Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color

326 Pages·2018·5.538 MB·English

by  Nicholas Gaskill

CHROMOGRAPHIA
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Chromographia
American Literature and the
Modernization of Color
NICHOLAS GASKILL
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis | London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance
provided for the publication of this book by the Rutgers University Research Council and
the Department of English at Rutgers.
Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce material in this book. If any
proper acknowledgment has not been included here, we encourage copyright holders to
notify the publisher.
Excerpts from “Spring and All” by William Carlos Williams from Imaginations (New York:
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1971); copyright 1970 by Florence H. Williams.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
A different version of a portion of chapter 2 was published in “The Articulate Eye:
Color- Music, the Color Sense, and the Language of Abstraction,” Configurations 25,
no. 4 (December 2017): 475–505; copyright 2017 The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Different versions of portions of chapter 3 were published in “Of Primitives and
Primaries,” Cabinet 61 (Spring– Summer 2016): 34– 41, and in “Learning to See with
Milton Bradley,” Bright Modernity: Color, Commerce, and Consumer Culture, ed. Regina
Lee Blaszczyk and Uwe Spiekermann (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 55–73; the latter re-
printed with permission of the publisher. Different versions of portions of chapter 4 were
published in “Red Cars with Red Lights and Red Drivers: Color, Crane, and Qualia,”
American Literature 81 (December 2009): 719– 45.
Copyright 2018 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
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, photocopy-
ing, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gaskill, Nicholas, author.
Title: Chromographia : American literature and the modernization of color / Nicholas Gaskill.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical
references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001932 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0348-0 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0349-7 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Color in literature. | American literature–20th century–History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PS228.C585 G37 2018 (print) | DDC 810.9/005–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001932
Contents
INTRODUCTION How Color Became Modern 1
1 The Place of Perception: Local Color’s Colors 43
2 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 79
and the Uses of Abstraction
3 The Production and Consumption 115
of a Child’s View of Color
4 Lurid Realism: Stephen Crane, 163
Gertrude Stein, and the Synthesis
of Modernism
5 On Feeling Colorful and Colored 203
in the Harlem Renaissance
EPILOGUE Albers after the Color Sense 239
Acknowledgments 251
Notes 257
Bibliography 279
Index 301
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Introduction
How Color Became Modern
Milton Bradley worried about color chaos. In the decades following the
success of his 1860 board game the Checkered Game of Life (now simply
LIFE), he saw thousands of new tints and tones flood the market, pack-
aged under wonderful names: ashes of roses, magenta, Styx, baby blue,
Nile green, eminence, elephant’s breath. As a longtime believer in the
stimulating power of well- placed hues, Bradley welcomed the increased
use of color in commercial goods. But he feared that manufacturers were
disseminating the synthetic dyes pouring out of industrial chemistry labs
so quickly and haphazardly that the visual environment had become lit-
tered with discordant arrangements. And since color terms were pro-
liferating at the same dizzying rate as colorants themselves, it seemed
impossible to establish a language of color standards capable of curbing
the chaos. What did “elephant’s breath” look like anyway?1
To clarify this confusion, Bradley devised a pack of colored papers
(Plate 1). Available in six standardized colors— red, orange, yellow, blue,
green, and violet— along with their intermediate hues, Bradley’s papers
promised to bring order by providing a common reference point. “Red”
meant the same thing for anyone who owned a set of the papers; all one
had to do was consult the red sheet. For elephant’s breath and the other
changeable hues of fashion, the procedure was almost as easy: arrange
the component colors on a Milton Bradley Color Wheel in a specified ratio
and then crank the handle to turn the wheel (Figure 1). The spinning
papers mixed in the eye, and voilà, elephant’s breath. Bradley delighted
in demonstrating how the incomprehensible names attached to modern
colors could be translated into fixed formulas for producing the hues.
He revealed that Styx, for example, comprised ten parts red (R), twenty-
one parts white (W), and sixty- nine parts black (N), written “R.10, W.21,
N.69.” Using this precise nomenclature, Bradley and his employees used
1
FIGURE 1. Milton Bradley Company Color Wheel for optical color mixing. Users
would place disks of colored paper on the wheel in specified proportions and spin.
Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student
of Color (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902), Plate 27. RB 710255, Huntington
Library, San Marino, California.
Introduction 3
to “telephone colors” between the office and the factory, speeding up pro-
duction times and ensuring that each edition of the Checkered Game of
Life had the same red on its board.2 For manufacturers, Bradley’s papers
and the nomenclature they supported offered a handy way to harness the
potential of new industrial colors without getting overwhelmed by their
intimidating number and uncertain names.
Yet Bradley wanted to beautify the products of manufacturing as well
as streamline their production, and here he took the long view: he put his
papers at the center of an ambitious program of color education aimed
at training the hands and eyes of the next generation of designers. In
the 1890s he wrote several books on why and how children should learn
color, the most famous of which was Elementary Color (1895). All of them
touted the benefits of his systematic nomenclature and offered exercises
and activities based on his colored papers. Bradley trusted that with the
right instruction, students could learn to attend to their own responses
to chromatic stimuli, to discern when an arrangement pleases and when
it unsettles, and to carry this knowledge into the production of color-
ful products that refresh sensation rather than exhaust or confuse it.
What he pitched to both factory owners and teachers as “The Bradley
Educational Colored Papers,” then, aimed at an intensive training of color
perception to counter the motley discords daily thrown up on billboards
and shop windows and even, with chromolithography and printed wall-
papers, pressing into the home.
In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, when cul-
tural interest in color reached an unprecedented height, Bradley’s pa-
pers circulated far and wide. Their travels map the astounding range of
pursuits devoted to color in this period. In addition to responding to the
alarm over synthetic dyes and helping make color an unquestioned part
of early education, the Bradley papers made an early contribution to the
projects of color standardization that resulted in classification systems
like Pantone, and as such they were a fixture of scientific investigations
into color perception. Their merits were discussed in the pages of Science
and Nature, where such luminaries as Herbert Spencer joined the de-
bate.3 Moreover, both the papers and the color wheel were part of the
basic equipment of the first psychology labs in the United States. William
James and Hugo Münsterberg stocked them at Harvard, where Gertrude
Stein, then a student at Radcliffe, adjusted the spinning colored disks to
test the perception of color saturation (Figures 2 and 3). In particular,