JF Ptak Science Books

ROYGBV Redux via Emily Vanderpoel's "Color Problems" (1903)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Just on the heels of yesterday's post of RIYBBV vs. ROYGBIV comes this lovely discovery in the highly unusual and original work by Emily Vanderpoel, Color Problems of the Layman, printed in 1903, a gorgeous but mysterious book in which she sought not so much to analyze the components of color itself, but rather to quantify the overall interpretative effect of color on the imagination.  I know this sounds begging and vague, but I really haven’t been able to make much headway in her theory.  Ms. Vanderpoel looked deeply and arithmetically into art—she also produced a numerical grid of the artwork that she analyzed, going a step further to re-order the reality of the painting into a representative 10x10 square, distributing the color sense according to a secret algebra that I cannot identify.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The series is preceded by a further presentation of the colors side-by-side (and reversed) as well as another plates of the colors side-by-side presnting their gradient tints:

And lastly, those lovely plates, larger:

 

ROYGBV, ROYGBIV, and Waiting for Josef Albers

JF Ptak Science Books  (Really) Quick Post

What's the dealing with indigo—the missing “I” in ROYGBV—anyway? And what about cyan? And what about those blocks of colors at the bottom, at this time in print history waiting for the appearance of Josef Albers to put them to artistic use in contradistinction? There's so much is so relatively little in this tiny part of the em spectrum, sandwiched there between UV and IR, and that sandwiched by X- and microwaves, and then gamma and radio waves?

I guess this print calls out for a little bit on color and music and the piano, but not tonight. 

Source: unknown, though I'd guess this to be printed ca. 1900.  

 

Vanderpoel's Futuristic Designs and a Color Tile Catalog

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post 

While looking through a London stationer's website for Blackwing pencils I found on their site a catalog for a floor tile maker that strongly reminded me of a gorgeous turn-of -the-century art book.

I've written several times¹ on this blog about the non-pre-discovery and non-pre-discovery-recognition of nonrepresentational art by the fabulous art theoretician Emily Vanderpoel. She wrote a a lovely and mysterious book in 1901 (a second edition appearing two years later)  called Color Problems for the Layman, in which she sought not so much to analyze the components of color itself, but rather to quantify the overall interpretative effect of color on the imagination--I think.  I know this sounds begging and vague, but I really haven’t been able to make much headway in the work, though it seems to display the occurrence and frequency of general colors in 100-block distributions. Vanderpoel seems to take the overall sense of the colors of, say, a Greek vase or mummy cloth or a teacup and saucer, and display the overall effect in her grid. As I said the procedure escapes me but the net result is beautiful. 

The 1940's tile maker's illustrations of samples of their work are also quite strong, and as you can see bear some similarities with the Vanderpoel:

[Tile image source: from the store perfectly-named Present and Correct https://www.presentandcorrect.com/collections/ephemera/products/tile-catalogue-1940s]

Offhand I guess you could say that any of cubist/block/tile/mosaic designs could remind you of Vanderpoel--but not so, and in ways I can't fully explain. It is something about the distribution and very involved nature of these tiles that pull it towards Vanderpoel...and perhaps it is the color selection. I'm not sure.  I have perhaps a dozen tile manufacturer catalogs from about this period (1930's/1940's) and none have struck me as strongly as this one does in its "relation" to Vanderpoel. In any event, there seems to be a "there" there. 

Notes:

1. Here are some links to the posts on Vanderpoel:

• https://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2010/12/what-color-is-an-unintentional-modernist-masterpiece-of-book-illustration.html
• https://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/04/shaping-space-a.html
• https://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2015/02/mummyii.html

The Effigies of Sidney Greenstreet, The Beaver, and Raymond Loewy: from B+W to Color (1944)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2723

Here's another in this series of fabulous color in 1930's and mid-1940's designs, and the third from the Armstrong Cork Company and their sales pamphlets for their linoleum flooring (Better Floors for Better Business, printed in Lancaster, Pa.).  As I've said earlier, it is somewhat jarring to see these designs in color when we're so trained from the pre-color movies to see them in all of their tremendous facets of black & white mixes. It is hard to think of Sidney Greenstreet gliding across a room or through a restaurant that is bathed in nothing but shades of gray, when in fact he could've been wearing a brilliant plum-colored suit and moving across a flaming red floor. And in this case, with Armstrong, they did indeed make flaming red flooring--and in stark contrasts with yellows and blue designs.

