When Things ARE Better in Glorious Black & White: Color Detonation and the Invention of *More* Primary Colors, 1942

JF Ptak Science Book Post 316

Well: this is a variation of yesterday's post on the two opposite edges of color in oddly-applied scientific/technical manners. In unwittingly responding to the question "when is color-use bad?", the answers were found in these room decorations from 1942, all of which come from a pamphlet entitled Ideas for Old Rooms and New, extracted from the mind of  Hapel (?) Dell Brown.  It is a tidy book with ideas that are anything but tidy;and  as you scroll down you'll see that the room solutions suggested by Hapel Del are anti-tidy; clutterous (no, not a word but could be).  Everything about these creations speaks to the annihilation of visual resting places; everything seems to be an affront to the concept of causal emptiness.  The weird thing is that there aren't very many objects in these rooms at all (at least comparing these rooms from where I'm sitting)--the visual complaints seem all rocketing from the abuse of colors found in the fabric of the furniture and walls and floors and window treatments.  The eye gets no rest--and as a matter of fact, the cones of the eyeball are impaled on the rods as a result of the author/decorator  desperate attempts to invent three more primary colors. 

Believe it or not we don't really get the full flavor of the color cacophony because the floors in these picture look sort of benign, fading away into themselves--which they are not, according to  the description in the text, because they are all high-gloss linoleum rolls or tiles ("efused [sic] with deep wondrous color".  And that means not only are these floors adding sheen and color to the rest of the incredibly colorful--an effect fairly lost in these photos--they are also cold.

One thing that I haven't pointed out in this peon to syrupy/pastel-y/techno-gelatinous-chromodrama is that they were all done in response to a re-decoration of a perfectly nice-looking house, with all of the former "bland" colonial-style rooms presented in glorious black and white.  I'd rather live in Maison Noir than in this happy nightmare.

And more:

   

Comments

[SA]

Ah, linoleum floors in the nursery - just the thing!

[John Ptak]

I guess these rooms looked perfectly okay to everyone in the same way perhaps that not-so-good music that we hear endlessly on the radio get sunk into our noggins. Like it or not, maybe it is just the repetitiveness of something that makes it "known" in our heads, the "known" part then getting confused with it being "liked".

[Ladybug2535]

Homes of the 50s and 60s do seem to have been saturated in colors that were anything but relaxing. I'd certainly seen my share of pink or mint green bathrooms. Obviously these schemes were very quickly dated. It is quite baffling to modern eyes that a kitchen full of pink appliances could have been attractive, but I suppose in the same vein, future generations will feel the same about the new spate of bright engine red; "ocean blue" and sunny yellows that have recently cropped up.