatic nuances of the Padua frescoes barely stand out against this luminous blue.\u00a0 One\u2019s first impression of Giotto\u2019s painting is of a colored substance, rather than form or architecture; one is struck by the light that is generated, catching the eye because of the color blue.\u00a0 Such a blue takes hold of the viewer at the extreme limit of visual perception…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this way, blue has a particular \u2018decentering effect\u2019, engaging with the viewer at some pre-linguistic, pre-conscious level.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know how to assess this kind of claim against the overwhelming historical evidence of cultural relativism in colour perception (that, combined with my own prejudice in favour of sociological accounts).\u00a0 But a recent programme of BBC\u2019s Horizon, on the theme of colour (and entitled \u2018Do you see what I see?\u2019), proposed very specific qualities of blue \u2013 presumably intrinsic rather than culturally specific \u2013 in which, interestingly, blue is perceived once again as a \u2018warm\u2019 colour.\u00a0 Experiments with restaurant d\u00e9cor found that diners perked up in the late evening in blue rooms.\u00a0 Scientists on the programme explained that we have photosensitive cells which are receptive only to blue, and which send the body a signal to wake up.\u00a0 Further, they argued that the colour blue digs into our earliest evolutionary consciousness, since primitive one-cell organisms can only detect blue and yellow; red and green reception came later, as new receptors developed in the eye.’<\/p>\n

This business of meaning and symbolism turns out to be rather tricky, though I am inclined to default to my rather automatic resistance to such universal, sociobiological claims \u2013 at least until persuaded otherwise.\u00a0 We are on safer ground, though, in looking at the clear evidence for the changing importance of blue throughout the history of western culture.\u00a0 This history is nicely summarised by Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn, in a 2004 catalogue essay for a Dublin exhibition called \u2018Blue\u2019:\u00a0\u00a0 \u2018Blue was the banished orphan who lived to take the throne\u2019.\u00a0 He bases this on his reading of Gage, Pastoureau and others who have recorded the fortunes of blue, in art and in textile dyeing, over two millennia. It is primarily a history of the availability, and therefore cost, of materials.\u00a0 It is a history of plants \u2013 woad and indigo \u2013 and minerals \u2013 lapis lazuli, azurite, cobalt – and, later of the invention of synthetic blues.\u00a0 It is also very much a social history, linked not just to the discovery and extraction of colours, but to navigation and trade routes, relations between nations, and, especially in the case of indigo, the patterns of colonial power.\u00a0\u00a0 For example, Philip Ball points out that the highly-valued blue, lapis lazuli (also known as ultramarine, because it came from \u2018beyond the sea\u2019), was more common in Italy than in northern Europe during the Renaissance, because it arrived from Afghanistan and elsewhere through Italian ports.<\/p>\n

Michael Baxandall\u2019s classic social history of Italian painting gives a marvellous insight into how the value and price of the precious mineral played out in the fifteenth century, in the detail of a 1485 contract for Domenico Ghirlandiaou\u2019s Adoration of the Magi (in the Spedale degli Innocenti in Florence).\u00a0 The Prior of the Spedale specifies clearly that the artist \u2018must colour the panel at his own expense with good colours and with powdered gold on such ornaments as demand it, with any other expense incurred on the same panel, and the blue must be ultramarine of the value about four florins the ounce\u2019.\u00a0 Baxandall explains:<\/p>\n

After gold and silver, ultramarine was the most expensive and difficult colour the painter used.\u00a0 There were cheap and dear grades and there were even cheaper substitutes, generally referred to as German blue. (Ultramarine was made from powdered lapis lazuli expensively imported from the Levant; the powder was soaked several times to draw off the colour and the first yield \u2013 a rich violet blue \u2013 was the best and most expensive.\u00a0 German blue was just carbonate of copper; it was less splendid in its colour and, much more seriously, unstable in use, particularly in fresco.)\u00a0 To avoid being let down about blues, clients specified ultramarine; more prudent clients stipulated a particular grade \u2013 ultramarine at one or two or four florins an ounce.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The fortunes of lapis lazuli in the history of art are entirely to do with its cost of extraction and transport, and its rarity, just as the fortunes of indigo in the history of textile dyeing are inextricably linked to Europe\u2019s role in India and, later, America and the West Indies.\u00a0 In the West, although there were alternatives to lapis lazuli for artists, in particular the cheaper mineral azurite, it was ultramarine that was the most prized blue.\u00a0 The colour blue itself, rather insignificant in earlier periods, emerged in the twelfth century as a highly fashionable and desirable colour, manifested most clearly in the new practice of rendering the robes of the Virgin in ultramarine.\u00a0 Blue became a royal and noble colour, in painting and in heraldry.\u00a0 By the seventeenth century, blue had taken its place as a primary colour, displacing the white-red-black triad which, according to Pastoureau, \u2018had been the focal point of Western color systems since antiquity (if not before)\u2019.
\n 
\n<\/p>\n

