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Nice idea, but a little impractical...
I suppose he covers the Elgin Marbles as well? - originally multi-hued and stripped down to the bare white but some colonialist who's name I'm too lazy to look up.
Yeah, he does mention that - apparently the Greeks weren't too troubled about subtlety and painted faces red, hair blue, etc. I seem to recall that you can still see traces of the paint on some of the Elgin marbles. Interesting to note that mediaeval churches, which we tend to think of as being austere and plain, would have been painted to the nines - thinking especially of Durham here, the patterning on those whopping pillars in the nave would all have been painted - as well as chocker with stained glass and painted monuments and shrines, &c. You can sometimes visit small country churches and see the paintings emerging from underneath the eighteenth-century whitewash - what Henry VIII and the Puritans didn't manage, yer ruddy-cheeked country parson probably did.
Actually, perhaps Protestantism is at the root of a dislike of gaudy colour in the West? Full of holes, I know, but perhaps there's something in it.
And then, yes, the association of sober colours with sophistication (and the Coco Chanel thing as well) - though the predominance of design over colour doesn't always denote sophistication - does anyone else remember those quilt covers from the eighties which every boy of my acquaintance used to have? Grey, black and red zig-zags? Nasty. But the supposed vulgarity of bright colours - is this in any way supported by the phenomenon of the gaudy red-carpet frock? (You know - Versace, Matthew Williamson, Julien Macdonald - things worn to get press photos). Fashion seems to love colour but not to want to actually wear it, though perhaps there's been a change in that over the last five years or so, I'm not sure (I can't wear bright colours - they wash me out).
Sometimes I think there's something execrably naff about the idea of 'good taste' though, in colour as in other things.
Philip Ball could almost be confusing the present and the past, the passage appears mixed up because it states Kristeva's postion referring to the present attitude towards colour but then descends in to a discussion of the nineteenth century and that, culturally, is quite a different thing.
Yeah, I think that's my basic problem with that passage - it's all over the shop chronologically, and tries to conflate Pliny's ideas with Kristeva's. However. What do people think of Kristeva's actual ideas? Does a variety of colours make us uncomfortable because it shatters unity (I would like to know *what* unity - has anyone else read Kristeva?) - in relation to this I've just remembered a books of booksellers' anecdotes which relates how lots of people like to arrange their books by colour - perhaps it is more restful for the eye? This would fit in I suppose with the slightly jarring experience you get with artists like Frank Stella and Bridget Riley... I'm veering all over the shop now, aren't I? |
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