Not so black-and-white: A look at the contentious history of colour

The Vantablack controversy, in addition to providing entertainment on a slow-news day, has also brought up a conversation on colour, ownership and artistic morality.

Those outside the art community may find it slightly bizarre (and they wouldn't be wrong) that so much heat can come off of such a seemingly innocuous issue, but the truth is, colour, in one shade or another, has been a point of contention in the art world for several years.

It only takes a sweeping glance to see that the history of colour in art isn't as rosy as one may think!

Let's look first at Yves Klein who, in the 1960s, patented his own shade of blue—now most commonly associated with the performing troupe Blue Man Group. IKB, or International Klein Blue was made by successfully preserving the luminescence of the unstable ultramarine pigment.

Ultramarine itself has quite a complex historical association, since it was originally made by powdering the mineral lapis lazuli, native only to Afghanisthan; rooted in trade politics between the East and West, the pigment was always a rare and much coveted commodity. In the 19th century, the invention of synthetic ultramarine made it far more accessible.

As fond as Klein was of his particular blue, so, too, was Joseph Turner, in the manner of the colour yellow. His contemporaries joked that his work gave the impression of being “afflicted with jaundice”, although art critics today argue that his work presents some of the most nuanced uses of the colour in history.

One of the most lauded shades he used, however, known as Indian Yellow, was banned, and is now no longer available. This pigment was made from the urine of cows that were fed nothing but mango leaves and water; the appallingly cruel practice was banned in 1908, and the colour has been unavailable since 1921.

When it comes to controversially created colour, though, nothing can compare to Scheele's Green—something that wouldn't be out of place in an Agatha Christie novel. The artists Carl Wilhelm Scheele invented the colour in 1775, and the Victorians absolutely loved it.

The unsavory part, possibly unbeknownst to many of its admirers and patrons, was that it was laced with arsenic, a deadly poison. It is believed that the toxicity of Scheele's Green may have contributed to the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, who was extremely fond of it and had it on his bedroom wallpaper.

Scheele's Green is also chemically related to Paris Green, which is believed to have caused Monet's blindness and Cezanne's diabetes.

History is full of such instances of artists becoming obsessed with colour—Picasso, famously went through a “Blue Period”, where he painted almost exclusively in shades of blue, broken only occasionally by a warm colour.

The late musician and pop artist Prince has famously been associated with the colour purple, specifically because of his song “Purple Rain”. Interestingly, Pantone's Colour of the Year for 2017 is “Greenery”—contrary to the colour's associations with toxicity.

Death as extrapolated above, Pantone has chosen a “fresh and zesty yellow-green shade”, a signifier of spring and a symbol of hope, unity and rejuvenation in our current, uncertain socio-political landscape.

Today, colour finds its most overt impact in branding. The colour red has been monopolized by Coca-Cola, there is a certain shade of blue that has now become synonymous with Facebook, for a while the combination of yellow and blue denim was universally symbolic of one of pop-cultures more insufferable trends, the Minions.

While it may seem counterintuitive for something as ubiquitous as a colour to convey an artistic signature—especially in the case of artists who, unlike Yves Klein, played no part in its discovery or creation—it is the very nature of ubiquity that makes its ownership so tantalizing.

Brands have been quick to capitalise on this idea—there's no clearer way to make your mark than to stake your claim on something that people see all the time, in various forms, everywhere; the more fluid the better.

So colour has and always will be a point of contention. Today the big story is Anish Kapoor's association with Vantablack; tomorrow if Vantablack—or, dare I consider, something even blacker—were to be made universally accessible, the focus might change to the whitest white or the most perfectly mid-spectrum gray.

One can't really say, but social media never fails to tickle us pink with its dedication to generally irrelevant controversy. So its only a matter of time before the next viral feud has us all seeing red.