\"house<\/a>
\n 
\nOrange:\u00a0 blue\u2019s complementary colour, and absolutely banned by my CMB adviser in Sheffield.\u00a0 Nevertheless, it inserts itself here as something to be confronted, representing a memory as uncongenial to me as the colour itself.\u00a0 Early 1979 \u2013 I\u2019m not sure of the exact date.\u00a0\u00a0 By then, there were only three of us still living in the collective house in Leeds after the break-up, during my three-month absence in the U.S. the previous autumn.\u00a0 Complicated personal relations, sexual politics, and other problems I was kept informed about \u2013 I assume it must have been by letter, since there was no email then and I don\u2019t recall many phone calls.\u00a0 It was a large, four-storey terraced house, five minutes from the university where three of us worked, and still \u2018inner city\u2019 enough to have been very affordable (\u00a310,000, as I recall) in 1975.\u00a0 Most recently it had been used as a children\u2019s home, and perhaps because of that there was a bathroom on three of its four floors.\u00a0 The lower ground floor comprised a living room and a large kitchen\/dining room, with a door out to the small garden at the back.\u00a0 We spent most of our time, together with many visiting friends, round the table in that room.\u00a0\u00a0 But now the house would soon be sold and we would each be living somewhere else.\u00a0 Before that, though, was orange \u2013 in the form of a line of washing hanging one morning in the basement kitchen\/dining room, announcing our house-mate\u2019s expected decision that she had joined the Bhagwan.\u00a0 A shared domestic life \u2013 five adults and two children – begun four years earlier, tailed off rather pathetically at that point.\u00a0 As for the colour \u2013 the new sannyasin, who left for India soon after the washing episode, wrote in her 2007 memoir:<\/p>\n

Someone once asked Bhagwan why we had to wear orange.\u00a0 He explained it was the traditional colour for sannyas, the colour of sunrise signalling the dawning of a new age.\u00a0 But I think it was to mark us out, to force us into each other\u2019s arms, as who else would willingly walk down the street next to someone swathed in such a deadly colour.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All this is now more than thirty years ago, and no doubt none of us remembers the details.\u00a0 Still, coming across a memory which bears little relation to my own has something of a shock effect.\u00a0 In the same book, she writes about the time, a couple of years earlier, when she had come to live in our house:<\/p>\n

I applied to join a neo-Marxist socialist-feminist commune.\u00a0 After an interview where I wore my badges of revolutionary slogans, dropped in the names of my most right-on mates, mentioned the conferences I\u2019d attended, the barricades I\u2019d fought at, I was in.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Applied? Interview? Political requirements?\u00a0\u00a0 And four people (one had recently left) as a \u2018neo-Marxist socialist-feminist commune\u2019? We were really just a group of friends, with no particular shared political activities – two men, two women, some of us colleagues, two with kids who lived half the week with us and half with their fathers, nearby.\u00a0 The account has no connection at all with my memory of our household.<\/p>\n

And I also try to square my memory of the orange-dyeing moment with that of her son, then aged three, who lived with us part of each week.\u00a0\u00a0 His name was Tim Guest (Timmy in those days), and many years later he wrote a wonderful and moving book, My Life in Orange<\/em>, about his early years in the Bhagwan\u2019s communes in India, England and the U.S.<\/p>\n

\n

Three weeks after hearing his voice on tape, my mother posted her letter to Bhagwan.\u00a0 That afternoon, upstairs playing with my Lego, I heard a loud splash.\u00a0 I went down to investigate.\u00a0 My mother was in our bathroom, her arms stained orange up to the elbows, sloshing all her clothes around in the bath, which was filled to the brim with warm water and orange dye.\u00a0 Later that evening she wrung her clothes out and hung them by the fire \u2013 to my delight, they left permanent orange stains on the fireguards \u2013 and from then on, she wore only orange.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"orange<\/a>
\n 
\nAn old friend from the Leeds days got in touch in 2004, to tell me that \u2018Timmy\u2019 had written a book which was getting a lot of publicity.\u00a0 That is how I found out that he had become a journalist and writer.\u00a0 Although I only lived with him and his mother for a couple of years, and haven\u2019t seen either of them since 1980, I read the book with great interest and have re-read it several times since.\u00a0 It is a beautiful, generous, heart-breaking story, an account of the disasters of communal life based on a strange (and later discredited) spiritualism, sexual freedom, and chaotic disorder for the children involved.\u00a0\u00a0 John Lahr, the New Yorker<\/em> critic, called it one of the best autobiographies of the decade.\u00a0 Elaine Showalter, reviewing the book in The Guardian<\/em>, says that this \u2018calm, meditative, and even lyrical memoir is a testament to his recovery\u2019.\u00a0 Certainly he became a very successful writer. The particular memory doesn\u2019t fit though.\u00a0\u00a0 For one thing, he and his mother had a bedroom each and a bathroom they shared all on one floor, so he wouldn\u2019t have gone down to investigate.\u00a0 Also, we didn\u2019t have open fires anywhere in the house, so I can\u2019t see how there could have been fireguards.\u00a0\u00a0 Of course it doesn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 But I hoped to get in touch one day, and compare memories.\u00a0 This didn\u2019t ever happen.<\/p>\n

