Color Studies

Workshop, Shane Smith Morrissy,  "Art, Authority, and the Phantasmagorias of Color at the Panama Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco, CA), 1915"

The postcard craze that swept America in the early twentieth century reached its peak at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco. This essay examines how the medium’s fusion of photography and lurid chromolithography produced a dreamlike vision of America that nevertheless carried the aura of scientific credibility. The postcards’ intensely colored imagery captivated everyday Americans, and the act of purchasing and inscribing them offered fair-goers a way to push back against the authority of art experts who sought to police the boundaries of elite taste. At the same time, however, this same lurid vision framed the city’s Asian population not as part of the local community but as fungible, mass-produced commodities. By tracing how color was mediated for a mass audience, this essay shows how the postcard’s commodified dreamworld simultaneously liberated some Americans while marginalizing and demeaning others.

Access the essay below.

Shane Smith Morrissy received his Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University in 2025 and is currently a History of Art and Visual Culture Fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. His research investigates the intersection of art and mass-produced print ephemera, focusing on the political economy of mass media in Progressive Era America.

Nuance:  Leah Humenuck (Munsell Labs, RIT), Beyond RGB: Practical Color Accuracy for Small and Mid-sized Cultural Heritage Institutions."

Organizer: Sarah

Approaches to Color

Or, more on the multivalency of color.

How do the combination of disciplinary expectations, research materials, and personal preferences shape approaches to (regard for, use of) color? 

In this meeting, we will  look at the different frameworks for color in arts, humanities, social sciences, and color science. Plan on an open discussion with opportunities to share your outlook as a researcher and consumer of color. 

My goal is to talk about different paths (disciplinary and cultural) to explore color, with the outcome that this will permit each of us to engage more fully with different ideas and methodologies as the year continues. This is critical to the broad-ranging discussions we hope to have in the CSWG.

To this end, I have posted below a collection of short writings (and videos and webpages) a thought-provoking resource. Please read (and think about) any two. I have included a few thought questions, too. (Note: This is is a new zip file, but the content is the same as earlier)

Organizer: Sarah  (Contact me if you'd like to help facilitate.)

Charlotte Ribeyrol (Sorbonne Université and Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) on 'the Colourful Literary Imagination of the Victorian architect William Burges (1827-1881)'

Following the recent ‘material turn’ in the humanities, chromatic materiality is being discussed by an ever-increasing number of disciplines. Literary studies, however, have so far lagged behind. Indeed, with the exception of the illustrated text, the difficulty of reading colour is that it is not there, the black-and-white page necessarily invoking it by absence or abstraction. One of the objectives of the CHROMOTOPE team has been to unveil the key role played by the transformations of chromatic matter in 19th-century art and literature, drawing on William Burges’s Great Bookcase in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford) as a case study. This presentation will discuss the outcome of this investigation into the colourful ‘embodied poems’ of the Victorian architect whose imagination was fuelled by the ‘wondrous stories’ of bygone ages, whether Pagan or Christian. 

Charlotte Ribeyrol is Professor of 19th-century British literature at the Sorbonne, Honorary Curator at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and head of the CHROMOTOPE project.

In advance of her talk, Charlotte Ribeyrol has shared 2 items. The second chapter of her book, William Burges’s Great Bookcase & the Victorian Colour Revolution, as well as an essay on the verdeurs of Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. These can be accessed through the CHSTM website.

Organizer: Elizabeth Savage

On the Multivalent Nature of Colors ... Or ... What can Prussian blue tell us about color in the world?

Prussian blue has a winding history and a myriad of uses. Since discovery of the pigment in the early 18th century it has been improved, converted, adapted, substituted, and traded within a variety of platforms. It has been called the quintessential inorganic pigment. Its chemistry and physics were long misunderstood. 
 
Join us for a discussion about the many ways colors may simultaneously inhabit nature, art, life, and the imagination, using Prussian blue as a reference point.

