Untrue Colors: Hues Are Shady Characters

Colors are like that. They're shifty and confounding and they will not stay in place.

Colors are promiscuous. They get infected by their neighbors. Anyone can test this. A color chip of brilliant red, when held up against other hues, will suddenly go orange, or purply, or pink.

The tricky, preternatural shiftiness of colors was useful to Gene Davis. When reproduced in textbooks, or shown in constant light in windowless museums, his stripe paintings look paralyzed. But his pictures breathe in changing daylight. They're not the same in summer as they are in winter. They're different in the red of dusk than they are at noon. Ask them and they'll help you observe this at Osuna's. Watch what happens to "Narcissus" when they turn off half the lights.

Scientists, though not poets, will tell you that the hue you see is essentially a matter of the wavelength of the light. They can assign that mauve a number. What that number does not tell you is that colors seem to move, they don't just sit there on the picture plane. Some colors advance, generally the hotter ones, while cooler hues recede. Davis understood this. There's no perspective in "Narcissus." What pries open its space is the way its stripes decide either to retreat or to step into the room.

Colors confound memory. Even when you're confident that you have memorized a color, it is likely that you haven't. To make this point explicit the great colorist Josef Albers often mentioned in his lectures the familiar Coca-Cola disk, the one with the white script. His listeners, he knew, had seen that glowing red "innumerable times," but few of them could match it. "Even if all the listeners have hundreds of reds in front of them from which to choose the Coca-Cola red," Albers wrote, "they will select quite different colors."

Colors resist systems. Logicians long have tried to systemize the subject, but most of them discovered that their studies of the rainbow, or of the color wheel, had a way of going fuzzy. When Davis picked his colors (there are 18 in "Narcissus") he relied on whim, on instinct. "Color systems are boring," he explained.

Albers, too, distrusted method. When he discussed picking pigments for the series that he called "Homage to the Square," he called his choices "automatic." "I'm not paying 'homage to a square,' " he said. "It's only the dish I serve my craziness about color in."

How many colors are there? Lens grinders say millions. Pliny, the Roman writer, figured there were four. Isaac Newton decided there were seven. The 13th century's Roger Bacon counted 21. When squeezing pigments from his paint tubes, Henri Matisse would put 21 colors on his palette. Vincent van Gogh made do with nine.

Colors defeat language. "The color of gold, butter, or ripe lemons" is the best definition Webster's can come up with for "yellow." When Shakespeare in "Macbeth" wrote of "multitudinous seas incarnadine," he probably meant red, but which red did he have in mind?

(Great writers, of course, can sometimes make you think you see the precise hues they mention. When describing his donkey, Robert Louis Stevenson said it had the color "of an ideal mouse.")

Painters' pigments keep on changing, as well, and new pigments make new art.

The synthetic colors devised by the chemists of the Industrial Revolution changed both the look and spirit of 19th-century oils. The warmly glowing sunsets of American luminist painting would never have appeared had the chemists not come up with a lot of hot new reds. The first of these, a coal-tar mauve, was synthesized by Sir William Perkin in 1856. Equally important was the alizarin red invented by Graebe and Lieberman in 1868. "After 1856," writes scholar E.P. Richardson, "a series of sharp new reds and purples flared upon the palette. Mauve was quickly followed by magenta and cobalt violet (1859) and cobalt yellow (about 1861). In the next few years most of the ancient mineral colors and practically all the organic colors gave way to new synthetic products. Some of these proved to be fugitive and quickly faded, others blackened in chemical combination with other pigments, but all were new, brilliant, and irresistibly tempting to the artist's eye."