Revolutions in the Color "Red": Paul Gauguin and Edwin Hubble

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 531

A circus passed the house—still I feel the red in my mind.  Emily Dickinson, 1866

Color expresses something by itself.  V. van Gogh

Pure color!  You must sacrifice everything to it…  P. Gauguin

 
Standing in my friends Lucy & Andy Archie’s store, standing near a window and catching some sun on a cold stinking day, a large red jar cast a long red shadow along the wall, causing me to think about the color. (It was a pretty nice shadow.)

Red has turned up as an important color in terms of patriotic/vitriolic symbolism (as in the revolutions of 1848, Garibaldi, communism), Aztec cochinealial luxury,  important burial dress of the Cro-magnums,  signs of divine favor and condemnation, Roman red divine, Egyptian danger, royal cinnabar of China , Indian bridal dresses, Japanese heroic figures, and on and on (into the lower realms of red tape, blood red, fire, blind anger, love/passion, evil, crushing impropriety,  and etc.)

Red’s most important contributions, perhaps, at least in modern times of the past few hundred years or so, comes in the field of art and science—and its appearance really is pretty monumental, and weirdly coincidental in their placement in the chronology of Big Important Stuff.  The birth of impressionism (with Monet and the Salon des Refuses), the greatest change in the history of art since the rediscovery of perspective, and the solidification of spectrum analysis (Bunsen and Kirchhoff), both occurred around the period of 1859-1863—the great use of red for both of these developments would come somewhat later, though the red roots began here. 

The achievement of Bunsen and Kirchhoff, started in the epochal year of 1859 (the same year seeing the publication of the Origin), was nearly as spectacular as any other scientific achievement of that century.  The two men showed—and this would have been incredible to the mind of the 19^th century—that individual atoms had their own spectral signature.  When the Englishman William Huggins absorbed their work, he realized immediately (as did Bunsen and Kirchhoff) that the spectroscope could be turned on the sun and all the rest of it—the results of the experiments of these three revealed the elements of what stars were made of, something that must’ve seemed like science fiction come true.  The second part of the second step* in this fabulous discovery and application came 65 years later, when American astronomer Edwin Hubble** theorized and proved  that the red shift that occur in the spectra of all galaxies actually (a phenomenon which had been observed for years but not understood) meant that they were all racing away (at a speed proportional to their distance, Hubble’s Law) from the Earth—the basis of the Big Bang.  Cosmological significances aside, this was also a big deal for the advancement of color, as it really hadn’t played a very major part at all in the history of science to this point (excepting the brilliant occasional bits like Newton’s Opticks). Color just wasn’t a part of the great systems and ideas of Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Euclid, Kepler, Newton and so on—it just didn’t come into play. 

 Now, as to the importance of Red in art.  It comes for me with Gauguin.  Gauguin and his red grass.  Red grass doesn’t mean anything today, but in the early 1880’s, well, red grass was, simply, everything.  It was a revolutionary idea to make the idea of what grass”is” subject to the color that the artist thought was demanded by it subject, and that all of this was an artistic variable in the control of each individual interpretation.  It happened right there in the middle of the Impressionist movement, and was the beginning of the end for representational art, the final blow to which would not occur until 1911 with Mr. Kandinsky.

 

This was a lot to blow through in under a thousand words, and undoubtedly I’ve slandered several good ideas—but I think overall that this is a reasonable idea, this importance of the color RED.  There’s much more to be said about the Impressionists and a whole bunch more on the absence of color in the history of science, but that’ll have to come later. 

Of no importance but of some smiling interest is the notion that the paintings that were rejected for exhibition in juried salons (in France in the 1860’s) and which were used in a new movement and in new “juried” shows called Salon des Refuses, were all stamped with an “R” on the back of their canvases.

 _______

*the first great advancement coming in the solving of the so-called “ultraviolet catastrophe”, arriving through the Maxwell equations of 1873 and riding into the quanta of Planck in 1899/1900 (and then to quantum mechanics).

**Hubble, Edwin, "A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae" (1929) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of

America

, Volume 15, Issue 3, pp. 168-173

Comments

[Jeff]

I take the royal aspect of red as a measure of rarity, except for maybe the burial red, which might join the others in your list as psychological aspects.

"into the lower realms of red tape, blood red, fire, blind anger, love/passion, evil, crushing impropriety" ... yet you add a little Lead and it becomes the sweetest color in the world, beloved by the most precious things in your life.

The red shift, of course, was less about red itself and more about the shift. For all its heat, I like the idea of red as cooler, as the color of a dying fire, or the color of a universe fleeing itself.

Nice post, John. Good with tea and toast. I'm feeling rather sanguine about the possibilities for today.

[Jeff]

Red Clay Blues
(by Langston Hughes)

I miss that red clay, Lawd, I
Need to feel it in my shoes.
Says miss that red clay, Lawd, I
Need to feel it in my shoes.
I want to get to Georgia cause I
Got them red clay blues.

[John Ptak]

Sanguine and Red Blues--very good, man, very good. And true about the shift, but it was a red shift, a shift in red--but it was the shift itself, the movement, the change, and not the red that made the deal. Funny how long the redshift existed before it was all tied together.

[Jeff]

There must be a tale attached to Hubble's theory, such as: He just missed his train, and while standing on the empty platform and watching the train get smaller and smaller, and hearing the whistle get deeper and deeper, he felt dejected and alone in the universe ... and then it hit him!