So I decided this time to take five examples of these designs and contrast them in color and then in black and white--it is an interesting little exercise in expectation and what our heads have been trained to see in old films. (All of the color images are as found in the Armstrong catalog--no enhancement.)

So, for example, the Hotel Pennsylvania coffee shop, NYC (a Raymond Loewy design!), as expected:

And then, the shock of non-recognition (apologies to Edmund Wilson and William Gaddis):

Unexpected, no?  It reminds me of seeing a b+w episode of Leave it to Beaver, where the Beaver buys himself a suit and his parents are completely done-in by its color, which of course on the tv looked like pretty much everything else. 

Here's four more, including Postman's Specialty Shop, 5th Ave, NYC:

Black & White in Color, Part V

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is another installment in a series on putting color into what we normally would think of in terms of black and white photos (and movies)--the results are sometimes surprising and unusual. (There are posts here on the color schemes on 1930's schoolrooms in Cleveland, air recon in color, color dissonance in 1940's bathrooms, colorless color charts, and other such bits, all findable by entering "color black and white" int he Google search box.)  The pamphlet below would sound like a simple and badly-titled publication (How to Plan Walls that Please, by Armstrong Cork Products, 1938) if you were just reading about it in a catalog, but in real life, it is a symphony of exploding and unexpected color. At first the color combinations had a somewhat claustrophobic effect, but I think it was mostly because the rooms were small and densely packed--once that is accounted for, the colors seemed to take on a welcoming attitude...especially in the kitchens, where you'd expect to sit down at one of those small tables and wait for Grandma to serve you some fresh pie.  

In any event, here are some examples for the pamphlet:

Oddly Adjectival Color Plumpness, continued (1938)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post    Part of the Series on Color, Its Uses and Abuses

I've written a number of times on what seems to be "extreme" color in the 1930's  (as in "Oddly Adjectival Opposites: Color Plumpness and Color-in-Black-and-White, 1941" http://longstreet.typepad.com/books/2011/02/odd.html) and come to it again today via the weirdly sublime color contrasts of rugs and floor coverings offered in the Bird Rug Catalog for 1938. I've thought about and seen so many of these images in luscious grays and stark blacks that it is difficult to think of these same images in gigantic color. It is just hard to picture Mr. Bogart's eyes and his accusing/weary glance being framed by that blue chair and all of the colors bombarding it. There should I guess be a diacritical of some sort to attach to the vocabulary of colors to express "surprise", as I could surely employ it in describing that blue linoleum floor:

Deep closeup of flooring:

 

Flooring details

A History of Black & White in Color (continued)

Putting Black-and-White Back into Color: 1930's Schoolrooms

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1840, expanded.

Its easy to assume a modern prejudice regarding the interior decoration of 1910-1940 school rooms, allowing a certain conceit and picturing them in shades of gray, the images formed being "colored" by the images of those things that we have seen, almost all of which have turned up in black-and-white photographs or movies. But of course we know that this can't be true, and that Humphrey Bogart didn't always wear a gray worsted in his movies, and didn't move that gray suit through gray rooms. Its just that the image-formation is influenced by what we've seen, and since what we've seen of these rooms is mostly without color, then our images are difficult to assemble outside black-and-white.  This applies to just about everything from that era, which explains why it is such a glorious shock to see motion pictures or photographs of (say) New York City street scenes from 1944. (And why is it such a jolt to the visual system to learn that police cars in Chicago during the 1933 World's Fair were orange?)

