The fear of colour- chromophobia - Stories in Colour Podcast S1 Ep6 - National Gallery

As with all prejudices, its manifest form, its loathing, masks a fear. A fear of contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable. The loathing of colour. This fear of corruption through colour needs a name. Chromophobia. It's a quote from Chromophobia by David Batchelor. Welcome to Stories in Colour, a podcast from the National Gallery I'm Bex Leary from the Digital Department here at the National Gallery and today with me on the podcast is David Batchelor to mark the 25th anniversary of his much-loved book Chromophobia. David is an artist and writer based in London who for 30 years has been concerned with our experience of colour within the modern urban environment and with His work comprises sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography and animation. He has also written a number of books and essays on colour theory. Welcome to the podcast David. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for being here. So we're gonna dive into the story of your book and where it came from. But what prompted you to write Chromophobia? Well, we could spend probably the whole podcast talking about it. It's a long story, but I'll try to keep it brief. I was an art student in the 70s at the high point of conceptual art, which meant there was essentially no colour whatsoever in my work, in the work of anyone I was particularly interested in at the time. But then at some point in the later 80s, I had a small studio in London and I was making mainly black and white type work. And then at one point, as they say, I painted myself into a bit of a corner. And in order to try to solve a fairly intractable problem, I decided to paint the front of a small sculpture pink, not because I had any interest in pink or colour, but I was just trying to differentiate the front from the back of the work. But as soon as I did that, I kind of noticed, there was a real absence of colour, both in my studio, but also in my background, in the teaching I'd had and in the contemporary art that I was aware of at the time. And gradually that just began to make me curious. And it simply made me ask a question, which is, what's wrong with colour? Where's the colour? Why isn't there any? And if there's not any, why not? Fascinating questions, which hopefully we'll dive into. So where does this term come from, the name of the book, Chromophobia? I'd been invited to do a small exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds of my then small colour-based sculptures, which would have been in the early 1990s. And I was also asked to write a short thousand-word text as a sort of leaflet to go with the exhibition. I was trying to describe what I began to notice as this sort of pattern of resistance to colour in Western culture. And I remember sitting on my old Amstrad, typing away. An Amstrad? Oh, yeah. We're really going back. Sorry, what's an Amstrad? Don't you know what an Amstrad is? Oh, dear. Kids, eh? An Amstrad was a pre-Mac computer. Okay. Designed and built by Alan Sugar and his people. That's an aside. You actually had to load them up. They had no hard drive, so you had to load them up. Anyway, there I was on my old Amstrad, and I was thinking, well, what I'm trying to describe here is a kind of this fear of the chromatic, this phobia of chroma. And I just thought, oh, there's a word. Let's just try that out. And I think I knew then it was quite a compelling word. And that was the starting point of what then, three years later, became the book, this thousand-word essay I wrote, trying to describe this pattern of resistance to colour. I realised there was more to say about it, and that's what then led to the book, which was published, yeah, as you said, 25 years ago in 2000. And maybe we should say chroma meaning colour, phobia meaning fear. The fear of colour. Apparently, the American publishers wanted that explanation on the cover. But the reaction books who published it resisted that, thankfully. So maybe, yeah, you could introduce us to this concept. As you said, you know, chromophobia is the fear of colour. I began to notice when I first become aware of that, in a way, that absence of colour from contemporary art and the discourses around it, I began to wonder where this came from and what had produced it. And I began to notice very, very quickly that there was a pattern of resistance to colour in Western art history, in philosophy and elsewhere. This sense that colour was somehow less than line, in a work of art, less than form, less than shape. It was always diminished and, in a way, marginalised compared with the other elements of making paintings or works of art. So, for example, in the 19th century academies, you would have spent four years learning how to paint, but you would have begun with line drawing, and then with chiaroscuro or shading, and then with composition and so forth. Only at the very end of your studies would you have coloured it in. So, colouring was always seen as the sort of the least important part of the practice of painting. You can see that in the writings of Joshua Reynolds, who founded the academy. But