Tim Guest\u2019s second book, Second Lives<\/em>, was published in 2007.\u00a0 It is an ethnographic study (if that\u2019s not a contradiction) of virtual communities and of the entrepreneurs who created those worlds, and it too was very well received by critics and readers. Later, some noticed the continuities between the two books, the recurring damage, perhaps the impossibility of full recovery.\u00a0 Guest himself (it seems a little strange not to call him Tim) hints at it, without making this a big deal in the book \u2013 indeed, only on page 246, though he alludes to the connection briefly throughout:<\/p>\n

When I was four, my mother and I moved into the communes of her guru \u2013 a bearded man-god who promised ecstasy and delivered mainly absence.\u00a0 I was supposed to be the child of the commune, not of my mother…. In the communes that bore Bhagwan\u2019s name, she and her friends danced, rolled their heads, swayed their arms, beat cushions, broke down their social conditioning and set themselves free.\u00a0 Meanwhile, we children filled our lives as best we could with the things we found around us.<\/p>\n

I filled the space with my imagination… By chance, I had uncovered the purpose of the imagination: to conquer absence.\u00a0 Our dreams give us a lens through which to examine what we lack \u2013 just as virtual worlds do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 2004, he wrote a short personal essay for The New York Times<\/em> magazine about his fear of commitment, his desire to marry and his deep resistance to taking this step and particularly to having children.\u00a0 His girlfriend of five years is keen for them to buy a house, and she wants to start a family. He knows that his resistance has everything to do with his own suffering as a child of the Bhagwan\u2019s communes, and some sort of fear that his own children might suffer.\u00a0\u00a0 He ends on a tentatively optimistic note, deciding to go ahead with the house and to try to leave his childhood behind:\u00a0 \u2018Maybe it\u2019s time to let go of my grievances, to grow up, to give some new little person a chance to be young.\u2019\u00a0\u00a0 In fact he got married in October 2008, to a woman he met at the Notting Hill carnival in 2006.\u00a0\u00a0 Ten months after the wedding, his new wife found him dead in bed, at the age of 34.\u00a0 The first obituaries reported an unexplained death, with suggestions that the cause was a heart attack or a stroke.\u00a0 In an essay in The Observer<\/em> in March the following year, Elizabeth Day tells the full story \u2013 of his early life, his recovery through writing, his periods of drink and drug-taking, and his eventual marriage.\u00a0 He died of an overdose of morphine.\u00a0 Day speaks to his family and friends and his wife Jo, and concludes that although this was almost certainly not a suicide \u2018it seemed none the less as if his commune experience had cast a long shadow and he was never entirely sure whether to embrace its legacy or try to escape it\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"int<\/a><\/p>\n

 
\nI am touched by the fact that this lovely writer (and, by all accounts, lovely person) has a connection, before his troubles really began, with a moment in my own life. The moment before orange.
\n 
\n<\/p>\n

\"Van<\/a>
\n 
\nWhat is a complementary colour?\u00a0\u00a0 The combination of the two other primaries (so here, red + yellow as complementary to blue).\u00a0 Or (the Newtonian version), the colour which, combined with its primary, makes white in coloured light, grey in coloured paint.\u00a0 Or, on the colour circle we have employed since the seventeenth century, the colour directly opposite its primary. Or, the colour of the after-image through closed eyes after staring at its primary.\u00a0 One might think that a primary and its complementary constitute a colour clash to be avoided.\u00a0 But many artists have realised that they may enhance one another when placed together \u2013 Delacroix, the Impressionists, van Gogh.\u00a0 According to John Gage, \u2018throughout the nineteenth century complementary contrast was widely regarded as the most harmonious because it constituted a union of all three primary colours\u2019.\u00a0 I suppose what goes for fashion advice simply doesn\u2019t apply in the same way in aesthetic, and technical, decisions about painting.\u00a0 But my prejudice against orange, from my blue vantage point, apparently needs a bit more thought.\u00a0 A quick internet search turns up a range of companies, mostly in the design and technology industries, which capitalise on the combination of opposites:\u00a0 BlueOrange software consulting,\u00a0 Blue Orange Signs, Blueorange web technologies, Blueorange IT, Blue Orange Marketing, as well as a Blue Orange theatre (and a play, by Joe Penhall, called Blue\/Orange<\/em>, about race and mental illness, in which a patient maintains that oranges are blue).\u00a0\u00a0 It seems that the clash is seen as productive and dynamic, just as the juxtaposition may be striking and beautiful in a work of art.<\/p>\n

