The Color of Modernism

Do not think of a man with a blue guitar. The paradoxes of that sentence contain in brief all the problems of literary color: the inescapability of color as an immediate sense memory (we must think of the blue guitar); the textuality of color words (we think not of blue but of "blue guitar"); the subjectivity of color sensation and recollection (no one thinks of the same blue); the secondary quality of color for philosophy and physics since Locke (the blue as a quality of the guitar, not a thing in itself); the way that words for color both mediate and transmit a textual history (we think immediately of "the man with the blue guitar" in Wallace Stevens); the dialogue between writing and the visual arts (despite Wallace Stevens's injunctions to the contrary, we may think of Picasso's famous portrait "Old Man with Guitar," painted in the palette of his Blue Period). Modernist color, then, evokes both the immediacy of experience and the literary, material, and cultural mediations that underwrite that experience. Recent work in modernist studies takes up the paradoxes of literary color as experience, material production, cultural mediation, and also racial history, in archives ranging from modernist-era American literature, children's literature, and the New Negro novel (Gaskill), to local food cultures in Catherine Keyser's Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions (Oxford University Press, 2019), to the vast array of color experiments in 1920s films (Street and Yumibe).

Nicolas Gaskill's Chromographia is an impressively wide-ranging and philosophically informed cultural history of American literature in what he terms the "mauve decades," the years between 1880 and 1930 when "innovations in synthetic colorants… defined the character of modern color experience" (16). Gaskill's project positions literary uses of color during the mauve decades within a set of debates, political movements, and material histories that intersect in daring and unexpected ways: "local color" in American regionalists like Sarah Orne Jewett and Hamlin Garland derives from the aesthetic and artistic practice of art critics writing on the relational character of color on the canvas (38); the production of "children's color" as defined, bright, primary, saturated hues is a product not only of artists and of mass-produced chalk, crayons, and colored paper, but also of psychologists' labs, advertising studios, and the educational experiments of Milton Bradley. As a work of cultural history, Chromographia attempts a complex synthesis of the technical, social, and aesthetic forces and actors that worked to produce "modern color" in the period, while also providing careful readings of central scenes of color in a select group of American regionalists, progressivist reformers, children's literature, experimental "realists," and Harlem Renaissance novels.

Gaskill takes as the main site of his readings the "inscriptions of color in writing: chromographia," a "borderland between history and philosophy" where new chromatic technologies and social movements intersect with the activity of narrating color experience, an act both private and deeply social" (7). This encounter between writing and chromatic experience is seen not only as inevitably fraught with failure or impossibility, but also as transformative and vivifying: "one of the central lessons of modern color discourse is that mediation facilitates immediacy," where "mediation" encompasses chemical processes, calculations, color terms, and color training (36). Several paradoxes attend the narration of cultural history through literary inscriptions considered within the larger scope of modernist studies: it is clear that literary narrations of color experience intersect only imperfectly with the social language that surrounds them, a productive paradox that Gaskill acknowledges; it is unclear that literature itself should be a privileged site of evidence for color experience, as against the color revolutions in painting or the "chromatic modernity" of the film revolution tracked by Street and Yumibe (10). Gaskill's primary texts are American, but his philosophical and historical apparatus is more broadly cosmopolitan and modernist, ranging from Goethe's color theory to the Postimpressionists, Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, and a strain of "radical empiricism" that runs from William James and John Dewey to Brian Massumi (12). Gaskill employs the philosophical present tense alongside the familiar past perfect of historical narration to advance a central idea: to think about color is to think and argue about the relational and processual nature of experience itself, in the style of the radical empiricists and pragmatists this book champions.

Gaskill weaves several related narrative strands and cultural practices throughout his history: first, the development of a relational model of color and color experience, both in philosophy, psychology, and artistic practice, a view of color as bound within both the seer-seen relation and within the surrounding world of colors (the blue guitar, like the blue dress of internet fame, turns gold within new backgrounds and saturations). Second, his account attends to the explosion of aniline-based synthetic dye, among other technical revolutions, as the essential precondition for the changing meanings of "modern color"; third, he describes the progressivist notion of a "color sense" that could be educated or neglected, and the consequent association of colors with either a "civilized" or "primitive" stage of development (7, 21).