This thinking came to the surface again this morning when I uncovered the Paint Specifications for the Model School, prepared for the East Cleveland Board of Education under supervision of the Foremost Authorities, and published by ARCO in 1939¹.  It reminds us that the only thing that lived in black-and-white in those days are in our memories.  (I've written about unexpected color in Lost German Color of 1927,  The Very Describale Macro Color of 1937, The Color Green in the History of Squares, and of course the non-immortal 200,000,000 Pounds of Buttocks-or-Putting the Black-and-White back into Color, and others.

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1840, expanded.

Its easy to assume a modern prejudice regarding the interior decoration of 1910-1940 school rooms, allowing a certain conceit and picturing them in shades of gray, the images formed being "colored" by the images of those things that we have seen, almost all of which have turned up in black-and-white photographs or movies. But of course we know that this can't be true, and that Humphrey Bogart didn't always wear a gray worsted in his movies, and didn't move that gray suit through gray rooms. Its just that the image-formation is influenced by what we've seen, and since what we've seen of these rooms is mostly without color, then our images are difficult to assemble outside black-and-white.  This applies to just about everything from that era, which explains why it is such a glorious shock to see motion pictures or photographs of (say) New York City street scenes from 1944. (And why is it such a jolt to the visual system to learn that police cars in Chicago during the 1933 World's Fair were orange?)

This thinking came to the surface again this morning when I uncovered the Paint Specifications for the Model School, prepared for the East Cleveland Board of Education under supervision of the Foremost Authorities, and published by ARCO in 1939¹.  It reminds us that the only thing that lived in black-and-white in those days are in our memories.  (I've written about unexpected color in Lost German Color of 1927,  The Very Describale Macro Color of 1937, The Color Green in the History of Squares, and of course the non-immortal 200,000,000 Pounds of Buttocks-or-Putting the Black-and-White back into Color, and others.

The Coloring Book of Hell--Hell in Black & White (ca. 1600)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2676

If you were to wish a foul curse upon the soul of the dead in Hell, then it is Prosperine/Persephone who would carry it out. The Hitman of Hades had the capacity to inflict damage upon the already damaged, what with being the Queen of the Underworld and wife of Hades. She is also the daughter of Zeus and the harvest goddess Demeter, so there is also that life/death struggle bit going on in the background. 

This image is made from the painting by Pieter Brughel the Younger (1564-1638), son of Pieter Bruegel  and part of the dynastic family of painters. (They spelled their surname differently, depending upon the time and the user.) The legend of the engraving tells us that "P. Breughel [sic] le j^ne, dit l'Enfer" was also known as the "Hell Brueghel" for his interest in depicting that place, and he certainly does live up to the nickname.  Even though the engraving is pretty small (about 3x5") it does communicate at least the sense of what the painting delivered, which was a very detailed and massive account of the underworld.  Even though the engraving is only a shadow skeleton of the original, we do get a sense of Mr. Cash's lake of fire, and though we see the torments of the damned we generally do not see what it is they are suffering from.  Prosperine is at center left, having just arrived in Hell (according to the description¹ of the plate found in Museé de peinture et de sculpture, ou, Recueil des principaux ..., volume 12, 1831², and behind her we see a river with boats dispensing new arrivals; at right, background, we see a gaping Hell Mouth though without fangs/teeth, which has at least one newly-damned trying to climb his way back into the mouth to perhaps retrace his steps to the surface of the regular world.  The image is creepy enough without the color and great detail of the original, what with the dozens of horrified dead falling about and a floating pig-snake flying above.  

The imagination ran high on the imaging of Hell, mostly for ever and ever--Dante, Botticelli, Japanese Hell Scrolls, Bosch, and on and on, though the flavor of it slacks off a bit when most of the image is white.  So, if you were of a mind to do so, here's your chance to color in one version of Hell as you please.  

