Like empires, colors have their own history, their own ineluctable moments of glory and reversals of fortune. Who might have anticipated that the 2000s would be—so far at least—the green century? Few could deny that green is the current king of colors, communicating cleanliness, progressive healthfulness, and eco-friendliness, with a dash of antimaterialist flair that paradoxically makes it catnip for marketeers. For the moment, green—like red in the middle part of the last century—has transcended its status as a mere color (and a “secondary” one at that!).
Green: The History of a Color
By Michel Pastoureau (Princeton University Press)
As Michel Pastoureau notes in his sprightly history, green “is no longer so much a color as an ideology.” Its ascendance is a remarkable transformation in color ideology, one that is particularly astonishing given the relative marginality of the color within political and aesthetic movements during the bulk of the 20th century and before. As he remarks, green occurred only rarely in the color schemes favored by the mass producers of consumer goods, and, at least in theory, the artists of the heroic era of early modernist abstraction abjured it as well. Mondrian called it a “useless color.” Kandinsky described it as tiresome and compared it to “a fat cow, full of good health, lying down, rooted, capable only of ruminating and contemplating the world through its stupid, inexpressive eyes.”
Poor green! Yet as any student of color history knows, fashions are fleeting, and long-dormant cultural values can unexpectedly pop up again after decades, even centuries, of submersion. Pastoureau, director of studies at the Sorbonne’s École Pratique des Hautes Études and a medievalist by training, is especially attuned to the long view. His background as a specialist in heraldry also provides him an unexpected angle on the premodern roots of color semiotics, which he has already explored in his earlier books on the destinies of two other colors, black and blue, as well as the various meanings that striped cloth has assumed since the Middle Ages.
Like Blue (2001) and Black (2008), Green: The History of a Color is a dash through domains and contexts as varied yet related as optics, clothing manufacture, vexillology, literature, color lexicons, and the history of painting; and also like its companion volumes, it is fulsomely illustrated, although in a way that at times appears to bulk up a purposefully light-footed essay. At the rate Pastoureau is going, he should make his way through the rainbow by the middle of the next decade or so. (In fact, he plans to call it a day sooner than that; Green is the third in a color pentalogy, to be followed by histories of red and yellow.)
The fact that Pastoureau’s study of green falls in the middle of his conceived five-volume work is somehow appropriate for a color that, as every schoolchild knows from Roy G Biv, lies squarely in the center of many color schemes. Long before Newton’s experiments with the spectrum, in Aristotelian thought it occupied a position of centrality, away from the extremes, a view that was given a Christian reading by Pope Innocent III in the early 13th century when he imposed liturgical colors on priests celebrating certain church days. “Green must be chosen for the holidays and the days when neither white nor red nor black are suitable because it is a middle color between white, red, and black.”
A middle color, not white or black or red: In the centuries after Innocent’s papacy, more than its color peers, green seemed always to be marked by contingency, and it was often found in liminal contexts. It was associated with pagan irruptions in Christian culture, none so much as the festal celebrations of early spring, and it assumed connotations of young love and hopefulness, ripe and fickle—connotations that could also blend into associations with youth’s wild abandon. (When a racehorse is said today to run greenly, i.e., erratically, the etymology goes back to German expressions already in use in the Middle Ages.) If the personification of lyric poetry, the goddess Minne, is depicted by poets and medieval artists as wearing a green dress, the color’s conceptual danger is exploited in the derring-do of the Green Knight, whose headstrong lack of restraint was a frequent source of disorder in Arthurian romances. Green was the color of health and hearth, but it was no less a hue of potential danger.
Such, at least in medieval color semiotics, was green’s split personality. Never a purely demonic color like red, it nonetheless was the pigment of the late medieval bestiary of abjection. With yellow, it was a color associated with dragons, and it shows up in multiple contexts associated with sources of poison and possession, from toads and frogs to the green eyes of witches. In later traditions of the Green Knight, the simply errant character is displaced by one with supernatural powers, while a kind of folkloric spinoff, the “Green Hunter,” is a nefarious nighttime creature who spells doom for anyone who encounters him, a tradition, as Pastoureau notes, that resonates all the way up to Goethe’s poem “Der Erlkönig.”
The point, Pastoureau emphasizes, is that green is, among the colors, exquisitely unstable—both in color theory and in real-life manufacture. If dyers were slow for a number of technical reasons in exploiting the blue + yellow = green equation to produce fabrics in the color, it was long known that green was the sum of other parts, both as a color and as a concept. (At times, it seems to foreground instability itself, although, as with musical tones, context determines everything. Still, is it any coincidence that Goethe associated the color with the upwardly mobile aspirations of the bourgeoisie, or that our dollars are green, or that the color should be associated for an astonishingly long time with the fateful baize of gambling tables and coin counters?)
It was no more chemically stable for dyers and painters than it was conceptually for color theorists, and the various materials used to produce green for clothing or for canvases—including rare ores like malachite, plant sources like leeks, and the copper arsenate beloved by Veronese—had various drawbacks, not least their tendency to break down over time. Medieval greens could turn to tawny yellows and dirty grays overnight, when they didn’t give off deadly fumes in their production. Even later variations like Schweinfurt green, which offered early 19th-century painters and wallpaper makers a deep metallic emerald hue to work with, was loaded with deadly arsenic. Green’s danger could often be literal, even fatal.
Pastoureau is fascinating in describing the long decline of green in the period just before the Age of Revolution, well before the industrialization of paint production in the middle of the 19th century made green a more widely available tool for artists. Although a competitor to the tricolor in the first days of the French Revolution, it lost out as the color nonpareil of liberty; it is an ironic fact of history that Napoleon loved green.
The Gallic focus in Green: A History is a given—one realizes just how much this is a work inflected by translation when “Babar green” is discussed at length but Kermit the Frog is nowhere to be found. Yet if there is a color that today seems to traverse national boundaries—or even to stand as the hue of postnational globalism—it is green. Perhaps the notorious anthropologist from Mars (no doubt a little green man) would aver that nothing better symptomized contemporary Earthlings’ shared sense of unstable times and offered them a colorful dose of healthy, hopeful security.