We will

• explore the multivalency (the quality of having many values, meanings, and appeals) of all colors using Prussian blue as a model
• examine the history, culture, chemistry, technology, uses, and meanings of Prussian blue since its invention/discovery/appearance
• disrupt the traditional format in which  scholars share information, raise questions, and find new ways to think about their own research in color, whether or not it includes Prussian blue

Join us for brief presentations by 

• Sarah K. Rich & Steve Chemly, “The bloody mess of Prussian blue”
• Sarah Lowengard, “Pigment to dyestuff”
• Fritz Horstmann, “Cyanotypes”
• Alexander Kraft, “"Insoluble, blue and nanoporous: Medical uses of Prussian blue”

. . . and nuances provided by 

• Sabine Doran, "Prussian Blues in Multi-Media Art"
• Ad Stijnman, “Jacob Christoff Le Blon’s choice of Prussian blue for his three-color printing system”
• Nicholas Eastaugh, “Technical uses of Prussian blue”
• Andreas Schwarz, “Prussian blue in 19th century student paintboxes”
• Nadja Stanulevich, Prussian blue in early 20th century photography (Russian & European)
• Sarah Thau, “Reconstructing George Washington Carver’s 1927 patent for Prussian blue”

. . .plus comment and further insight from all participants.

See the (optional) resource packet below.

Organizers: Sarah Lowengard, with Sarah K. Rich and her team at the Center for Visual/Material Culture (Penn State University)

Patrick Syme’s Field Guide to Color: Past, Present and Future

                        NOTE:  Attached is a page of links to online copies of Syme's publication, and to high resolution copies of 4 plates from the original.
                                        Paul Smith kindly contributed the latter.

Join us as Giulia Simonini leads an informal conversation with Patrick Baty, Peter Davidson and Joyce Dixon about  the past, present and future values of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1814).

Abraham Gottlob Werner, geognost in Freiberg (Saxony), published Von den äusserlichen Kennzeichen der Fossilien (On the External Characteristics of Fossils) in 1774. The book included a color-based classification system. 

Forty years later, the Scottish painter Patrick Syme (1774-1845) published Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, a special book on color founded in Werner’s work. As a field guide to color, it has proved to have a practical and theoretical longevity the first never achieved.

This will be a unique opportunity for all CSWG members to participate in a very interdisciplinary conversation.

Patrick Baty is the author of The Anatomy of Colour and the owner of Papers and Paints, a specialist paint business in London.
Peter Davidson is senior curator of minerals at National Museums Scotland.
Joyce Dixon’s research has called on Syme’s work to understand the development of color classification and communication in the 19th century.
Giulia Simonini, Co-Convener of the Color Studies Working Group, is a science- and art historian, and an art conservator. Her research focuses on color history, color science, botanical and zoological illustrations between the seventeenth and the early nineteenth century

Organizer: Giulia Simonini

Ian Dooley (School of Advanced Study, University of London) on 'Chemical Colour, the ‘Coal-tar’ Pigment Revolution in British Printing Ink 1850–1885'

This talk explores the introduction of synthetic organic pigments for printing ink from the 1850s to 1885. Synthetic pigments introduced brilliant never-before-seen colours for printing that could not be produced by naturally derived pigments. But we don’t know much about when these pigments were commercially adopted, or which ones in fact were used. Ian's research analyzes an untapped resource to answer these questions: printing ink “specimen books”, ink manufacturers’ printed samples of available colours, to track the introduction, appearance, and uses of these pigments. Specimen books reveal the affordances and limitations of using these new colours, their continued impact on cultural heritage collections, and how they forever changed how books looked. 

Ian is a third year PhD student whose thesis, Printing Ink Manufacturing in Britain and Its Impact on Print Culture and Society: 1850–1915, draws a missing link between the chemical experimentations, technological innovations, and business decisions of British ink manufactures and the technological and visual developments of printing during the late nineteenth century.

https://ies.sas.ac.uk/people/ian-dooley

Organizer: Elizabeth Savage

Colorways in Africa: Books and Textiles in Senegal and Burkina Faso

Presenters: Laurence Douny (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) & Dame Kane (Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar)

Join us to explore color production and representations on two kind of surfaces: book covers and textiles. We will highlight the ways by which a West African color system composed of red, white and black is used by Senegalese publishers and textiles producers in Burkina Faso to communicate traditional values, identities and culture at large. While books or the 'written words' are explicit medium of communication, textiles enact as non-verbal forms of communication. In both case, colors play a role in conveying messages, symbolism and cultural codes. 