Notes:

1.  "PROSERPINE AUX ENFERS. Le peintre Pierre Breughel le jeune est souvent désignésous le nom de Breughel d'Enfer parce qu'il aimait à traiter des incendies et des sujetsdiabcliques. On en voit un exempledans ce petit tableau où il a représenté Proserpine à l instant où elle arrive aux enfers tandis que tous les autres artistes anciens et modernes se sont pliis à retracer le moment où Pluton enlève la jeune déesse des riantes plaines de la Sicile. La fille de Cérès descend de son char et parait vouloir s'éloigner de l' endroit où sont assises les trois furies, Alecto, Mégère et Tisiphone. Mais en détournant la vue de dessus les impitoyables déesses elle trouve partout des figures monstrueuses qui Iourmentent les mortels. Le lointain offre la vue de bautes montagnes d où sort un grand fleuve sur lequel on aperçoit plusieurs barques remplies des âmes des mortels qui viennent de quitter la terre. Ce charmant tableau peint sur cuivre fait partie delà galerie de Dresde. Il n avait jamais été gravé."

2.  I have the full set of 22 volumes for sale elsewhere on this blog--if anyone is interested in owning it, send me an email.  

 

Color as a Secret Weapon--Air Recon, Camouflage, and Color Film (1939)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Here's something I never thought of before--how color air recon photography changed the application of camouflage.  Aerial photography used to reveal the hidden segments of an enemy's position was almost exclusively limited to black and white film in the two decades or so following WWI. Color films were far slower and evidently not suited to the task until the late 1930's--therefore, it seems, camouflage was prudently directed to disguise objects from aerial surveillance with those limitations in mind.  As this cover for an article in Popular Mechanics suggests, all that changes with the invention of faster color film that made the b+w film obsolete, and changed the way camo was used to confront mile(s) high observation.  (I also suspect that this was available to the U.S. armed forces well before this article was published...)

[Popular Mechanics, April, 1929, page 497.]

Color and Its Abuses--the New York World's Fair, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2569

Color and its use and abuse is a very personal thing—especially the “abuse” part. The pamphlet below (Views of the New York World's Fair, 1939, and published that year) to me is certainly one of those entries in the history of the abuse of color, not so much that the colors used in it are odd together, but the saturation of color across the board leads to something like Splendorama hyper color. I'm not sure why the colors are like this--they remind me of a color equivalent of a laboriously and not-very-good translation of a tech manual. It isn't as though color printing was new in the publishing industry, as books had been printed in different colors besides black for at least 300 years by this time;  even full-color printing had been around for 120+ years, so it isn't as though they were experimenting with the color equivalent of newly-available typefaces in a 1985 word program. Color photography in books is brand new at this point, the wide-scale use taking place this year, but these images are not photos, so I doubt that this had much of an effect on the creativity of the designer. 

Since a few of these images are quasi-sci-fi, I even wondered about the color influence in speculative novels and movies.  Color was very adventurously used int he early sci fi pulps and monthlies, but that stuff was already being employed for two decades by this point so their newness in regard to publishing experimentation is not an issue.  And so far as sci fi and color in the movies goes, that also wasn't an issue because it didn't exist yet, as the first color film¹ in that genre didn't appear until Lesley Selander's awful Flight to Mars (1951).

In short, I don't know what is going on here, color-wise.  

Notes:

1.  Flight to Mars, from Monogram Studios, was about a manned flight to Mars in 2000,  There was another unusual film, I think it was Destination Moon at about the same time, where the spaceship overshot the Moon and went to Mars instead. This note though is in regard to the Georges Melies film, Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), which did have some color, though that was tediously applied by hand in post production.  (Invaders from Mars (1953), by the director William Cameron Menzies, was the next sci fi flic made in color.  

 

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

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 3286

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.