It may, on the other hand, merge into the grey that is the unavoidable blur of juxtaposition becoming total merger.\u00a0 Michel-Eug\u00e8ne Chevreul, director of dyeing at the Gobelins tapestry workshop in the mid-nineteenth century, promoted the use of complementary colours, but \u2018warned that colours that mutually enhance each other can also cancel each other out if too intimately mixed: as an example, he wrote of threads in a tapestry that would appear merely grey if adjacent complementaries were too closely woven\u2019. This became a problem in Seurat\u2019s pointillist technique, where \u2018uncalculated greyness\u2019 surrounded the points of colour in some paintings.\u00a0 But here I want to put in a word for greyness, calculated or otherwise.\u00a0 In the field of art, the case is made by Gerhard Richter:<\/p>\n

[Grey] makes no statement whatever… it evokes neither feelings nor associations;\u00a0 it is really\u00a0 neither visible nor invisible.\u00a0 Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph.\u00a0 To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"richter<\/a>
\n 
\nIn his grisaille paintings, often blurry as well as monochrome, this \u2018absence of opinion\u2019 compels our own reflections, whether they are the series of works about the Baader-Meinhof group or the painting based on a photograph of an aunt of his, a schizophrenic killed in a euthanasia camp by the Nazis.\u00a0\u00a0 There is a certain moral imperative in the way in which refusal of colour presents us with the image.\u00a0\u00a0 The \u2018indifference\u2019 of the image evokes quite the opposite, I think, in the viewer, namely the insistence that we think for ourselves.<\/p>\n

\"richter<\/a>
\n 
\nNow that I have navigated the threat of orange by merging it with blue, the grey I am left with is a colour with which I have a great affinity.\u00a0 (As it happens, though this is incidental, there are also three shades of grey in my CMB personal colour guide.)\u00a0 That \u2018capacity to mediate\u2019 which Richter alludes to is very compelling, and if we substitute \u2018uncertainty\u2019 for \u2018indifference\u2019, as I think quite legitimate, then I feel sure this describes an important life-long value of mine, though one I have only recently come to recognise, articulate and defend.\u00a0 My last book was called The Aesthetics of Uncertainty<\/em>, and its project was to refuse certainties \u2013 especially uncritical, unconsidered certainties \u2013 in favour of an aesthetics (and an ethics) willing to start from a position of not-knowing. The open-minded negotiation of meaning and of value, in dialogue with others and with other points-of-view, is for me a particularly attractive feature of some contemporary political and theoretical trends.\u00a0\u00a0 So if grey stands for that \u2013 one could say the avoidance of colour, the mediation of black and white keeping things fluid and not quite certain \u2013 it is an appropriate metaphor.\u00a0 But this is not about avoiding responsibility, nor is it a kind of postmodern relativism.\u00a0 Rather (to stay with the colour model) the image, confronting us in grey and perhaps also blurred, makes us think differently about its moral and political content, as well as its nature as painting and representation \u2013 a familiar avant-garde strategy.\u00a0\u00a0 When I think about it, too, my academic life over more than thirty-five years was always somewhere between disciplines \u2013 sociology, cultural studies, art history, aesthetics \u2013 and institutionally nearly always in an interdisciplinary unit or project.\u00a0\u00a0 A scholarly dilettantism (shared with many colleagues and friends over the years \u2013 that has been the trend in our corner of the humanities and the social sciences) which is another crucial kind of uncertainty.\u00a0\u00a0 Grey Studies, maybe.\u00a0 As long as that is understood as a positive characterisation.<\/p>\n

Primo Levi\u2019s concept of the \u2018grey zone\u2019 of moral behaviour is not unrelated to this project of principled negotiation, though his subjects are acting out of what Lawrence Langer has called \u2018choiceless choices\u2019.\u00a0 These are the Kapos and Sonderkommandos of the Nazi concentration camps, many of them Jews and all of them prisoners, who operated as functionaries and thus, in a sense, as collaborators, helping to run the camps. He writes at length too about Chaim Rumkowski, elder of the ghetto of Lodz, who mediated between the Gestapo and the inhabitants of the ghetto. Levi identifies a hierarchy of collaboration, from \u2018those whose concurrence in the guilt was minimal and for whom coercion was of the highest degree\u2019 to those who took more powerful roles and, at the extreme, those who performed them willingly and with cruelty.\u00a0 But he refuses to condemn any of them.\u00a0 \u2018How would each of us behave if driven by necessity and at the same time lured by seduction?\u2019 he asks.\u00a0 This impossible situation constitutes the grey zone:<\/p>\n