it also goes right back to Aristotle, to the Greeks, two and a half thousand years ago. And in his Poetics, Aristotle said something along the lines of, in a work of art, a well-drawn line will always be preferable to a random distribution of colours. Which, again, it's already loading the dice a bit by calling colour random. But that sense that line was the repository of value in art has, I think, continued throughout the Western tradition, you know, to a greater or lesser extent at different times. And that marginalisation and trivialisation of colour has always been a part of it. So, what I said in Chromophobia was that the tendency, this pattern I'd noticed, was to treat colour as either feminine rather than masculine, as oriental rather than occidental or Western, as infantile rather than adult, as primitive rather than civilised, and as kitsch rather than sophisticated. It was always placed, if you like, on the negative side of those binaries. And of course, the more I saw that, and the more that picture became evident to me, the more interesting colour became. And in the book, you start with this idea of white as a kind of purity or plainness. How does that feed into that idea of Chromophobia? Why did I write the first chapter on whiteness? I can't remember. But I did. And I think, I think actually probably it begins with an actually an old essay by Ernst Gombrich, who writes an essay called, I think, something along the lines of white as a repository of value in art. And at a certain point, whiteness was privileged over rich colour in the Western tradition. Again, that's quite evident through a lot of writing through neoclassicism, that false assumption that Greek sculptures are all pure white marble. But also that sense of whiteness as purity, as virtue, I think is so embedded in Western culture. And I mean, not just Western culture, perhaps. And you can find it in the Bible, though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Yeah, so you find it in the Bible, find it in this neoclassical idea. Classical sculpture was white. And they resisted, didn't they, when they, you know, archaeologists first found those flakes of coloured paint on these statues, they resisted the kind of reality that actually these statues were very brightly coloured. Greco-Roman sculpture was very brightly painted, by all accounts, the residue of these pigments can be seen in the works. But of course, when they were dug up in, in the archaeological moment of the, I think, the mid-18th century, they'd obviously lost most of their pigmentation, but not all of it. And that led art historians such as, well, we call them an art historian now, but philosophers such as Winckelmann, to posit that the whiter the sculpture, the purer it was, both as form, but, you know, by extension in other ways, too. And connected to the idea of an ideal body as well. I think Winckelmann was more complex than he's often represented as. But I think there is one phrase which he used, which is, you know, that something like, you know, the whiter the body, the more perfect it is. And of course, you know, that now echoes, you know, in very dramatic and difficult ways. What I would add was that it's in the mid-19th century, in a way the height of sort of Western imperialism, you also get the beginnings of a critique of that notion of whiteness. And in particular, the amazing Moby Dick by Herman Melville. And Melville has a superb chapter, short chapter on whiteness called The Whiteness of the Whale. He turns this whole notion of whiteness and value inside out, that he makes white deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, he says whiteness is identified with purity, virtue, etc., justice, etc. On the other hand, whiteness invokes a kind of terror and the terror of annihilation. So you suddenly have this undercutting of the comfort in whiteness. And this was in 1851, which is fairly extraordinary. So in the book, you describe two different forms of chromophobia. On the one side, colour as other and dangerous. On the other hand, colour as cosmetic and therefore superficial. How would you describe that distinction? Yes, that's how I wrote it back then. I'll probably revise that slightly now. Colour is either identified with the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, etc. And I said, yes. And then the other form was to treat colour as just a surface on top of a surface, like a cosmetic. Like makeup on your face. It is like makeup, maquillage. Again, we'll go back to perhaps Plato rather than Aristotle. That I sense that colour is like a false adornment. It's a deceitful, it can trick you, it can seduce you, it can lie to you. It's a false surface. Now, Plato wasn't big on surfaces in any way. He preferred essences, the idea of deep structural. The sense you get is that what you were looking at would be more clear and more true if you wiped away the colour. So there's like an essence beneath it that is the form, that is the shape. That is what is often argued, yes. As if colour could be wiped away. The irony is, of course, that the first thing we experience when we're born, allegedly, is coloured light. So in a way, it's the one