Putting Black-and-White Back into Color: 1930's Schoolrooms

JF Ptak Science Books    

Its easy to assume a modern prejudice regarding the interior decoration of 1910-1940 school rooms, allowing a certain conceit and picturing them in shades of gray, the images formed being "colored" by the images of those things that we have seen, almost all of which have turned up in black-and-white photographs or movies. But of course we know that this can't be true, and that Humphrey Bogart didn't always wear a gray worsted in his movies, and didn't move that gray suit through gray rooms. Its just that the image-formation is influenced by what we've seen, and since what we've seen of these rooms is mostly without color, then our images are difficult to assemble outside black-and-white.  This applies to just about everything from that era, which explains why it is such a glorious shock to see motion pictures or photographs of (say) New York City street scenes from 1944. (And why is it such a jolt to the visual system to learn that police cars in Chicago during the 1933 World's Fair were orange?)

This thinking came to the surface again this morning when I uncovered the Paint Specifications for the Model School, prepared for the East Cleveland Board of Education under supervision of the Foremost Authorities, and published by ARCO in 1939.  It reminds us that the only thing that lived in black-and-white in those days are in our memories.  (I've written about unexpected color in Lost German Color of 1927,  The Very Describale Macro Color of 1937, The Color Green in the History of Squares, and of course the non-immortal 200,000,000 Pounds of Buttocks-or-Putting the Black-and-White back into Color, and others.

 

The rest of the ARCO catalog is below; but first, here's a sample from the 200,000,000 Pounds of Butts post, showing the 1938 barroom in color:

Naming Things: Colors

JF Ptak Science Books                                          Part of the series Naming Things

(Almost) in the beginning were monsters.  The epic battle that Moses wages early on is not with Pharaohs, but with the dragon(s?) that the creator itself had fought on the opening whisper of creation (Book of Job 26:12, Psalms 89:10) and who would again meet at the very last bits of the closing days.  Behemoth, Leviathan, Rehab may all well have been monsters to these ancient folks, but they very well might look like rhinoceros or crocs or hippos to us.  Monster demons like Rehab (Psalm 87:4), a slaughtering beast who would be reintroduced to a different part of the world as Tiamar who would or could also be known as the Red Sea,  lifted straight from Mesopotamian mythology and placed directly into that of the Old Testament among the rest of the borrowed stories and beliefs, a problem by any other name.

Following names and their cyclonic twists, and absences and sudden  re-emergence through the history of storytelling is dizzying—just consult your Robert Graves on myths  if you want to have  your memory plumbed (the great poet and writer doing not such a poetical or writerly job in this effort in my opinion though most people love it).  Keeping an eye on the mix and mash of gods and goddess and associated super beings from thousands of years ago, the god of the Old Testament makes it very clear and precise about just who he is in his self-introduction to Moses:  “I am the God thy Father, the God of  Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6)

Equally almost in the beginning, again so far as the Bible is concerned, are colors—before that maybe everything was black and white, or just white, or maybe just black, depending on your epistemological concept of everythingness or nothingness.  (It looks like green may be the first color mentioned in the bible, (Gen 1:30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so) though the mixing up of meat and veggie is a little confusing to me.))

Over the years color names themselves have creepethed among themselves like a vocabularic ocean, a fluid dynamic of naming.  Names have flowed across their individual spectra, some names sticking, some not; the originator of the concept of the naming of "red", the original namer of the color, lost to the earliest and deepest part f the collective human memory.

I don't know where many of the names of colors come from, or why.  Index to Color Names and Color Numbers of the Standard and Season Color Cards of America (published and created by the Textile Color Card Association), and published in 1923, is filled with color names whose meaning and origin are a mystery and whose necessity seem to hinge on sunspots.  Which is fine, though it might be interesting to have had color names more dependent on that which went before. Like the names of the streets on most of Connecticut Avenue in D.C. are alphabetical, and once the first 26 letters or so are monosyllabicly employed, the second set starts with two syllables, and then three.  It is a system that usefully indicates where long the long avenue you might be. It might be useful to employ such a method in color names; or not. 

And I suspect it would be "or not", unless the poetry and art and music inherent in these formulations would be imaginatively employed

But on to the color names:  Ambulance, Basketball, Bosom,  Cowboy,  Squirrel, Chit, Old, Nymph, Old mephisto, Pelt, Racket are examples of some of the mystery colors.                             