The harsher the oppression, the more widespread among the oppressed is the willingness, with all its infinite nuances and motivations, to collaborate:\u00a0 terror, ideological seduction, servile imitation of the victor, myopic desire for any power whatsoever, even though ridiculously circumscribed in space and time, cowardice, and, finally, lucid calculation aimed at eluding the imposed orders and order.\u00a0 All these motives, singly or combined, have come into play in the creation of this gray zone, whose components are bonded together by the wish to preserve and consolidate established privilege vis-\u00e0-vis those without privilege.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Levi included himself among those in the grey zone, exploring his residual feelings of guilt in an essay on shame.\u00a0 Still, he is less concerned to identify and judge levels of collaboration, than to insist on the recognition of circumstances of confusion and ambiguity.\u00a0 Scholars of the Holocaust have since shown how many \u2018grey zone\u2019 areas there were outside the camp and the ghetto \u2013 in industry, in the church, in the French detention centres, even in the area of post-war Holocaust restitution.\u00a0 The Holocaust is always the extreme case taken in discussions of ethics and morality, not always usefully if it is intended as a generic example.\u00a0 But I do think that the concept of the grey zone, somewhat downgraded from its stark and terrifying existence in Primo Levi\u2019s experience, memory and testimony, is one we should retain, as an injunction against simplistic and unconsidered judgement.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think any of this is disloyal to blue.\u00a0\u00a0 After all, as Philip Ball tells us, in the Classical literature the distinction between grey and blue was not at all clear.\u00a0 Blue was not then recognised as a colour in its own right, and was considered a colour related to black \u2013 \u2018a kind of grey\u2019.
\n 
\n<\/p>\n

\"family<\/a>
\n 
\nWhen I was thirteen, my life changed from black and white to Technicolour.\u00a0 This, though obviously metaphorical, at some level feels literally true.\u00a0 We moved house that year (1956), from a semi-detached house in north Manchester to a larger, detached house in south Manchester, and my memories of the earlier period seem to have no colour in them at all.\u00a0 Certainly the house was darker and gloomier.\u00a0 The new house had bigger rooms, more windows and a larger garden, and it was in an area with many more trees.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I had also recently moved from an inner-city lower middle class\/working class primary school to a solidly middle class direct grant girls\u2019 high school, which in retrospect also somehow feels like a lightening, and a coming-into-colour.<\/p>\n

\"school<\/a>
\n 
\nThere is of course one obvious explanation for this chromaticising of my memory.\u00a0\u00a0 Colour photography was newly available at almost exactly this time.\u00a0 When I look through our old family photo albums, everything is black and white \u2013 in fact right through into the early 1960s.\u00a0 And then, around 1956, the occasional colour photo turns up.\u00a0 Here is one of my sisters and me, inexplicably inserted among pages of black-and-white photos, dated 1956 on the back.<\/p>\n

\"three<\/a>
\n 
\nThe effect is something like the 1998 film, Pleasantville<\/em>, in which a teenage brother and sister are transported through their television set into the black-and-white world of a 1950s sitcom, a world which gradually takes on touches of colour as its inhabitants discover emotions, freedom from rigid social conventions, and sexual liberation.\u00a0 I mean the surprising and \u2013 at first \u2013 fleeting appearance of colour in my black-and-white world, not the fictional cinematic explanation.\u00a0 And yet I suppose I am talking about a kind of liberation, which colour seems to connote.<\/p>\n

At the cinema too we were now seeing more films in colour.\u00a0 Although Technicolor itself dates from the 1920s and 1930s, and home movies had used colour film for a while, it was only in the 1950s that colour film became widespread, after a successful 1950 anti-trust case against Technicolor and the simultaneous development of lower-cost colour film.\u00a0 Eastman Color was crucial here, and so twenty years after his death, and still forty years before I came to his city, where I lived for ten years, George Eastman of Rochester, New York, already figured in my life.\u00a0 Steve Neale has traced the history of Technicolor:<\/p>\n