thing we can't wipe away. And until our eyes fail us, we are stuck with colour. I guess our experience in the world is entirely colourful. It's only when you go into a film or into literature that it can be possible to imagine a black and white world. There you go. So it's only in the arts that you can erase colour. Only in painting or printmaking or film or literature, photography, you can imagine a world without colour. We're going to take a quick break now. After the break, we will descend into colour with The Fool and with some film examples as well. Welcome back from the break. Before the break, we were introducing this concept of the fear of colour, of chromophobia and how that might manifest in Western society. You also talk about a kind of descent or a fall into colour associated perhaps with chaos or other emotions. How might that manifest? And particularly, shall we look at the example of Cézanne? Cézanne, who never, as far as I'm aware, published any writing, noted a lot of stuff down, unlike, for example, Van Gogh. He's reported to have said that what you need to do when you're making a painting is, in a way, imagine a world without concepts. Imagine the world, that's not what I'm looking at. There's not a mountain or a tree. It's just coloured light. That's what the eye receives. And then the brain organises that into different objects and things. And he says something along the lines of descend into colour, fall into colour, and then emerge in a state of grace. And I think he says something like lose consciousness, which is an extraordinary thing to say because if you lose consciousness, you close your eyes. So this idea of losing consciousness as you absorb the sensation of looking at the colours in a painting. I think by saying lose consciousness, it's saying forget your concepts. Yes. Forget all these fancy ideas that we have, all the eyes that we need in order to organise our place in the world. Lose yourself in a coloured state of grace. And we should probably say, or I should probably say that, yes, Cézanne, French painter, and maybe we'll look at one example in our collection. Then here's a fabulous Provence landscape. I mean, one thing, in a Cézanne painting, all it is is dabs of colour. Yes, patches of colour. Tache, I think, is just touches of colour. That's it. But from that, you generate a sense of space, form, volume, distance, etc. And some of the paintings are, especially some of the perhaps more unfinished ones, you can see that it's just touches of colour. Layers of building up colour. And he loves the new inventions, didn't he, of colours, that 19th century revolution of emeralds and viridians and… Yeah. I mean, one thing you can't separate colour from is sort of technologies of colour, particularly when you're doing works of art. And in the mid-19th century, you had the emergence of synthetic colours, which is to say chemically produced colours, rather than colours mined from minerals or the bodies of insects or plants. Not only did you have a much wider range of more cheaply available colours, they were also ready-mixed and put into tubes, which then, of course, allowed painters to go outdoors and paint en plein air, which you wouldn't have been able to do previously. Absolutely. So we've just been, yeah, talking about Hillside and Provence painted in around 1890 to 1892. Cézanne has this kind of association of colour with innocence, almost sensing the world like a newborn child would, like you referred to before. But there is, perhaps, if we're talking about a descent into colour, a very famous example from a film. I suspect the film you have in mind, because I've written about it at some length, is The Wizard of Oz. Absolutely, yeah. Which was, of course, comes from a book from the early 20th century, but was made into a film in 1939. Starring Judy Garland, of course. Absolutely. And I think it's a film that most adults are familiar with, actually most kids are familiar with. And it is a remarkable film, not least because if you'd gone to the cinema in 1939, on the cusp of World War II, almost all movies would have been black and white. And the extraordinary thing about The Wizard of Oz is that you go in to see this movie, and it begins with black and white film, which is a very grey version of black and white, the Kansas, flat Kansas landscape. And then through a series of events, not least because of a tornado that comes along, Dorothy, played by Judy Garland, and her dog Toto, and their little house is whisked up into the tornado, and then it falls. Dorothy falls out of the sky, and after about 17 minutes of the film, after the first reel, she falls into colour, which is to say she falls into munchkin land. And that must have been quite extraordinary for the audience of that film at that time, because they wouldn't have known it was coming. No, actually, yes, if you hadn't heard before, you know, you're seeing it, no one's told you. Yeah, there are probably a lot of spoilers going around quite soon after that. I can imagine. But even so, it must have been astonishing that fall into colour. And technologically, it was amazing how they did it. Do you know the story of how they spliced