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Mark Mussari
Respond To This Article
Volume 5 Issue 3 July 2002
"The eye altering, alters all."
- Blake
In his essay "How Culture Conditions the Colours We See," Umberto Eco claims that chromatic
perception is determined by language. Regarding language as the primary modeling system, Eco
argues for linguistic predominance over visual experience: ". . . the puzzle we are faced with is
neither a psychological one nor an aesthetic one: it is a cultural one, and as such is filtered through
a linguistic system" (159). Eco goes on to explain that he is 'very confused' about chromatic effect,
and his arguments do a fine job of illustrating that confusion. To Eco's claim that color perception is
determined by language, one can readily point out that both babies and animals, sans language,
experience--and respond to--color perception. How then can color be only a cultural matter?
Eco attempts to make a connection between the "negative concept" of a geopolitical unit (e.g.,
Holland or Italy defined by what is not Holland or Italy) and a chromatic system in which "units
are defined not in themselves but in terms of opposition and position in relation to other units"
(171). Culture, however, is not the only determinant in the opposition that defines certain colors: It
is a physiological phenomenon that the eye, after staring at one color (for example, red) for a long
time, will see that color's complement, its opposite (green), on a white background.
Language is a frustrating tool when discussing color: languages throughout the world have only a
limited number of words for the myriad color-sensations experienced by the average eye.
Though language training and tradition have an undoubtedly profound effect on our color sense, our
words for color constitute only one part of the color expression and not always the most important
one. In his Remarks on Colour (1950-51), Wittgenstein observed: 'When we're asked 'What do the
words 'red', 'blue', 'black', 'white' mean?' we can, of course, immediately point to things which have
these colours,--but our ability to explain the meanings of these words goes no further!' (I-68). We
can never say with complete certainly that what this writer meant by this color (we are already in
trouble) is understood by this reader (the woods are now officially burning).
A brief foray into the world of color perception discloses that, first and foremost, a physiological
process, not a cultural one, takes place when a person sees colors. In his lively Art & Physics
(1991), Leonard Shlain observes that "Color is the subjective perception in our brains of an objective
feature of light's specific wavelengths. Each aspect is inseparable from the other" (170). In his 1898
play To Damascus I, August Strindberg indicated specifically in a stage direction that the Mourners
and Pallbearers were to be dressed in brown, while allowing the characters to defy what the
audience saw and claim that they were wearing black. In what may well be the first instance of such
dramatic toying with an audience's perception, Strindberg forces us to ask where colors exist: In the
subject's eye or in the perceived object?
In no other feature of the world does such an interplay exist between subject and object. Shlain
notes that color "is both a subjective opinion and an objective feature of the world and is both an
energy and an entity" (171). In the science of imaging (the transfer of one color digital image from
one technology to another) recent research has suggested that human vision may be the best model
for this process. Human vision is spatial: it views colors also as sensations involving relationships
within an entire image. This phenomenon is part of the process of seeing and unique to the way
humans see.
In some ways color terms illustrate Roland Barthes's arguments (in S/Z) that connotation
actually precedes denotation in language--possibly even produces what we normally consider a
word's denotation. Barthes refers to denotation as 'the last of connotations' (9). Look up 'red' in the
American Heritage Dictionary and the first definition you find is a comparison to 'blood.' Blood
carries with it (or the reader brings to it) a number of connotations that have long inspired a
tradition of associating red with life, sex, energy, etc. Perhaps the closest objective denotation for
red is the mention of 'the long wavelength end of the spectrum,' which basically tells us nothing
about experiencing the color red. Instead, the connotations of red, many of them based on previous
perceptual experience, constitute our first encounter with the word 'red.' I would not be so inclined
to apply Barthes's connotational hierarchy when one sees red in, say, a painting--an experience in
which some of the subjectivity one brings to a color is more limited by the actual physical
appearance of the hue chosen by the artist.
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Also, though Barthes talks about linguistic associations, colors are more inclined to inspire
emotional associations which sometimes cannot be expressed in language. As Gaston Bachelard
wrote in Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement: 'The word blue designates, but
it does not render' (162). Still, the 'pluralism' Barthes argues for in reading seems particularly
present in the reader's encounter with color terms and their constant play of objectivity/subjectivity.