In fact, the value of colour to the film industry fluctuated during the 1950s and 1960s as the relationship of the industry to television, and as the importance of colour within television, themselves shifted and changed.\u00a0 The use of colour in film production increased steadily from 1935 to 1955, accelerating in particular during the early 1950s until colour films comprised some 50 per cent of total US output… It was only during the mid-1960s, when television had converted to colour, that the use of colour in the cinema became virtually universal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We know very well that a switch to colour within a film (The Wizard of Oz<\/em> is the obvious example) can signify transition into a fantasy world, or at least a different world. (In Wim Wenders\u2019 Wings of Desire<\/em>\u00a0 the coming-into-colour signifies the angels\u2019 full immersion in the \u2018real\u2019 world of everyday life.)\u00a0\u00a0 So the effect of adjusting from black-and-white films to the new colour cinema must have been something similar.\u00a0 In a context in which reality has been conventionally represented in black and white, the introduction of colour was bound to register a kind of exotic shift.\u00a0 The history and technologies of colour cinema are a fairly new, and fast expanding, field in film studies, but I haven\u2019t found anything yet that discusses the particular effects on audiences of that moment of re-learning how \u2018the real\u2019 may be represented.\u00a0\u00a0 (Even now, we tend to consider black-and-white footage, whether documentary or fictional, as \u2018authentic\u2019 in a certain way.)\u00a0 Of course what I am really interested in here is the reverse effect:\u00a0 the possibility that the immersion in cinematic colour has transformational power in our everyday lives and, more particularly, our memories.\u00a0 My strong suspicion is that my idea that the world became colourful in 1956 was mediated by a visual imagination radically re-organised by the movies.\u00a0 The introduction of colour television in Britain in 1967 no doubt reinforced the effect.<\/p>\n

I think there is another, more personal, factor in my emergence into Technicolor.\u00a0 When we moved house in 1956, my grandmother, my father\u2019s mother, moved into a retirement home.\u00a0 She had lived with my parents since their marriage, and therefore with me for my whole life.\u00a0 Widowed within six months of her arrival as a refugee from Germany in 1939, far from any members of her family apart from her son, she did not have many options.\u00a0 In our very discreet and calm household \u2013 no fights or arguments, no strong emotions, certainly no mention of unpleasant things \u2013 this all seemed like a \u2018normal\u2019 arrangement.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I didn\u2019t even consider, until much later, that this may have been a rather ghastly situation for both my mother and my grandmother. I also had absolutely no knowledge then of the probable cause of my grandmother’s sadness \u2013 the loss of many family members, including her sister Leonie, in the Holocaust.\u00a0\u00a0 Now I am absolutely sure that the new \u2018lightness\u2019 (colour) after the move was very much to do with a general sense of release \u2013 not just the absence of my grandmother (who was, it is true, a rather dark and brooding presence, and always dressed in dark colours), but more particularly the lifting of my mother\u2019s depression.\u00a0 After sixteen years of marriage, she was living with just her husband and daughters \u2013 including a new baby girl, born in November 1954.\u00a0\u00a0 I think I am right that from the age of thirteen I was no longer living in black and white.
\n 
\n<\/p>\n

\"portrait<\/a>
\n 
\nThe Oranienburg company outside Berlin, where my father worked before emigration, was the twentieth-century descendant of one started by the chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, mentioned briefly in my father\u2019s short memoir:<\/p>\n

A famous German chemist called Runge worked here on the same premises where later a chemical works was built.\u00a0 He was a distinguished scientist of the early 19th century, who discovered a large number of basic chemicals, among them phenol, aniline and atropin.\u00a0 He also discovered caffeine from a box of coffee beans which Goethe gave him as a curiosity.\u00a0 In 1832 he started a chemical company producing the first candles from stearin.\u00a0 This firm, after a number of name changes, became the Oranienburger Chemische Fabrik, ORACEFA or OCF for short, the company for which I worked.\u00a0 The house in which Runge had lived and worked was a well-preserved museum piece on the premises of the company, which was always very proud of its historical background.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"bungalow<\/a><\/p>\n

 
\nAs I have discovered more recently, in connection with my developing interest in Manchester\u2019s history in textile production, Runge was the first to produce synthetic blue, the product of his researches on coal tar in 1833.\u00a0 He named it \u2018cyanol\u2019, blue oil.\u00a0\u00a0 Its other name, given by a researcher in 1841 who had produced the same substance by treating indigo with caustic potash, was aniline.\u00a0 This was the beginning of the aniline dye industry, so crucial in textile production through the nineteenth century.\u00a0 The person generally credited with the discovery of aniline dyes is William Perkin, who in 1856, at the age of eighteen, produced, in the course of his experiments with coal-tar aniline, the first usable synthetic colour \u2013 mauve.\u00a0 After this, the possibilities of synthetic colour expanded, and the new colours multiplied.\u00a0 There were enthusiastically taken up by the thriving textile industry.\u00a0\u00a0 Perkin went on to discover and market other dyes, and received many honours, including a knighthood.\u00a0 He retired a very wealthy man.\u00a0 But Runge, with one or two other earlier researchers, is there in the background, as Simon Garfield relates:<\/p>\n