it? I believe that the first, because each film reel is I think about 15, 16 minutes long. So the first roll would have been black and white stock. Yeah. The second roll, colour stock, but they had to work this transition. Yes, exactly. But you tell me about that. There was actually a TikTok that went viral explaining this last year, which is how I came across it. They had to use a stunt double and paint and clothe the cast and the set in sepia tones to magic this transition. To make it appear black and white. Absolutely. So the moment before she steps into the world of colour is, when it still seems to us black and white or sepia, is in fact on colour film, technicolour film. Yeah, she emerges, her stunt double goes first, whisks away for a couple of seconds. And then you see Judy Garland in her blue gingham dress in the world of colour. If you watch the film, good modern television, you can see that it's not quite as grey when they land and there is a sort of sepia tone to it. But I think what's remarkable about the film is I think in a way it discusses many of the themes of chromophobia, the idea of the fall into colour. Dorothy falls out of the sky into Munchkin land and into this hyper chromatic, crazy world. But then of course you learn at the end of the film that she's actually fallen twice. She's fallen into Munchkin land, but of course the reveal at the end is that she's fallen out of consciousness, which is an echo of the Cezanne quotation. And of other writers, subsequent writers, for example Roland Barthes said that colour is like a tiny fainting spell. Again, a sort of a closing of the eyes again and into a kind of dream world and a world of narcosis in some aspects of the Judy Garland film. Yeah, you talk more about this idea that descent into colour is kind of hallucinogenic in some respects. It's irrational, it's chaotic, it's highly unpredictable, it's intense and it's all encompassing, but it's also something you have to leave behind. It also represents a threat and a danger to the order of our lives. And so you fall into colour at great risk, it is said. I think you describe it as there's this kind of reaction against that descent in this desire to control colour. How does that manifest in Western thought? Well, the first thing, of course, is that Dorothy says she has to leave colour. She has to go back to Kansas, to grey. And Salman Rushdie, who wrote a beautiful little essay on Wizard of Oz, says when she says, oh, there's no place like home, was it no place like home? And she joyously, as it were, goes back to Kansas. He says, this is the least plausible line in a film of wildly implausible characters and forms. But yes, that sense that we have to leave colour. There was an interesting essay that I quoted by a French writer, Charles Blanc, again in the mid-19th century. He's talking about art. He talks about this notion of drawing versus colour, the traditional academic put it, and that drawing should always be privileged over colour in art. And he says something quite interesting. He says, well, the thing is, we can't actually, we can't get rid of colour. We're stuck with it. So therefore, we have to control it. We have to subordinate it. And he genders it. He says, it's just like men and women. We can't get rid of women, which seemingly is disappointing to him. Therefore, we must subordinate them and control them. And he says at one point, painting will fall to its ruin in the same way that mankind fell to its ruin through Eve. So he's gendering this relationship between line and colour, and saying, as did Reynolds and others before him, that line is the repository of value and philosophical understanding in art. But it's also a male privilege, if you like, that to draw in line shows a capacity for abstract thought, because there's no lines of nature. So if you can do a good line drawing, it shows that you're capable of this kind of elevated form of reflection. And this is the unique ability of men. Women. Supposedly, according to him. Exactly. And women, as is often still said, are better at colour. But colouring in for Reynolds, for Charles Blanc, and for others, was mere copying. It doesn't show any capacity for abstract thought. It's just copying. It's not a skilled work. It has nothing like the skill compared with the skill of line drawing. So that's the D'Azegno versus Coluri. It's not just a technical separation of different aspects of art. It's also a gendering of it and a privileging of a certain kind of thought process, they thought. We should touch a little more on D'Azegno and Coluri and go back in history a bit to where that began, I guess. So there was kind of this debate in 16th century Italy, wasn't there? The kind of heights of the Renaissance, exactly as you've described, this kind of feud almost between the priority of form and line and design and colour. But perhaps we could give some examples of how that manifests in relationships between artists or in particular works. I'm going to add here very quickly, I'm not an art historian. No, no. And I've not studied the formal debates of the Renaissance later, Italy. But I'm also, I think I'm very sceptical. Okay, yeah, there's D'Azegno