Some names which were part of institutionalized racism I'm sure are now gone:  Arab, Negro, African; Bagdahd (?), Bombay Brown,  Coolie Yellow, Coolie, Congo Brown, Egyptian Husk, Hankow (yellow), Kyoto Yellow, Korea Yellow, Mandarin Yellow, Punjab Brown, Kafir, Tar Baby.

But I've got to say, even though the names may not have much to do with the colors, most of the names in the pamphlet sound quite lovely, and many are yummy: London Smoke, Log Cabin, Leadville, Madonna, Naked, Pitchpine, Pompeii, Prelate, Smoked Pearl, Swamp, Lucky Stone, to name a few. Overall I doubt that this is what Newton, Goethe, Chevreul, Rood, Maxwell and the rest had in mind when they were figuring out what color *is*, but I do think that all of them had large enough poetic natures (Newton the weakest and Goethe by far the strongest) to appreciate the occasional beauty of naming.  The unbelievable Shakespeare seems not to have spent that much time on color (so far as I know, and I don;'t much about the Bard), but (in a dear-sweet-god understatement) other people did:  people like Richard Feynman synesthesically thought in mathematical color terms, others created musical  instruments which would produce color from music while most of the rest of the world produced music which conveyed color, and on and on.  And then of course there's the whole world of art.

But I won't go there now--I just wanted to follow this loose thread in what seemed to be a pretty inert pamphlet--in the end it opened itself to a lot of possibilities with just a little thinking. 

The Future as the Color Red

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2172

In 1947 the future looks a little red, and sparky, and filled with television.  

This image is that of the television antenna of station WNBT and for many years it sat on top of the Empire State Building.  WNBT was the flagship station of NBC, which was owned by RCA (Radio Corporation of America, 1919-1986) which (according to its name) was really the first national broadcasting radio network in the United States, and which (as experimental station W2XBS) became the first to broadcast a television picture (of a papier mache Felix the Cat) in 1928.  This fantastic cover art for a 1947 promotional for the company pictured the famous antenna,  the great visual of the company's external hardware, right there on top of the world's tallest building. 

This was really a picture of the future, and in 1947 the future of mass communications and entertainment (and in making money in the two) was seen in television, much more so than the formerly gargantuan radio.

And why red?  Was it latent images for a few decades of seeing Lenin marching forward with a poiny figure and folllowed by legions againsst a background of deep red?  Or is it the hundreds of years of red being associated with power--it did cost a fair amount, centuries ago, given the difficulty of its manufacture.  

And in the history of red the business of its business was obtuse and secret.  The Spanish began exporting the source of red--the cochineal bug, which was a tiny cactus-borne bug--from Mexico.  They sent barrels of these bugs back home, where they were pounded and prepared for the Spanish worthies' textiles.  The source of the color was held as secretly as possible, making the bug as odd a guarded source as the secretive history of medical forceps so long shrouded in mystery by their progenitors, the Chamberlain family.  So red was expensive, limiting its use to the ruling/economic powers.  It would also start showing up in art in the depiction of robes for royalty, or for robes for Mary and Jesus, and occasionally in Renaissance skies.  Alternatively, it is also associated with Hell and Satan, I assume that is the case since red was not-often used (given the cost) and so it was a rare-ish color that would strike the viewer as being exceptional. 

 

That said, I'm not sure why RCA chose red for their sky in 1947, though the company did have its famous "red Seal" label beginning in 1902 and used the color freely in its logo. Aside from that, why there is a red sky is a bit of a mystery.  

The Visual Genetics of Color and an Unintentional Pre-Modernist Masterpiece

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1282--continued, & now with the Full Text book!