By the time Perkin found mauve, aniline had been linked with colorants and colour-producing reactions for thirty years.\u00a0 The liquid had first been discovered by the Prussian chemist Otto Unverdorben in 1826, one of several products isolated from the distillation of natural vegetable indigo.\u00a0 Some years later the chemist Friedlieb Runge obtained it from the distillation of coal-tar, and found it gave a blue colour when combined with chloride of lime.\u00a0 But such colours were considered to have no practical use.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Colours, especially blues, had been synthesized artificially for many years \u2013 millennia, in fact.\u00a0\u00a0 Egyptian blue was in use before 2000 B.C.;\u00a0 according to Philip Ball, this was a blend of calcium oxide, copper oxide and silica.\u00a0 In the early eighteenth century, a scientist called Diesbach, trying to make red paint, accidentally produced a new blue.\u00a0 This mixture, iron ferrocyanide, was named Prussian blue. (None of those who record his discovery seem to know his first name.)\u00a0\u00a0 Over a hundred years later, Prussian blue was to prove of great importance in Japan, where it was known as berorin-ai<\/em>, and notably in Hokusai\u2019s iconic, and greatly influential, 1831 print, The Great Wave<\/em>, which uses three shades of Prussian blue for the water and indigo blue for the outlines and the text.<\/p>\n

\"wave<\/a>
\n 
\nBut what was radically new was the growing understanding of the structure and composition of the materials.\u00a0 In other words, the rise of the chemical industry.\u00a0\u00a0 Later, other dyes were added to aniline dyes \u2013 alizarin (a red from the madder plant) and azo dyes.\u00a0\u00a0 And through those nineteenth-century decades the traffic between Germany and England was particularly fascinating (a subject, of course, of personal interest to me, given my father\u2019s experiences a century later).\u00a0\u00a0 The first great chemists were in Germany, and notably at Justus Liebig\u2019s laboratory at the University of Giessen.\u00a0\u00a0 Simon Garfield quotes Liebig\u2019s own assessment of England\u2019s deficiencies in the early part of the century, speaking at the British Association meeting in 1837:\u00a0 \u2018England is not the land of science… There is only widespread dilettantism, their chemists are ashamed to be known by that name because it has been assumed by the apothecaries, who are despised.\u2019\u00a0\u00a0 The establishment of the Royal College of Chemistry in London in 1845 was inspired by Liebig\u2019s lectures (whose fans including the prime minister, Robert Peel, \u2018who expressed personal interest due to his family\u2019s involvement in calico printing\u2019).\u00a0\u00a0 The first director of the College was August Wilhelm von Hofmann, who had studied in Giessen.\u00a0\u00a0 By the 1860s, German scientists were moving to England, and specifically to Manchester and its surrounds, employed by textile companies to develop their dyes.\u00a0 Hofmann predicted that England would become \u2018at no distant date .. the greatest colour producing country in the world.\u2019\u00a0 Hofmann continued:\u00a0 \u2018nay, by the strangest of revolutions, she may, ere long, send her coal-derived blues to indigo-growing India, her tar-distilled crimson to cochineal-producing Mexico and her fossil substitutes for quercitron and safflower to China and Japan.\u2019\u00a0 In fact this was already the case by the time he wrote this, in his report on the 1862 International Exhibition in London.<\/p>\n

The story of blue ends, for now, in Manchester, which suits me very well.\u00a0 Some of the most important chemists lived and worked here in the mid to late nineteenth century:\u00a0 Lyon Playfair, Frederick Crace-Calvert, Henry Edward Schunck, Heinrich Caro, Ivan Levinstein, Charles Dreyfus.\u00a0\u00a0 Some started their employment in the textile industry, often brought over from the Continent by the calico printers or simply deciding to come because of the opportunities linked to the industry.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some started, or joined, laboratories in the new Owens College (later the University of Manchester).\u00a0\u00a0 And some started their own chemical factories (Roberts, Dale and Co., Clayton Aniline, Levinstein & Sons).\u00a0 New colours were discovered and produced in Manchester, including Manchester Brown and Manchester Yellow in the 1860s.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As R. Brightman put it in 1957, \u2018Manchester can fairly claim to be the home of the first attempts to synthesize new dyestuffs to meet the growing demands of the expanding textile industry for fresh supplies of colour, and speedier and simpler methods of applying them\u2019.\u00a0 There are also, in these developments, some blues in Manchester, for example Ivan Levinstein\u2019s Blackley Blue of 1869-70.\u00a0 Robert Kargon records Crace-Calvert taking out patents in the 1860s for new colouring matters, including Azurine (blue) from aniline and its homologues.<\/p>\n