versus Coluri, there's the privileging of line, as we've discussed, and that's identified with certain artists at certain points. I've never really bought it. I mean, I probably know more about the 19th century, the way that was kind of conducted in the 19th century between Ingres and Delacroix. The problem for me is that, I mean, Ingres was seen as the linear artist and Delacroix as the colourist. Yes. The problem I have with that is that I love Ingres' colours and I love Delacroix's line. And I just think it's a false opposition. Probably any art that's really worth it, in a way, transcends those rather false oppositions. Let's skip forward to Ingres and have a look at Madame Matisse, maybe. One of the joys of living in London, or visiting London when I didn't live here, was, obviously, is to come to the National Gallery and see some fabulous, obviously, remarkable paintings from a huge range of historical periods. And I've always, long before I became directly interested in colour, I remember seeing this painting of Madame Matisse, which is 1856 by Ingres. It's richly colourful and vibrant. It's unbelievably sensuous, particularly, obviously, in the clothing and the fabric in which the sitter is placed. And there's a hint at Orientalism in the painting. Again, that would be the notion of the Oriental would be an opportunity to bring in vivid colour. But she's sat there, isn't she, looking quite majestic. It's a portrait of a woman wearing her finest clothes, a dress that's kind of got a white background with pinks and blues and yellows in the florals adorning her. She's wearing lots of jewellery. Bedecked in jewels. Yes. And the kind of chaise longue, I think it is, or armchair is satin pink. There's an Oriental fan and what looks like a Chinese vase behind her on the left. And then it's all reflected softly in a mirror. In a mirror where you can see kind of her profile and her shoulders reflected back at us. For me, the difference between Ingres and Delacroix is that Ingres' work is so static. And it's not in a rigid way, though. There's a soft stasis in this. And it's not least down to the, in a way, the pyramidal structure of the sitter. Your pyramids are Very strong. Strong, stable forms. Yeah. And there's a pyramidal structure in this. And there are in other of Ingres' portraits of the time. Whereas the Delacroix's, they're all movement and instability and cascades of forms and arabesques and colours. Another example we're going to look at colour in was this skiff by Renoir, 1875, who makes fantastic use of what we call complementary colours. I think Renoir has sort of had a bit of a bad press over the years, maybe perhaps particularly his later work. But his sort of, if you like classic Impressionism, which is mid-1870s, highly vibrant colours, usually displaying sort of leisure scenes of middle class people on the outskirts of Paris. It's a small painting. It looks fairly incidental, fairly improvised. But it's also, I think, a brilliant study in colour theory. Yes, yeah. And it's essentially a painting of blues and oranges. With a tad of green. A tad of green and a little bit of black and white. But essentially the main element, the skiff, this long orange form just below the centre of the picture. A little boat, we should say. With two young women rowing it. It's a vibrant, vivid orange and the water is again a vibrant kind of cobalt blue perhaps. Very dappled with the light. And again, there's no linearity in it at all. It again is a kind of, it's touches of colour. The reason the painting is so vibrant is because of this contrast, which is, I think people think, well, Impressionism was about that scrupulous observation of nature. I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure the skiff was that orange and I'm not so sure the water would have been that blue. You think of the weather we normally get in Paris. But those colours are echoed further back in the painting. There's a house in the background, which again has a blue roof and orange gables. But also there's an incidental detail in the which is the Impressionists were great train spotters. What do you mean by that? There's so many trains in Impressionist painting. You think of the Monet-Garce-Alazard paintings. But even in this painting, right at the back, you just see there's a little chimney and a puff of white smoke. You know what? I'd never spotted it. There you go. I've looked at this painting so many times. You can play the game of train spotting in so many of these paintings. And a lot of it, it's about saying, yeah, this is a lovely bucolic scene of pleasure in nature. But you've got to get there and that you can get there by this modern form of transport. So it's also about modernity, because those sites of leisure wouldn't have existed previously without those forms of transport to get you there. So, yeah, we've kind of looked at this designe colore debate. We've kind of looked at the maybe false division between colourists and those who prioritise line. We are going to take a quick break now and after the break, we're going to dive a little more into this idea of colour as cosmetic or surface. So we'll see you after the