The Republic of Color by Michael Rossi

Author:Michael Rossi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI000000 Science / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE LOGICAL AND THE GENETIC

Bodies, Work, and Formal Color Notations

THE LESSON

Denman Ross was a Harvard art professor; color system author; and sometimes-rival, sometimes-friend of Alfred Munsell’s. Between 1898 and Munsell’s death in 1918, he and Munsell collaborated closely and argued bitterly over their color systems. They fought over the meaning of color. They fought over the bases of color harmony. They fought over the nature and demands of a good color system and the proper ways to notate and describe colors. For all their differences, though, the men had two things in common. Both had a commitment to formal austerity in their color systems—to the stark systematization of the pure essence of visual sensation, distilled from the vagaries of individual observers, the obfuscations of colloquial language, and the interference of social meaning. And both had a conviction that it was necessary to train children from an early age in how to see color in this way: singly, universally, and scientifically.

So it was that one morning in 1912, Laurena Skinner, an elementary school teacher in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, entered her classroom intent on commencing a series of lessons on the science of color based on Ross’s system. She had each of her students draw nine circles on a piece of paper but found her students to be listless, “as if weary of it all.” It was hard to lead such a group of “tired little brains” in an academic analysis of color, so she decided on a different activity. One of the students was from “the south,” and she asked him to define “plantation.” This he did quite more easily than he spoke about colors. From his definition, she began to tell a story and had her students mix shades of red, white, and black paint to fill in the circles as she talked.

The story began on a plantation owned by “Mr. White.” He was the first circle in the series and the students painted him as white as the paper. He greeted the students and took them to his “mansion on the hill” to meet his family. His baby daughter’s cheek was such a “delicate color” that the students called her “High Light.” She was the second circle—colored in with just the faintest tint of red within the white. Her bashful older sister blushed when introduced, so she was simply “Light,” the third circle. The fourth circle was a young girl who was visiting; her cheeks wore a “ruddy glow,” so she was “Low Light.” “Most beautiful of all” was the girls’ mother. She was “Normal,” or “Standard Tone” or “Middle Color”—an optically pleasing pink. The sixth circle was a young man who had been out horseback riding; he was “High Dark” and so required “some black with the red.” The “young superintendent of the estate,” used to working outside under the sun, was the next circle: “Dark.” He “apologized for his appearance” but the children said they liked him. “Old Mammy Sue (the girls said she was such a

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