Let’s face it, the phrase “it’s nice and colourful” can often come in handy. It brings us back down to the lowest common denominator of art. You can apply it to anything from primary school messes to peerless Old Masters, and it can prove terribly useful for all those modern abstracts. You may not have a clue what you are supposed to be thinking but at least you get back to basics. You can start by responding to the colour. Surely, colour means something to all of us.
Or does it? A new exhibition at Tate Liverpool sets out to challenge such preconceptions and put traditions to the test. Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour, 1950 to Today, which opens next week, brings together works by some 40 Post-Modern pioneers — ranging from Ellsworth Kelly and Andy Warhol to Richard Serra and Damien Hirst — and chronicles a fundamental shift in attitudes that has taken place over the past 50 years. Colour, to these artists, is not a vehicle for mood or emotion. It does not evoke feelings or frames of mind. It is not a conveyor of metaphysical meaning. It is simply a matter-of-fact element of the work.
Can they do this? Surely colour has always been as mysterious as it is elemental. It has a fundamentally enigmatic power. The pulsating energy of the electromagnetic spectrum is converted in the eye’s retina to a symbolic force. Wavelengths of frequencies of around 650 nanometres, for instance, impinge on photoreceptive cones that transmit them through the nervous system to the brain’s cortex, where, in a series of incredibly complex cerebral processes, we come to recognise them as “red” and hence, working to interpret them by inference and memory, we come up with such concepts as passion or anger or sin.
What alchemy could be more extraordinary? The radiant energy of the Universe is translated into human emotion. No wonder artists — from the earliest cave daubers who heated up ochres, the Ancient Egyptian pharaoh who (according to Greek records) first fabricated blue and the medieval mixers who invented vermilions to the 18thcentury chemists who elaborated violets, yellows and greens — have been obsessed.
Links between meaning and colour are ancient. Purple is considered imperial, for instance, because to extract the necessary tinctures from shellfish was an incredibly long and laborious process. But the dye they produced was unrivalled in its durability. Purple became the most valued pigment of the ancient world. For many centuries only the emperor’s household was allowed to use it and it has remained an emblem of royalty ever since.
But what happens in our modern era of synthetically manufactured, mass-produced, standardised pigments? This is what the Tate Liverpool show will explore. It takes the idea of the commercial colour chart as its central metaphor. These cards, dished out by paint companies that want to display their range, reduce paint to a mere commodity. It has no mystical overtones or symbolic resonances. It is just a commercial product.
What happens when these are incorporated into the artist’s vocabulary? Well, you can forget composition, for a start. The deeply contemplated harmonies of Matisse, whose famous Red Room, though originally painted green, was altered to accord with the artist’s sensibilities, are superceded by Ellsworth Kelly’s collaged grid: a randomly selected arrangement of monochrome panels; a visual demonstration of what Duchamp called “canned chance”.
Once the Virgin Mary’s robes were painted blue because the ground lapis lazuli that made up the pigment was so precious. It was called ultramarine because it came from Afghanistan, from “beyond the sea”, and was prepared, according to the late 14th-century Florentine Cennino Cennini, by pretty girls rather than men, for they have dainty hands. (“Just beware of old women,” he advises in his handbook.) This feels an awfully long way from the Yves Klein Blue which the eponymous artist patented: a customised colour with a purely commercial origin. What is the difference between a rectangle of coloured paper and an aesthetically fulfilling object, Klein wondered as he presented his 1954 Yves: Peintures. He himself was no cynic. But he pondered the sorts of questions that opened a debate.
To the tortured 19th-century Expressionist Eduard Munch, colour was intensely personal. It welled up inside him like a force. There is one eyewitness account of him standing, with his eyes closed, shouting out a sequence of colours to his printer. “He reveals his feelings though his colours,” a poet friend explained. “He does not just see yellow and red and blue and violet; he sees sorrow and screaming and melancholy and decay.” Contrast this with Jasper Johns’s cerebral postwar investigations into colour as a concept rather than a form of personal expression. What really interested him, Johns said, was not the act of creation, but the fact that colour “isn’t designed, but taken. It’s not mine.”
The pioneering Minimalist Donald Judd rejects, on principle, any pigment associated with the values of outmoded tradition. He turns to the industrial materials that reflect his own period, manufacturing his pieces according to orders that he sends to a factory. What could be farther from the practices of his impassioned predecessor, the theosophical Wassily Kandinsky, who believed that colour spoke directly to the soul?
“Colour! What a deep and mysterious language!” cried Gauguin. It spoke “the language of dreams”. It was like music, “a matter of vibrations”, and so reached “that which is most general and therefore indefinable in nature: its inner power”. Compare his exotic canvases with Sol LeWitt’s systematic productions: wall drawings in which “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art” and colour is handled with the strictest and most mechanistic objectivity. What’s the difference between a house painter and an artist, he asks? Van Gogh knew, even as he painted a picture of his own bedroom. He explains the complex interplay of colour contrasts that he develops so that the image in its entirety will convey a feeling of “absolute restfulness”. Compare this with John Baldessari, an artist who, as one of the curators puts it, gave up painting at the end of the Sixties as one would give up smoking. Baldessari presents his 1977 video piece Six Colourful Inside Jobs of a man in a room painting. The line between tradesman’s skill and unique talent is blurred.
Bit by bit, as they walk through this show, visitors will see colour deprived of its traditional power. They will see it reduced to a series of grubby stains by Ed Ruscha, drained of its lushness by Bruce Nauman’s faded-out photocopies, made mundane by Robert Rauschenberg who, coining the term “pedestrian colour”, set out to denote what he described as that “general no-colour” created by throngs of people in the streets, in which no one single tone stands out amid the mass.
It all sounds decidedly depressing. Damien Hirst’s spots, for example, are produced by other people to a soulless formula — colour placement is random, no colour can occur more than once in a painting, and the size of the gaps between the spots must equal the size of the spots. But wouldn’t you rather have the dots of the ancient aborigines in which the ochres are extracted from the mines of their ancestors; in which the reds are their blood, the yellows their fat and the whites their faeces; in which the dots break rank to make pictures that evoke ancient memories, that bind land and identity and origin together?
John Keats famously accused Isaac Newton of unweaving the rainbow. But he was not necessarily right. Newton’s factual explanations showed us a new way of looking at universal wonders. Science reveals new facets of the shimmering prism.
Can the artists in this show do the same for colour? They certainly explore a lot of alternatives. Colour escapes from the strictures of traditional pigments in a show of works that involve anything from photographic processes to fluorescent lights, from video pieces to vinyl tape, from spray paint to plexiglass. You can do anything with colour, from hacking it out of Super Mario game (Cory Arcangel) to trapping it in pixel boxes (Angela Bullock) to loading it into a dishwasher (Christopher Williams).
The Aborigines discovered the potential of modernity. Given acrylics in the late 1960s, they developed a fertile new interest in painting that led to their culture being discovered the world over. Likewise, tradition might reveal alternative aspects to Hirst’s mass productions. A potentially endless grid of different-coloured spots might on one level speak of a mechanistic modern age. But on another it evokes the timeless mysteries of infinity.
Colour is not over. This exhibition brings us not to the end of a story but to a new beginning. As Donald Judd said: “There is much to be done, in fact colour is almost brand new in the world.”
Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour, 1950 to Today will be at Tate Liverpool (0151-702 7400), from May 29
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