break. Welcome back from the break. We have been looking a little at this contrast between designe colore and now we're going to move on to this idea of colour as cosmetic or superficial or surface. So what in your book did you mean by this idea that colour can be seen in Western thought as cosmetic? Again, it's something that I picked up from reading some of the philosophical and art historical material about colour in art and this tendency to want to treat it as trivial and saying that colour is a surface laid on, as it were, after the event. And you find that also in some stories of the origins of the world, that the world begins by the division of dark and light, land and sea. Almost at the end of the day of creation, it's spattered with colour, not because it has much use, but because it makes things more enjoyable. It says, yeah, colour's okay, but it's just, it doesn't have a value other than being pleasurable, which of course is, to me, a great value nevertheless. And I guess that Latin colorum as well being related to kolos or colare, meaning to hide or conceal. To conceal and Plato used a colour, it was called a farmokum, which is also a drug. So as a, again, a cosmetic or a colour or a drug, which is deceitful and non-rational. And even Roland Barthes, when he was writing about photography in the early 1970s, said that he didn't trust colour photography. He said it always looked like a corpse that had been painted after the event. Gosh, that's vivid. And that colour, that photography is more real without colour, which again is a strange and ironic thing to say. Yeah, it's more real without colour. I guess we do still, or some of us, would still have a sense that black and white photography seems more sophisticated. And certainly historically, that was the case. So of course you have to remember that back in the day, when you're using film rather than digital technology, you had to choose which film to put in your camera and you had essentially a choice of black and white or colour film. Black and white stock is much easier to process, so it was more functional, it's cheaper. In film and photography, it was often deemed that colour was appropriate for fashion or in films for musicals or comedies, but not for proper drama. Not for serious stories. Exactly. And Don McCullen, British photojournalist, studied many harrowing wars of the second half of the 20th century. He always works in black and white, as if somehow black and white is more appropriate to that level of human drama. And I think a lot of people go along with that, and in some respects, maybe even I would, I'm not so sure now. But I think that the sense of what black and white, say war photography has, is a sense that it delocalises it. I think colour always localises, colour makes everything very specific. Whereas if you use something black and white, it sort of generalises a bit. And I think it enables people to think, perhaps, that there's this famous photograph by McCullen of a shell-shocked American GI in the Vietnam War, blank-faced soldier. And I think being in black and white, it maybe allows you to think that, that stands for every soldier in every war. It's not just specific to this particular battle, in this particular phase of American imperialism, etc. So it allows you to imagine, it's a consolation that this stands for all soldiers in all wars. Maybe that's the attraction of black and white in that kind of photography. So if there's a specificity, I guess, in colour, or a cosmeticness, or a superficiality, should we look at some examples of how that might manifest in painting? Let's look at the Wilton diptych. It's one of the earliest works in our collection, really a magical gem in our collection, I think. We don't know who the artist is, it was either an English or a French artist working right at the end of the 14th century. And it sings with blue and gold, doesn't it? On the right hand side is the Virgin surrounded by about a dozen angels, and she's holding the Christ child. And it's just blue, it's just blue and gold. So her robes, and all the robes of all the angels, are this rich, vivid ultramarine. An ultramarine was the most expensive and valuable pigment at the time, more valuable than gold, it is said. One of the reasons it was so expensive was that it comes from one mine in northern Afghanistan. And to this day, that's where you'd get natural ultramarine from, it's a mineral. And what I love, I mean, there's a great deal to love about this work, but it's almost that when you look at that right hand panel, really the first thing you see is just a sea of blue, of rich, beautiful ultramarine. It is so striking. And I think the colour precedes almost the ostensible imagery, the painting. The background is a flat, decorative gold. Now the problem with gold, which was again, a highly valued material for painting up until the Renaissance, at least, the problem with gold is you can't model with gold. You can't do... What do you mean by that? You can't make it look like a rounded form, it'll always sit flat as a surface. So if you look at the diptych on the upper part, it's just in a way, it's like a gold wall. And it's been punched in, hasn't