By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, April 2, 2006
A warning to the reader.
The accompanying photograph -- of "Narcissus" by Gene Davis -- is completely unreliable. "Narcissus" doesn't really look like that at all.
The canvas is all stripes, precisely colored stripes, and there's the problem with the photograph: The colors are all wrong. And it isn't just this photograph, to some degree it's all of them. Next time you see a painting on a poster or a postcard, in the pages of an art book, online, or in a catalogue, don't entirely believe it. The colors aren't right.
The 10-foot-wide canvas, now on view at Ramon Osuna's gallery, 7200 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda, is named for the Naricssus who, in Mediterranean myth, fell in love with his reflection because he couldn't tell the difference. But in paintings, as in life, the difference matters hugely.
When it comes to painted canvases all reproductions lie.
Even smart people forget this. When Microsoft's Bill Gates built his billionaire's mansion on a lake near Seattle, he didn't bother buying paintings. Instead he'd program screens set into the woodwork. "You'll be able to call up," he wrote, "portraits of presidents, pictures of sunsets . . . or reproductions of High Renaissance paintings."
Already he'd arranged access to great art. Through his company called Corbis, Gates, on his own dime, had bought the right to digitize the pictures in fabulous museums, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. His options were immense. He could tap on a few buttons and the Hermitage's Leonardo, the great "Benois Madonna," would show up in the room. Or, if perhaps he wished to see the best thing in the Barnes, Cezanne's mighty "Bathers," he'd just tap a few more.
Of course it didn't work. It was a really dumb idea. Gates's Leonardo wouldn't look like a Leonardo. It would look like a Leonardo on TV.
Screens will never cut it. They're the wrong shape (the Leonardo has a rounded top), and the wrong scale ("Bathers" is seven feet wide; Gates's screens were 40-inchers). And video displays never get the colors right. Technology can't solve this. Pixels aren't paint; canvases are not packets of digitized information -- they're complicated objects, changeable as wine, getting older every day.
There's a moral to this story. Colors: You can't trust them.
* * *
To test this proposition: When next in a museum, first buy yourself a postcard, then go and find the painting it pretends to reproduce, and compare them side by side. You'll see. The card will be demolished by the real thing.
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."
The acidic emerald green that jumps out of the paintings of the impressionist Claude Monet was another newfound synthetic. So was van Gogh's chrome orange.
Paul Cezanne was an exception. "You paint just with these?" he demanded of a friend, the artist Emile Bernard, in 1904. "Where is your Naples yellow? Where is your peach-black, where is your Siena . . . "
Cezanne had a reason for distrusting the new colors. He knew they wouldn't last. Van Gogh thought so, too. "All the colors that the impressionists have brought into fashion are unstable," he wrote his brother Theo, "so there is all the more reason not to be afraid to lay them on too crudely -- time will tone them down only too much."
He was right in that prediction. You can see this in his art. Van Gogh's great "White Roses," a gift from Pamela Harriman to the National Gallery of Art, no longer bears that title. Today it's just called "Roses." There's a reason for the change. Van Gogh's glowing flowers had a rose flush when he painted them, but the red he used was fugitive, and the pink has disappeared.
His canvas has changed, too. Small areas of the cloth can be seen between his brush strokes. Light beige when he bought it, it's now a coffee brown.
Lots of pictures in museums are continually changing. That's another thing with the colors seen in photographs, which only seize an instant. Pigment changes, often subtle, are sometimes not subtle at all. You can see this at the National Gallery in a small, exquisite portrait by the Dutchman Frans van Mieris. He painted "Agatha Paets" in 1665. There's a fig leaf in the picture. He mixed blue with yellow to get the green he wanted, but the yellow went away and now the leaf is merely blue.
Gene Davis's "Narcissus" is from 1973, and couldn't have been painted many years before. That's because its pigments are neither ancient earth tones nor 19th-century synthetics, but startling acrylics soluble in water that offered color painters here a whole palette of new hues.
None of this, of course, is clear in color photographs. The distortions of that medium so offended Albert Barnes that when he opened his museum in Merion, Pa., he would let his paintings be shot only in black-and-white.
What would Barnes have thought of Bill Gates's TV screens?
Gates's company keeps buying -- Corbis has struck deals with dozens of museums, and today sells online digitized reproductions of some 100,000 works of art.
"That doesn't mean I believe that reproductions are as good as the originals," Gates writes. "There's nothing like seeing the real work."
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