The secret history of color
In the shadow of World War II, modern capitalism was beginning to take shape. Manufacturing was booming. Consumerism was on the rise. Modern ideas about worker productivity were starting to take shape. In 1953, a British designer named Robert Francis Wilson published a book describing how color could make work–and workers–happier. Bright, colorful workspaces make employees healthier, Wilson explained. Drab, gray, messy offices and factories “promote the feeling of depression.” His ideas about color, and how it could transform work, held up a mirror to emerging ideas about labor and the workplace.
In theory, color is simple–as empirical as mathematics or chemistry. There’s only so much of the spectrum that’s visible to our human eyeballs, as Newton realized 300 years ago. But the simplicity begins and ends there. The way people perceive color is nearly as social and as dynamic as language itself. As historian and author Alexandra Loske puts it in her new book, “The order of color, both practically and conceptually, is a mirror of its time as well as the person who created it.”
In other words, color has a secret social history that tends to go unnoticed–the premise of Loske’s Color: A Visual History From Newton to Modern Color Matching Guides, a weighty new tome that collects hundreds of years of guides to color and the wildly diverse authors behind them, from chemists to architects to Jesuit priests-slash-entomologists.
In the book, Loske looks at dozens of these color wheels, systems, and guides, beginning with Newton’s groundbreaking 1704 treatise Opticks, which identified the colors that human eyes could see. Maybe it’s no surprise that the Enlightenment, an era obsessed with rationality and empiricism, was also fixated on color. As Loske explains, scientists, artists, writers, and naturalists of all sorts published their own treatises on color, inspired by Newton, giving rise to what she calls “the eighteenth century color revolution.”