In 1938, my father\u2019s belated departure from Germany was possible because of a new chemical company, Lankro Chemicals, founded in Manchester by another German-Jewish refugee.\u00a0 Heinz Kroch had known my father at university in Freiburg and gave him the job which enabled him to emigrate.\u00a0 It was not a company involved in work for textile production, but its very existence was due, I think, to the history of the chemical industry in Manchester.
\n 
\n<\/p>\n

I like the sound of Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, of whom my father seemed so proud. Esther Leslie devotes quite a few pages to him in her fascinating book on nature, art and chemistry, Synthetic Worlds<\/em>. As well as the famous discovery of aniline dye (and a reminder of the story about Goethe and the coffee beans) we learn he was criticised by Hegel, in his doctoral viva, for not theorising properly \u2018in a philosophical manner\u2019 (though he did pass the exam); that as a populariser of science he wrote manuals for many different trade groups, as well as a series of letters for housewives; that an acquaintance visited him and found him \u2018with hair in long curls hanging down to his shoulders…with one hand he was filtering a precipitation, while the other was stirring a few potatoes, which were boiling over a chemical lamp\u2019. He continued to do many experiments and make many discoveries in colour chemistry and he developed a notion that there is a \u2018drive to formation\u2019 (Bildungstrieb<\/em>) \u2013 a sort of life-force \u2013 in chemicals, shown in the images which form when chemical solutions are dropped onto paper. These images he considered a \u2018painterly art\u2019, and he clearly took pleasure in their beauty at the same time as observing their structures and effects. The long-term effects of his 1833 discovery of cyanol were the guarantee of another kind of beauty \u2013 the deep blues of calico in Manchester, and of fabrics around the world.<\/p>\n

\"stairs<\/a>
\n 
\n<\/p>\n

Image credits<\/strong><\/p>\n

Anna Atkins \u2018 Cyanotype of British fern\u2019, 1853 \u00a9 National Media Museum \/ Science & Society Picture Library<\/p>\n

Van Gogh \u2018Van Gogh\u2019s chair\u2019, 1888 \u00a9The National Gallery, London<\/p>\n

Gerhard Richter \u2018Tante Marianne\u2019, 1965 \u00a9 Gerhard Richter 2013<\/p>\n

Gerhard Richter \u2018Abstract painting (grey) (880-3)\u2019, 2002 \u00a9Tate, London 2013\/\u00a9Gerhard Richter 2013.<\/p>\n

Katsushika Hokusai \u2018Under the Wave off Kanagawa\u2019, c.1831 \u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum.<\/p>\n

Works cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

Philip Ball:\u00a0 Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (Penguin 2002 [2001])<\/p>\n

Michael Baxandall: Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford University Press 1974 [1972])<\/p>\n

R. Brightman: \u2018Manchester and the origin of the dyestuffs industry\u2019,\u00a0 Chemistry & Industry 4, 1957.<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Day: \u2018\u2018Till death do us part:\u00a0 the short and extraordinary life of author Tim Guest\u2019, Observer New Review, 28 March 2010.<\/p>\n

Fran\u00e7oise Delamare and Bernard Guineau: Colors: The Story of Dyes and Pigments (Harry N. Abrams 2000)<\/p>\n

M. R. Fox:\u00a0 Dye-makers of Great Britain 1856-1976 (ICI, Manchester 1987)<\/p>\n

John Gage:\u00a0 Colour in Art (Thames and Hudson 2006)<\/p>\n

John Gage:\u00a0 Colour and Culture (Thames and Hudson, 1993)<\/p>\n

Simon Garfield:\u00a0 Mauve (Faber and Faber 2000)<\/p>\n

Ann Geraghty: In the dark and still moving (The Tenth Bull 2007)<\/p>\n

Tim Guest:\u00a0 My life in orange (Granta Books 2004)<\/p>\n

Tim Guest:\u00a0 Second Lives: A journey through virtual worlds (Arrow Books 2008 [2007])<\/p>\n

Robert H. Kargon:\u00a0\u00a0 Science in Victorian Manchester (Manchester University Press 1977)<\/p>\n

Julia Kristeva:\u00a0 \u2018Giotto\u2019s joy\u2019, in Desire in Language (Blackwell 1981)<\/p>\n

Esther Leslie:\u00a0 Synthetic Worlds:\u00a0 Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion Books 2005)<\/p>\n

Primo Levi:\u00a0 \u2018The gray zone\u2019 and \u2018Shame\u2019, The Drowned and the Saved (Vintage 1989)<\/p>\n

Michel Pastoureau: Blue: The history of a color (Princeton University Press 2001)<\/p>\n

Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn: \u2018In lovely blueness: adventures in troubled light\u2019, catalogue to Blue exhibition at Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, 2004<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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