Chromographia begins with the movement of "local color" from art criticism and theory to the practice of the American regionalists in a sensitive reading of the movement from impressionism to figurations of "local color" as distinctively capturing local cultures. Gaskill reads Hamlin Garland in particular as employing the relational hues of the impressionists as a model for a national culture "made up of interlocking perspectives and impressions" in which "place and identity alike are networked and singular, qualitatively distinct and yet not self-contained" (76). Color is not a metaphor but a method, here, of investigating the cocreation of place and speaker in a particular aesthetic schema. The same applies for Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in the second chapter, read as art innovator and social reformer as well as writer. Gaskill places Gilman's attention to color experience within a history of progressive associations between health, aesthetics, and interior design: "over the course of the nineteenth century, the perception and enjoyment of color came to bear an unprecedented moral weight as a sign of individual and national health" (84). Worries over color sense extended from color blindness, a sign of civilizational decay, to the ethnographic study of color perception in a variety of settings. Gilman's interest in "color music" as well as interior design are read within a racialized history of color appreciation, "in which greater responsiveness to stimulation meant greater capacity for evolution" (117, 113).

A standout chapter investigates the "child's view of color" in the period, focusing on the abstract schemas developed by W. W. Denslow in collaboration with Frank Baum. The pedagogical uses and racial narratives of "color sense" training are brought vividly to light here not only in the argument but in the color plates. Gaskill argues convincingly that The Wizard of Oz "is in many ways about modern color and its ability to excite viewers to a state of rapt wonder," its story an allegory of the aniline revolution in artificial color, joining a child's-eye aesthetic to contemporary experiments in commercial color printing and mass sensory education (149).

Gaskill reads the "redness" of Stephen Crane's experiments in "lurid realism" as "transferr[ing] the bold, abstracted, synthetic hues of ad posters into a literary method" that would not just evoke color but turn it into a "vector of abstraction, a way of unmooring colors from objects and reassembling them in new perceptual compounds" (176–77). Gaskill employs the phenomenology of Pierce to describe in new terms the work of compounding and associating color in Crane, moving away from familiar invocations of "literary impressionism" to a more textual treatment of chromatic experience. Gertrude Stein, an avid color theorist who experimented with psychology experiments at Harvard before her literary experiments with the technique she called her "color thing," found first in "Melanctha" and then Tender Buttons a way of figuring color that would free language from mere description: "only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, and a bow is every color" (cited in Gaskill 195, 194). Both Stein and Charles Chesnutt denaturalize the racial naturalism of "color words" in the period, ironizing the notion of a "black voice" (186) or an abstracted whiteness (32). One could only wish that the brief, evocative section on Stein and modernist color could have lasted longer.

A chapter on the Harlem Renaissance takes up the explosions of chromatic experience and expression characteristic of novels in the period, from Nella Larsen to Carl Van Vechten and Claude McKay, complicating the racialized "modernist primitivism" of color in the period (215). Harlem writers delighted in new vocabularies for skin in all lights and settings, skin as dusky purple, as golden dawn, even as "mauve": in so doing they "forge a chromatic lexicon for describing skin that routes the visibility of race through the materials of modern color" in order to denaturalize the vocabularies of racial color (220, 215). Much more remains to be said here as well, on the poetic, journalistic, anthropological, and fashion-industrial modes of color thinking that intersect in Harlem. An epilogue takes up Josef Albers's color training at Black Mountain College as an exemplary case of Deweyian democracy education of the senses, a lasting inheritance of "color sense" pedagogy that extends the argument about the intersecting pedagogical and philosophical threads of the "mauve decades" out into the perceptual revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s.

Gaskill's work deserves to become the standard work on the relation of "color sense" discourse to American fiction from 1880–1930 despite the nominal treatment of modernist-era color cultures and writers that don't begin or end on American soil. The same applies to Street and Yumibe's deeply researched, thoroughly cosmopolitan Chromatic Modernity, an exquisitely illustrated history of the color film of the 1920s and its intermedial relations with twenties color culture more generally. Beginning like Gaskill with the aniline revolution in synthetic dye, Chromatic Modernity describes the technological and cultural changes that made the 1920s a vibrantly colorful decade in film, rather than a mere moment of transition from early cinema's experiments to Technicolor in the 1930s. Like Gaskill, Street and Yumibe emphasize the medial cross-pollinations between advertising, fashion, commercial signs, neon lights, and new color processes. This is a deeply archival and empirical work of recovery and cultural analysis that makes several arguments that concern all scholars of modernist culture.

