Red: The Art and Science of a Colour

256 Pages·2016·30.84 MB·English

by  Spike Bucklow

Red

tthhee aarrtt aanndd
science
of a colour
Spike Bucklow
reaktion books
Dedicated to Tara
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Rd
London n1 7ux, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2016
Copyright © Spike Bucklow 2016
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers
Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78023 591 2
Contents
I ntroduction 7
one
Animal Reds 21
two
E astern Trees 35
three
F ruits of the Earth 51
four
M ysterious Reds 65
five
Reds for a Better Life 85
six
B rave New Reds 101
seven
Crossing the Red Line 117
eight
Red Meanings 125
nine
R ed Earth 141
ten
Red Blood 157
eleven
R ed Fire 177
twelve
Red Passions 193
References 211

Bibliography 241

Acknowledgements 245

Photo Acknowledgements 247

Index 249
Introduction

he everyday language we all share is generously sprinkled
T with references to ‘red’, and with good reason. We lay out the
‘red carpet’ to greet celebrities because for over a thousand years,
red cloth was the most expensive that money could buy. A ‘red
letter day’ is out of the ordinary for us but has its origins in the
use of red, rather than black, ink for some letters and words in
medieval illuminated manuscripts. Hitting ‘red lights’ is a way
of saying we have met a series of obstacles, while being tied
up in ‘red tape’ suggests we are struggling with the continuous
obstruction of bureaucracy. Wrongdoers are caught ‘red-handed’
if they bear evidence of their crimes (in which case they may be
embarrassed, blushing and ‘red faced’). Such phrases allude to
blood on (or close to) the surface of the skin. tv documentaries
revel in Nature when she is – to use Tennyson’s phrase – ‘red in
tooth and claw’ and they tug at the heartstrings with the fate of
individual animals, especially endangered ones on the ‘red list’.
‘Painting the town red’ is a celebratory activity that might make
a more sober and sedate townsperson ‘see red’ or even become
helplessly engulfed in an angry ‘red mist’. ‘Seeing red’ and the
related ‘red rag to a bull’ are expressions of irritation, provoca-
tion or threat and official responses to those posed by foreign
powers or homegrown terrorists – or, if really unlucky, by the
weather – include putting armed forces or the whole population
on ‘red alert’. A ‘red sky at night, shepherd’s delight’ and ‘red sky
in the morning, shepherd’s warning’ is weather-lore that has some
validity in Western Europe where clouds often come in from the
Atlantic. When the sky is red in the morning ‘the East is red’, but
7
red
this phrase has more significant political connotations due to
the adoption of red as the colour of socialism and communism.
This association spawned the ‘red menace’, ‘red peril’ and ‘red
revolution’ together with Western fears of ‘reds under the beds’
and the alternate responses of being either ‘better dead than
red’ or ‘better red than dead’. Then, no sooner had the threat
or opportunity for change from without receded, but threats or
opportunities for change arose within, with the likes of the Italian
‘red brigade’ and the feminist ‘Redstockings’. Of course, these
political colour codes have limited shelf lives but they reflect
much older social distinctions, such as the difference between
‘red-blooded’ working men and others, like the effeminate and
the aristocratic or blue-blooded.
Sometimes red is understood relative to another colour. In
twenty-first-century economics, the debt-averse try to avoid being
‘in the red’ and prefer being in the black, but in nineteenth-
century literature, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black referred
to the Church and State. Red was juxtaposed with white in
revo lut ion ary Russia (Bolshevik and Tsarist) and these two
colours often seem to be in conflict. Before the Bolsheviks and
Tsarists there were, for example, the Houses of Lancaster and York
(red and white roses) and before them, the Britons and Saxons
(red and white dragons, according to Merlin).1 Red is paired with
blue in class-war or two-party politics (left and right), and with
green in traffic lights (stop and go) and on power tools (off and
on). At other times, red’s meaning is an absolute. Sometimes red
phrases have very literal meanings – among other things, ‘red eye’
can refer to conjunctivitis, a badly timed long-haul flight or a
consequence of flash-photography. Yet again they don’t have
literal meanings but can refer to things that are not red, like the
Red Sea (unless it is suffering a bloodbath or an algal bloom). Some
reds don’t even exist, like the ‘red line’ that must not be crossed.
One cannot generalize about the red in red phrases. And just
as the quality of redness seems hard to pin down in language,
so red also resists psychological generalizations. Red triggers
different things in us at different times, but wherever it is, red
often has shock-value. Red is associated with anger, shame, fear,
8
Introduction
1 Alphonse Allais, Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes on the Shore of the Red
Sea (Aurora borealis Effect), 1897, monochrome on paper. This contemporary parody
of Impressionism significantly pre-dates the Abstract Expressionists’ colour field
paintings of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s so it would seem churlish to insist that, usually,
the Red Sea is not in fact red.
attraction and an extraordinary range of emotions. Given red’s
apparently mercurial character, can there be a common thread
that runs through the colour? Is there, in fact, a ‘red thread’?
Threads, herrings and lines
The English Navy has a certain arrangement by which every
rope in the Royal Fleet, from the stoutest to the finest, is spun
in such a fashion that a red thread runs through it which
cannot be extracted without unravelling the whole rope, so
that even the smallest piece of this rope can be recognised as
belonging to the Crown.2
Goethe made this observation, before the age of steel hawsers,
in a novel he wrote around 1809 when in his late fifties. The
book has an autobiographical element and unfolds the story of
a relationship between a young girl and an older married man,
9