Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (review)

Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism by John Gage. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A., 2000. 320 pp., illus. $35.00, paper. ISBN: 0-520-22611-9.

Color vision is an integrated process that involves physical, chemical, physiological and psychological aspects. It starts with the generation of signals in retinal receptors, involves comparisons and evaluations of the information that is transmitted to the brain and terminates with the declaration of particular hues in order to describe a scene. (The chemistry and physics of light and vision are mammoth subjects and Leonardo readers may wish to refresh their working knowledge by visiting <http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html>, an instructive Internet site by C.R. Nave.)

The question of whether practicing artists today understand anything about the physics of light is an interesting one. Are they pragmatists or do they think about wavelengths and the differential stimulation of our retinal pigments? Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism is the most recent attempt to approach this set of difficult subjects. Indeed, John Gage strives to deal with all things from the ancient and modern languages of color, through a little science, to explorations of the works of selected artists. Chapters with headings such as "Color and Culture," "Color in Art and Literature" and "Color in History" are appealing and, in some cases, deliver admirably. In others, we get little more than snippets and are left wanting more. There can be no doubt that Gage has read a good share of the literature about color, but too often he assumes that the general reader has already been down the same path and is more interested in his gloss than in a full explanation.

Nonetheless, the book has many items of interest. For instance, one illustration provides an exercise on the phenomenon of color complement wherein the after-image of red is green, as expected, but as Gage remarks in this case it really is a blue-green. According to the author, "since about 1800, red's complement has usually been described simply as 'green'--partly because in the system of the three primaries of red, blue and yellow, the complement of each color was deemed to be an equal mixture of the other two."

Color-circles or color-wheels, extended and modified over the last three centuries, are of considerable application in this context but still cause confusion between physics and art. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was initially occupied with splitting white light into its component colors, with the aid of a prism, and in describing the resultant linear spectrum. When a beam of light from an incandescent lamp passes through a prism, it emerges as a spectrum, the so-called colors of the rainbow. Newton went on to show that light of a "pure" color could not be further diffracted but, most important, white light could be reconstructed from a mixture. Newton's color-circle (Gage: fig. 58, p. 136) taken from his Opticks of 1704 shows the spectral colors as clockwise sectors in the order of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. The original significance of these discs was that they look white when spun on a top. This was the kind of evidence that led Thomas Young (1773-1829) to his theory that there are three color receptors--red, green and blue--in the retina. James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) further developed these ideas and was one of the first to employ a team of observers (including his wife, who suffered from a form of color-blindness).

Somewhere along the way, the color wheel became more of an artistic prop than a physical tool. Thus a modern version has red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta. Magenta (a purplish-red), so-called because it was discovered by the dye industry about the time of the Battle of Magenta (Italy, 1859), is not a spectral color. It is placed in the artistic color wheel...