Shattering a Colorblind View of the Past

For nearly two centuries, scholars have been arguing that beige and white were not the true colors of antiquity. The Parthenon in Athens and the Forum in Rome might have been almost gaudy. Unfortunately, such ideas have never influenced Hollywood or many experts. For example, in "Gladiator," when Russell Crowe strides down the streets of ancient Rome, circa A.D. 180, he's backed up by the proper complement of white marble. In almost every view of the past, textbooks included, the ancient world comes off as monochrome.

A flood of recent exhibitions has put color back into the vocabulary of antiquity. Last year, "Gods in Color" in Boston and "The Color of Life" exhibition at the Getty featured multi-colored sculptural masterpieces from the Greek and Roman eras.

However, not all scholars are pleased. Of note, Fabio Barry, an art historian at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, is not overly fond of the Prima Porta sculpture's colored reconstruction. "Can you imagine the family-values, back-to-basics, republican emperor Augustus . . . represented by something that looks like a cross-dresser trying to hail a taxi?" raves Barry, an expert on the history of marble. He insists that the Romans cherished the whiteness of fine marble as an important symbol of light and purity.

On the other hand, Getty Curator Kenneth Lapatin "For the Greeks it was all about mimesis," says, using the Greek word for realistic imitation. Beauty depended on it.

A week ago, scientists revealed something else that shatters our preconceived notions about the drab and dinghy colors of an even more distant past. A team of British and Chinese scientists found evidence that a dinosaur that lived about 125 million years ago had a feathered mohawk with orange-brown bristly feathers around its tail. By examining and comparing tiny structures (melanins) in the feathers, they found the color associated with red-brown. Source

While this colorful development in the lost world of dinosaurs is quite exciting, it will still be left up to our imaginations to create the colors of popular dinosaurs, like Tyrannosaurus rex - at least for now.

As for antiquity, we also need help visualizing and accepting a colored world of architecture and sculpture.

Perhaps this century will colorize the past in amazing ways.

Push the color red as far as it can go?

One of my unfulfilled dreams as a colorist has been to pack as many colors as possible into a painting that breaks the barrier of “it’s too pretty to be considered as serious art.”

When I was working on my M.F.A., the "anti-aesthetic" ruled. The art that was sanctioned by the intelligentsia was far from lovely. Matisse’s famous philosophy - that a painting should be like a comfortable armchair - was taboo. There was no going back to the luxurious color harmonies of Matisse and Monet in the French impressionist era or the lush abstractions of deKooning or Rothko in the mid-twentieth century.

Maybe it was a good thing that I turned away from painting fifteen years ago, because until a few days ago, I didn’t think it was possible to create an image on a canvas with juicy oil paints - an image with more colors that one could imagine occupying the picture plane or just one lush or screaming color in a way that it had never existed before. Finally, I didn't believe that this genre of colorful imagery could meet the high standards of the fine arts world today.

I met an artist last week whose paintings embody every goal, every dream any artist, any colorist could wish for. She is Chris Chou, a Guggenheim Fellow 2007 - and that means she is indeed taken seriously by artists and art historians internationally.

Here’s what Chris says about red “I paint the color of red. I want to push red as far as it can go.”

At this point, words fail. See what she did with red and every color of the spectrum at her website - http://aredstudio.blogspot.com/