In painting color was first released from the confines of form by the Post-Impressionists
Czanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh, who allowed the color of the paint, the very marks on the
canvas, to carry the power of expression. Following their lead, the French Fauve painters, under the
auspices of Matisse, took the power of color another step further. Perhaps the greatest colorist of
the twentieth century, Matisse understood that colors possess a harmony all their own--that colors
call out for their complements; he used this knowledge to paint some of the most harmonious
canvases in the history of art. 'I use the simplest colors,' Matisse wrote in 'The Path of Color' (1947).
'I don't transform them myself, it is the relationships that take care of that' (178). When he painted
the Red Studio, for example, the real walls were actually a blue-gray; he later said that he 'felt red'
in the room--and so he painted red (what he felt), leaving the observer to see red (what she feels).
Other than its descriptive function, what does language have to do with any of this? It is a matter of
perception and emotion.
At a 1998 Seattle art gallery exhibit of predominantly monochromatic sculptures featuring icy
white glass objects, I asked the artist why he had employed so little color in his work (there
were two small pieces in colored glass and they were not as successful). He replied that "color has a
tendency to get away from you," and so he had avoided it as much as possible. The fact that color
has a power all its own, that the effects of chromaticism depend partially on how colors function
beyond the associations applied to them, has long been acknowledged by more expressionistic
artists. Writing to Emile Bernard in 1888, van Gogh proclaimed: 'I couldn't care less what the colors
are in reality.'
The pieces of the color puzzle which Umberto Eco wishes to dismiss, the psychological and the
aesthetic, actually serve as the thrust of most pictorial and literary uses of color spaces. Toward
the end of his essay, Eco bows to Klee, Mondrian, and Kandinsky (including even the poetry of
Virgil) and their "artistic activity," which he views as working "against social codes and collective
categorization" (175). Perhaps these artists and writers retrieved color from the deadening and
sometimes restrictive effects of culture. Committed to the notion that the main function of color is
expression, Matisse liberated color to abolish the sense of distance between the observer and the
painting. His innovations are still baffling theorists: In Reconfiguring Modernism: Exploring the
Relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature, Daniel R. Schwarz bemoans the difficulty in
viewing Matisse's decorative productions in 'hermeneutical patterns' (149). Like Eco, Schwarz wants
to replace perception and emotion with language and narrativity.
Language may determine how we express the experience of color, but Eco places the cart
before the horse if he actually believes that language 'determines' chromatic experience. Eco is
not alone: the Cambridge linguist John Lyons, observing that color is 'not grammaticalised across
the languages of the world as fully or centrally as shape, size, space, time' (223), concludes that
colors are the product of language under the influence of culture. One is reminded of Goethe's
remark that "the ox becomes furious if a red cloth is shown to him; but the philosopher, who speaks
of color only in a general way, begins to rave" (xli).
References
Bachelard, Gaston. Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement. Dallas: The Dallas
Institute Publications, 1988.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
Eco, Umberto. 'How Culture Conditions the Colours We See.' On Signs. Ed. M. Blonsky. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1985. 157-75.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. The Theory of Colors. Trans. Charles Lock Eastlake. Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1970.
Lyons, John. 'Colour in Language.' Colour: Art & Science. Ed. Trevor Lamb and Janine Bourriau.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 194-224.
Matisse, Henri. Matisse on Art. Ed. Jack Flam. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California, 1995.
Riley, Charles A., II. Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture,
Literature, Music and Psychology. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995.
Schwarz, Daniel R. Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship between Modern Art and
Modern Literature. New York: St. Martin's, 1997.
Shlain, Leonard. Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light. New York: Morrow, 1991.
Strindberg, August. To Damascus in Selected Plays. Volume 2: The Post-Inferno Period. Trans. Evert
Sprinchorn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 381-480.
M/C Journal http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0207/eco.php
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Van Gogh, Vincent. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. Trans. Arnold Pomerans. London: Penguin, 1996.
Citation reference for this article
MLA Style
Mussari, Mark. "Umberto Eco Would Have Made a Bad Fauve" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.3
(2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/eco.php>.
Chicago Style
Mussari, Mark, "Umberto Eco Would Have Made a Bad Fauve" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no.
3 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/eco.php> ([your date of access]).
APA Style
Mussari, Mark. (2002) Umberto Eco Would Have Made a Bad Fauve. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture
5(3). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/eco.php> ([your date of access]).
M/C Journal http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0207/eco.php
3 3 10/7/2014 3:25 PM