Red: The Color That Grabs Us By the Heart

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, February 13, 2007; Page C01

Valentine's Day is different. Most days, scarcely visible, are as pallid as plain water, but tomorrow will have color. Valentine's Day is red.

Take your notions of the holiday, swirl them through your head, and that's what you'll be left with, mind-suffusing redness, the color of the pounding heart, that most declarative of signals, the color you can't help see.

The green of grass and leaf has nothing like red's power, and sky blue doesn't either. They're outside. Redness is within us. It's as deep in there as language, built into our beings.

Red's the color of the wound left by Cupid's arrow. Red's the hue of the forbidden, too. Against the foliage of Paradise the color of Eve's apple, dangerous and shiny, is as conspicuous as flame.

Red delivers messages. The messages keep shifting. The color, as a symbol, is continuously fluid. Put redness in your mind and watch the way it pools, and watch the way it shoots its meanings out like darts.

For Will You Be My Valentine, red's a sign of sweetness. It's sex's color, too. In 1953, in the first issue of Playboy, Hugh Hefner, for that reason, showed us Marilyn Monroe, unclothed, on wrinkled crimson sheets. Red also means betrayal. The Lady in Red, who in 1934 lured the robber John Dillinger to the Biograph Theater in Chicago, would not be so remembered had she worn another color. Beige would not have done.

The Devil wears red. While fixing the World Series in the musical "Damn Yankees," though disguised in a business suit, he showed himself satanic merely by displaying the red of his socks.

Red can be a warning, a come-on or a boast. Red can mean most anything, but it cannot be ignored.

Stop signs aren't puce.

And red doesn't just mean Stop! It also urges forward. Think of all the Jacobins, and Communards, and Bolsheviks, who have marched to revolution under the red flag.

Red's the vivid color, the color with effrontery. Red's the one that works.

How it does so is worth pondering. On Valentine's Day, especially. At the Textile Museum an open-minded little show is now doing just that. Its theme is in its title. The exhibition is called "Red."

One room, two dozen textiles, 2,500 years.

A Navajo rug, a Berber shawl, a fabulous Ottoman velvet. The other colors glimpsed in this wide-ranging exhibit just make its reds burn brighter. Reds benefit from contrast. A Japanese kimono (ink black on the outside, crimson on the inside) flashes the same colors as Count Dracula's cape.

Pinned to a white shirt is an AIDS awareness ribbon lent from the collection of the Whitman-Walker Clinic.

Red can ward off evil. Among the textiles chosen by exhibition curator Rebecca A.T. Stevens is a handsome Balkan tunic with red around its openings (at neck and cuff and hem) to take advantage of that power. Red can invite danger, too. The most striking status object shown is an all-red Halston ball gown, bias-cut and classy, that would make the most chaste woman seem a flaming femme fatale.

Like congressmen's red ties and Nancy Reagan's dresses, like fire trucks, and valentines, and the bullfighter's red cape, all the reds in "Red" are bound to set one thinking, which is, of course, a central purpose of the show.

Why does red stand out so among all the other colors? What gives it its powers? Where did they begin?

Wherever they began it was really long ago.

Careful science tells us that at least one of our ancestors was processing red pigment -- in a workshop in the Becov Cave in Slovakia -- 250,000 years ago.

We'll never be able to identify the first painter, but whoever set up that color workshop has to be a candidate. He, or she, was busy powdering red pigment -- red ocher (iron oxide) -- more than 200,000 years before Ice Age artists got around to painting southern Europe's famous caves.

This is how Alexander Marshack of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University reported the finds:

The cave, he wrote, "produced a piece of intentionally striated ochre, an abraded quartzite rubbing stone, and a huge quantity of ochre powder dispersed in a circle around the stone on which the abrader had sat. The feet of the abrader were outlined on the ground as ochre-free negative footprints. Particularly important was the fact that a piece of ochre, a rubbing stone, and apparently a container had been brought from different places to this particular cave at a particular time for a particular purpose."

Powdered ocher can be sprinkled. Mixed with grease or fat it turns into vividly red paint.

Ancient ocher has been found in lots of other digs. The 100,000-year-old Tata plaque -- a four-inch ivory amulet fashioned from a mammoth's tooth, and painted red with ocher -- was discovered in Hungary. A 60,000-year-old ocher crayon was found in Australia. The more that paleontologists search for that red pigment the more they seem to find. The 90,000-year-old ocher found in the Qafzeh Cave in Israel had, before grinding, been heated to enhance its redness.

Red must have been exceptionally valuable. People worked very hard to get it. At the Lion Cave in Swaziland, a 70,000-year-old pigment mine, they removed so many tons of the stuff that they gouged a tunnel 30 feet deep, 25 feet wide and 20 feet high.

What did they do with all that ocher? Some of it, we know, was given to the dead.

The reddening of bones, perhaps to give them afterlife, is a practice known worldwide. The Maya used red cinnabar (poisonous mercuric sulfide) instead of red ocher, but the immortality-bestowing function of its redness must have been pretty much the same.

Science can't tell us why those Paleolithic colorists put such faith in red, but one can guess.

Fire has something to do with it. Blood, fresh shiny blood, also has to be a big part of the answer.

Think of what you'd see -- the pulsing flow, the glossy redness -- each time you stuck your stone-tipped spear in a mammoth or an enemy. One reason fresh-spilled blood seizes one's attention is that it isn't red for long. Soon it turns to brown. Slowly dying embers also lose their redness. So, too, after the sunset, does the daytime's dying light. The darkening of the blood, and the fading of its color must have also looked like dying -- as if redness were the carrier, the emblem and the substance, of the force of life itself.

Any symbol as rich as red, as old and universal, deserves commemoration. Remember this tomorrow. Take a meditative moment to look beyond the candy, the card, the wine and roses, and give a thought to red.