[Earlier in this blog, about 1200 posts ago, a million words ago, I wrote about an extraordinary book by an aesthetician named Emily Vanderpoel.  It is "extraordinary" in a narrower sense, and that "extraordinary" might not actually be positive for its original intent.  The extra-intent of the book, what has come out of it for me, was something that was unintentionally accomplished by the author.  The images that she used to illustrate her color theory ideas--the basis of which are not really comprehensible to me--turn out to be artwork in themselves, a found art, the artistry of the images taking over the original intention for the arrangement of their color.  I've found the book now at the Internet Archive in all of its glory, and downloaded only 150 times.  I'm still at a loss to know why this work hasn't received more attention

The idea of how we put parameters to something like the visual field is a gargantuan topic—it is something that architects and geometers and physicists and mathematicians (in general) have dealt with forever.

The full text is available HERE via Internet Archive.

  Mapmakers have perhaps the most visualized aspect of this on paper, performing the semi-miracle of translating three dimensions into two; physicists have a more difficult time, taking the opposite approach, sort of , and translating two or three dimensional space into x-number of dimensions.  Anatomists had a difficult time of their subject until relatively recently in human history, what with the sublime religious curfews on messy knowledge and all coming into play, poking around into the heart and such as though it was an affront to the sanctity of the creator (M Servetus’ ideas on the circulation of the blood via the heart, making the heart a tool and not the brain or some odd conjunction of creative divine power, cost him his life, burning slowly alive at the stake…how mysterious the whole world of RNA Genotype-Phenotype Mapping and such would seem to him if he could have a peek into the future/present from wherever he is.)

Color theory is old and pretty—as a matter of fact there is a very attractive gathering of color theory models (in black and white, though) displaying some two dozen or more color models from the last 400 years.  People like Della Porta (1593), our old friend and resident oddball polymath crank Kircher (1646), the smarter-than-you-could-imagine Newton (1660), Waller (1686), Lambert (1772), the wide ranging and again polymathic Goethe (1792), Herschel (1817, who also ushered in our understanding of the other light-sensitive shape spacing medium of photography in 1840), the semi-forgotten Chevreul (1835), the beautiful Maxwell (1857), Wundt (1874, the early experimental psychologist who also looked for spirits/spiritmus and ghosts), von Bezold (1878), Rood (1879), Munsell (1918) Kandinsky (1914 and not decipherable by me) and Klee (1924), and so on towards the present, all tried to analyze the prospects of color.

Not in this list is the very highly problematic Emily Vanderpoel, who in 1901 and 1903 produced (in two editions) a lovely but mysterious book called Color Problems for the Layman, in which she sought not so much to analyze the components of color itself, but rather to quantify the overall interpretative effect of color on the imagination.  I know this sounds begging and vague, but I really haven’t been able to make much headway in the work.


I’m attracted to this effort because of its attempt at quantifying such abstract thoughts.

By virtue of this effort, though, Vanderpoel had produced a strikingly illustrated book, with 118 color plates, all very intense, and beautiful, and in its way exceptional—unique for it time perhaps.  Had the book been written thirty years or so hence we’d call it some sort of constructivist/constructionist artform.  But since the artwork in the book comes a decade before the first non-representational artwork in human history (or so), I don’t know exactly what to call it. 

I really don’t know what it is, but I know that it is not entirely accidental, this pre-non-representational artform, because controlled geometrical color art is not accidental. 

In trying to quantify the color images of the objects in her study, Vanderpoel establishes a 10x10 square grid, dividing all of the color in that object into individual units numbering to 100.  Then, somehow, she identifies the major colors and places them according to a system that I cannot understand within the grid.

The net effect is glorious.  I just don’t know how she got there—which isn’t normally a consideration in art, except that this work is an instructional on how to understand color in art and nature, and the explanation of the procedure is ethereal.  Vanderpoel was and remains a respected author on porcelains and other applied and plastic arts.  In this work she looked at her fair share of porcelain, limogues, clay pots, burial urns, glass shards, and the like; she also analyzed clouds, mummy cloths (and casings), dew on morning grass, brocade, the eye of a blue jay, feathers, and another hundred or so poetic arragenments of the stuff of teh world.  I still do not know what this book is trying to tell me, but I do know that it is remarkable.