We imagine the cinema and culture of the 1920s in black and white, as a fallow prelude to the three-strip Technicolor revolution of 1932. But this is an artifact of archival procedures that privileged black and white prints as easier to preserve. Recent archival and historical work reveals that "80 to 85 percent of silent films were colored in part or in whole," in a proliferation of techniques and hues: stencils, tints, hand-coloring, and toning, often applied differently in successive scenes (2). Far from alien to the culture of color described by Gaskill, 1920s silent cinema in particular was an explosion of blues, green, sepias, and even rainbows; these processes interfered with sound strips and thus were deprecated after the introduction of sound. With examples ranging from Hollywood Technicolor to Léger and Duchamp, Street and Yumibe describe cinema's participation in the explosively colorful media revolution of the period. They are concerned with the intermedial development of 1920s color culture, from advertising to color magazine inserts to fashion and photography, and in the parallel development of what they call "color consciousness" (32).

Street and Yumibe work to support their central argument about the color revolution in film inductively and descriptively, rather than beginning from debates over color in psychology and philosophy: this is a collective chromatic modernity, the result of a "complex, transnational network of chromatic research and development that accelerated during the interwar period" in parallel with new artistic theories and practices (5). They begin with the industrial production and standardization of colorimetry and color film during the period, taking in the seizure of German color patents after World War I, the research labs at Eastman Kodak, and the founding of the Technicolor Company in 1915. A second chapter concerns the relation of fashion and cinema, from newsreels to films about exquisite bourgeois interiors. The third assembles an astonishing variety of experiments in color off-screen, from the interiors of theaters to ambient lighting displays. These chapters contain an abundance of primary evidence about practices and institutions, and we could only wish for more synthetic work on the chromatic experiences that result.

Chromatic Modernity is a visually sumptuous book, well illustrated with full color examples of the many color processes described, from stencils and tints to substractive two-color and Hanschiegl processes, many of which were used for hybrid effects in a single film like The Phantom of the Opera (1925). This deep history of color effects connects to avant-garde practice through Bauhaus color theorists like Moholy-Nagy, expressionist and absolute film, and the fascinating experiments of Léger, Duchamp, Marcel L'Herbier, and avant-garde Anglophone auteurs. These are stunning films, briefly evoked but painstakingly reconstructed in their first chromic versions and evocatively illustrated throughout. The final chapter traces the long passage to the new sound dispensation of the 1930s, which did not entirely erase the color effects and processes of silent cinema but did begin to efface it in favor of a new set of affective and spatial devices.

Street and Yumibe employ a carefully intermedial and international approach to their subject, one that vindicates the very notion of modernist studies as an interdisciplinary conversation. Less convincing, for some, will be the Bourdieuian theoretical frame within which they position their intersecting fields and objects: why think of industrial color production as a "field" in Bourdieu's sense, for example, and not simply the foundation of color cinema as material and capitalist enterprise? At times the encyclopedic presentation of color processes and effects here can obscure fundamental questions: how did viewers recreate color effects in the mind, and in community? (Some suggestive first-person accounts are included on this question.) Can't black and white provoke a "color consciousness" as well, and aren't they also colors? The invisible dominant, whiteness, receives little sustained attention in Chromatic Modernity until the final chapter, which attends to the interplay of racial and color conventions in Nordic Romances like The Viking (1928) and race dramas like Redskin (1929). Gaskill makes the education of the white eye a central theme of Chromographia, but also deprecates whiteness as the context for Harlem Renaissance experiments in color (as opposed to the confident claim of George Hutchinson that the Harlem Renaissance was written in Black and White). We need more thinking about whiteness as the ground for the chromatic modernities here figured.

Both these books should change how we see the colors of this period; indeed, they have already changed the color of my washroom tilework. That's a revolution of the senses that Wilde, Albers, and Duchamp could all applaud.