NOTE:  An abstract with some questions to consider is posted below.

Organizer: Sarah Lowengard

Glenn Fleishman (independent comics and printing historian) on 'How Comics Were Made: Dawn of the Dots'
American newspapers found success in adding colour to relief printed cartoons started in 1893. The patented Ben Day process was used, preceding its application to letterpress by decades and lasting until at least the 1950s. The craft behind Ben Day required intricate painting, masking, inking, and adjustments across typically four zinc plates, representing each of the standard newspaper printing colours of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Glenn Fleishman walks participants through the process guided by a heavily illustrated chapter of his book on newspaper comic production and reproduction.
 
Organizer: Elizabeth Savage

Deadly Colour: A Roundtable
Tony Travis (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) on 'Dangerous Dyes: A Different History of the Synthetic Dye Industry'and Chiara Palandri (National Library of Norway) on 'A Voyage pittoresque in Norway through Colour Prints, 1789–c.1815'

Organizer: Elizabeth Savage
 

Building Color Schemes - Theory and Practice
 
Join Architectural Color Designer, Amy Woolf for an exploration of creating successful color schemes -- including some history, a little theory and actual practice.
 
Together we will think about and discuss methods of combining colors and follow up with some hands-on exercises with color samples you have obtained in advance. (See below.)
 
Amy's insights will be valuable to anyone interested in the aesthetics of the built environment as well as anyone who has ever struggled putting together a color scheme. Her lessons will also add to the analysis of material and visual culture that has been a theme of this autumn’s meetings.
 
Amy Woolf is an Architectural Color Designer, based in New England, and has been consulting independently for 18 years. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Inter-Society Color Council since 2019. (https://www.awcolor.com/about)
 
Paper Tools

To get the most out of this session, it's helpful to have access to a variety of colors in the same material or form. Here are some options:

• Color Aid Papers: Available in boxes of 220 or 314 colors (220, small size is ideal). These can be found at art supply stores or purchased online.
• The Essential Color Card Deck: A less expensive option with colored cards, smaller than Color Aid papers.
• Solid Origami Paper: Comes in 100 colors, available from various suppliers.
• Paint Chips: Obtainable from a local paint store, where you can often borrow or collect them.
• Other Material Samples: Fabric, laminate, or tile samples work well.
• Printable Color Swatches: Created with your computer and color printer.
• Paper Swatches: Made with colored pencils, crayons, or markers.

Any of these will work for the session.

Paul Smith (University of Warwick) "Cezanne, sensations of colour, and autism"
The essay is available below.
 
Our next meeting (Wednesday, 13 November, 12:00PM EST (UTC -5:00) will feature discussion of a work in Progress. Paul Smith has offered to present "Cézanne, sensations of colour, and autism", a draft of a chapter of his book project on Cézanne, perception, and autism.
Paul’s chapter explores the possibility that the French post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was autistic. It does so by comparing how Cézanne described his colour sensations in letters to friends and colleagues with their materialisation in his paintings, and by examining records of his behaviour and sensory sensitivities. This is an extraordinary opportunity to delve into colour from a different, non-neurotypical, angle and I hope you will take advantage of it.
 
Paul Smith is Professor of the History of Art at University of Warwick. His research interests include colour theory and colour in the works of Seurat, Cézanne and C19th art more generally. Recent writing has looked at the role of psychology and neuroscience to investigate Cézanne’s "slow looking," and explored the science, perception, and depiction of coloured shadows.
 
