John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (University of California Press)

John Gages book Color and Culture appeared to considerable acclaim in 1994, and it won that
years Mitchell Prize for art history. It was a dense, ambitious, yet readable exploration of color in
Western art from the Classical era to the 20th centuryor rather, of ideas about color, since Gage
gave more attention to writings about the subject than to actual examples of practice: for instance,
he devoted far more space to Matisses Notes dun peintre (1908) and other written and spoken
observations about his approach to color than to the painting Red Studio (1911), used to illustrate
Matisses notions.
Gages new book, Color and Meaning would appear, thanks to its equally ambitioussounding title, to be a sequel to the earlier one, but it would perhaps be better described as a series
of extended footnotes to it. For that reason it may disappoint many of its predecessors admirers.
Whereas the earlier book was, as its author warned straight off, for all its baggage of scholarly
apparatus not an academic book, this one certainly is. Furthermore the twenty-one essays it
collects are quite separate and self-contained. Many of the topics it covers are of specialized
interest, and furthermore, specialists in some topics may be uninterested in others. This is
testimony to the breadth of Gages curiosity, which (despite a focus on late 18 th to early 20th
century European painting) ranges widely, from the pre-Colombian Americas to German
Romanticism and well beyond, certainly, but something that should have been made clearer in the
books presentation.
Maybe all thats to complain that the glass is half-empty. Many of these essays are
admirable. I would particularly call attention to Chapter 14, Mood Indigo From the Blue
Flower to the Blue Rider, which swiftly and efficiently sketches in the route from German
Romanticismboth literary and artisticto Kandinsky and Schwitters, by way of Goethes
Farbenlehre. As Gage shows, nineteenth-century German color theory was primarily based on
symbolism and moral associations. But there were also more perceptually-oriented

tendencies in German color theory, though they remained exceptions, and it was at the Bauhaus,
Gage implies that the two tendencies were at last synthesized.
As one would expect, Gage also has some fine pages on Seurat, who may have been less
au courant with current color theory than has often been thoughtless so, too, than some of his
fellow Neo-Impressionistsbut who is undoubtedly the greatest painter to have been seriously
concerned with scientific color theory. As Gage shows, however, he was not wedded to a single
theory, but was rather a highly experimental artist who modifies his methods from picture to
picture. More important, Seurat was close to Symbolist attitudes in his color, which is to say
that, as was the case in German art, a scientific approach to color was inseparable from the echo
of Romanticism.
Later on, his meditations on the work of Seurat would prompt Matisse to admit that I am
a romantic, but with a good half of the scientist, the rationalist, in me, which makes for a struggle
from which I emerge sometimes triumphant, but breathless. For painters, the scientific study of
color has sometimes been felt necessary, but has always remained secondary. As Gage notes, it is
the subjective effects of color which have been the central concern of painters, and these
remain rather resistant to rational inquiry.
The question remains, then, whether the study of color has any fundamental importance
for art. Reading an old interview between the poet and critic Edwin Denby and the painter Neil
Welliver, whod been a student of Josef Albers, I was struck by Wellivers remark that Albers
was an incredibly good teacher and most of the teaching and conversation and so on was outside
of art. It had to do with color and how colors interacted, the optics of color. So what Welliver
learned from Albers was a lot about color, and also the fact that all this was somehow tangential,
not central, to painting. What may be the inadvertent lesson of Color and Meaning is much the
same.