Color across Cultures: A Global History of Pigments, Dyes, Metals and Other Colorants in Art

Catalog description

Color across Cultures offers an introduction to color from the perspective of global art history. Through documents, art works and specimens of historic colorants, we will explore geological and mineral sources of mined pigments, as well as natural sources of historic dyes; students will learn techniques for identifying many such mineral and organic sources of color in works of art. We will browse a global variety of artists' recipe books for making pigments, and we will attempt to recreate a few of their colors. We will explore the ritual use of colorants, such as ochre (which, in early indigenous cultures of North America, was turned red with fire and then used to paint images of fire deities), "Maya blue" (which was used to paint both votive objects and victims of blood sacrifice), or vermilion (a red used to represent the transformative blood of Christ in medieval art because it was made through transformative alchemy). We will consider the economics of color: the capacity of purple dye to signify royalty in the pre-modern Mediterranean world, the global traffic of color-making technologies along the Silk Road, and the colonial exploitation of coloring resources (most notably in the case of enslaved populations forced to cultivate indigo for British trade in the 18th century). Students will gain an introduction to different color theories, from Sir Isaac Newton's light-refraction theory, to Goethe's emphasis on the instability of retinal color, to Thomas Young and Sir James Clerk Maxwell's RGB vision models; artistic uses and responses to such theories will be explored. We will also examine different color organization systems (the rainbow, the palette, color wheels, the Munsell system, Pantone, Hexcode numbers) from which artists have drawn their ideas about color. Among such color-organization systems, we will also explore the many, frequently problematic attempts to delineate biological species and races using color as a criterion.