Organizer: Giulia Simonini

 
Margaret Morgan Grasselli (formerly National Gallery of Art) and Elizabeth Savage (School of Advanced Study, University of London) on Printing Colour 1700-1830: Discoveries, Rediscoveries and Innovations in the Long Eighteenth Century. It can be pre-ordered at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/printing-colour-1700-1830-9780197267530?lang=en&cc=gb .
 
28 October is the official publication date for Printing  Colour 1700 - 1830: Histories, Techniques, Functions, and Receptions. (Oxford University Press 2024, 978-0-19-726753-0).  Join editors Elizabeth Savage and Meg Grasselli, plus selected authors, as we celebrate this landmark work. We'll hear about current research into histories of printing in color and discuss the issues raised when printing books in color about books in color.
 
About the book:
Printing Colour 1700-1830 . . . examines the rich period of invention, experimentation and creativity surrounding colour printing in Europe between two critically important developments, four-colour separation printing around 1710, and chromolithography around 1830. Its 28 essays expand the corpus beyond rare fine art impressions to include many millions of colour-printed images and objects. The chapters unveil the explosive growth in the production and marketing of colour prints at this pivotal They address the numerous scientific and technological advances that fed the burgeoning popularity for such diverse colour-printed consumer goods as clothing, textiles, wallpapers, and ceramics. They recontextualise the rise in colour-printed paper currencies, book endpapers and typography, and ephemera, including lottery tickets and advertisements. This landmark volume launches colour printing of the long 18th century as an interdisciplinary field of study, opening new avenues for research across historical and scientific fields.
 
Elizabeth Savage is a historian of art and print. She specializes in pre-industrial western printing techniques, especially for printing color in late medieval and early modern Europe.
Margaret Morgan (Meg) Grasselli recently retired as Curator of Old Master Drawing at the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC).
 
Organizer: Elizabeth Savage
 
 

We will discuss
 
Georges Roque: « Éléments de méthode d’analyse de la signification des couleurs : expression et contenu » /  “Expression and content: A methodological tool to analyze color meaning”
 
Abstract:
This paper is a chapter from a forthcoming book, Significations des couleurs dans la peinture (17e - 20e siècles). It provides a methodological tool, based on general semiotics, to analyze color meaning, mainly in painting. The method is widely used by semioticians, but not yet (as far as I know) in the field of color. Its starting point is Louis Hjelmslev’s distinction between the expression plane and the content plane, which corresponds roughly to Ferdinand de Saussure's significant (expression) and signifier (content). As each plane is composed of several oppositions the process to create meaning consists of correlating oppositions of the expression plane to oppositions of the content plane. To give just a few examples, the opposition light/dark can be related to day/night, life/death; the opposition between saturated and desaturated can be related to happiness/sadness. In this paper I briefly examine the main oppositions used for the expression plane of color and their possible links to semantic oppositions. I am aware that such links are often too general and cannot replace the context-dependent analysis of a given artwork. However, I argue that this tool can prove useful when we try to understand color meaning in works of art.
 
A philosopher and an art historian, Georges Roque is honorary senior researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris. On color he organized four international symposia whose proceedings have been published and curated three exhibitions. Main books:  La Stratégie de Bonnard. Couleur, lumière, regard, Paris, Gallimard, 2006; Art et science de la couleur. Chevreul et les peintres, de Delacroix à l’abstraction, second revised ed., Paris, Gallimard, 2009; Quand la lumière devient couleur, Paris, Gallimard, 2018; La cochenille, de la teinture à la peinture. Une histoire matérielle de la couleur, Paris, Gallimard, 2021. His latest papers published in English are: “Philosophy and Science”, in A Cultural History of Color In the Age of Industry, vol. 5, (éd. A. Loske), London & New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, p. 33-52 ; “Colour Theory: Definition, fields and interrelations”, AIC Journal of the International Colour Association, vol. 32, 2023, n° special Colour Theory, p. 4-16;
 
Please note that the text proposed for this discussion was written for publication in French. We are including along with the original an English translation made using Google’s AI translator and slightly revised.