it? Yeah. So you've got this texture to it, it's almost geometric, isn't it? The repetitiveness of this background. It is. And there's a lot of geometry and patterning going on in the painting. And it's almost as if they're two worlds pulling in slightly different directions. On the one hand, you've got the flat, decorative, almost textile-like gold, but then you've got a certain amount in the lower portions of that panel of the blue has a certain amount of variation in tone, which suggests sort of rudimentary modelling and a rudimentary three-dimensionality. But it's not one or the other, it's both. And that's what I love about the painting, is that it's sort of pulling in two directions without conflicting. And you almost have to acknowledge that colour here is superficial, not in a negative sense, but in a sense that it can't be entirely representational. No, I think it's colour as colour, not colour as fabric or as robes. It's colour as itself. It's its own presence in the work, and vividly so. Who couldn't be drawn to that side of the panel? But on the other side, when you have, I think it's King, who's it? King Richard II, with, strangely, with St John the Baptist and a couple of saints. And there's also this, there's not so much blue in that at all, there's a lot more gold. If you look at the robes of the kneeling King and the saint on the left, they're both richly decorated fabrics. The pattern on the fabrics is painted completely flat. It's sort of conceptual. It's like, this is the pattern. It's completely 2D, whereas the robes that sit on are slightly modelled. So again, you've got this pull between the understanding of what the pattern is and displaying that, but also the perception of folds and forms. But they don't align at all, and they don't need to. No, because the experience of the colour is so beautiful. Perhaps there's more synergy here between the kind of, obviously we wouldn't actually call it this, but a proto-abstraction of colour way back here at the end of the 14th century. We might compare it to the work of pop art, the work of Andy Warhol, his amazing colourful paintings. It's perhaps a little bit of a leap to get there, but this idea of colour being 2D and surface and the subject almost being the colour, I think links us. And I think a lot of abstract artists of the second half of the 20th century and before that were drawn more to this pre-Renaissance, so-called late medieval painting because of its abstraction and its flatness and its colour as colour than to the more high Renaissance work of Raphael or Leonardo, for example. And I think that's a commonplace in 20th century art, looking away from the assumed apotheosis of Renaissance painting towards this earlier or non-Western bodies of work. Now, Warhol. Should we describe his work? What we have here is one of Warhol's fabulous Marilyns. Marilyn Monroe, that is. Marilyn Monroe, probably 1963 or from 63 through to the 67 or 68. It's a photo silkscreen, so it's a very simplified photograph from, I think, an agency shot of Marilyn Monroe that Warhol used and reused thousands of times, I think, in single or multiple images of this headshot of Marilyn Monroe. For example, a group of 10 prints he did where it's exactly the same Profile of her. Profile of her, full face and with a bit of shading. And in each case, the colours of the face, the hair, the lips and the background are changed. So it's as if they're completely unconnected with form of the person. The colour can be changed around infinitely, irrespective of the image. Now, a lot of that's to do with, I think, that what Warhol was depicting was not a person, but an image of a person, but the medification of Marilyn's face. But it is colour as make-up, it's colour as cosmetic, very directly, because there's also always in Warhol a misalignment of the colour. And he does that. And it's always there. And it's always a part of the brilliance of the work, I think. It's not accidental, I think, that we have Warhol using colour in this way. Now, I've described colour as cosmetic, and that would suggest it's coded, again, as feminine rather than masculine. But it could also, of course, be coded as camp or as a form of drag. Cosmetics are powerfully part of that culture. So there's a kind of colour as drag in cosmetics within this work. And this is maybe a long way from the Wilton Diptych. It is a long way. It definitely is a long way. Nevertheless, that sense of colour is its own presence in the work. And I think in that sense, colour through Warhol, but through other artists in the 20th century, is, if you like, really genuinely released from, as Yves Klein called it, the prison of line. And I guess with it, we get what you call in the book, the digitisation of colour, colour being itemised into digits. So not necessarily digital, but we get colour charts, we get, you know, household paints being used, cans of paint being used by artists, each paint with a name and its own specificity. This was an argument I began making 25 years ago, that colour, as we tend to use it now, is very different from how it was used in, say, the 19th century, where, as an artist, you would have learned in the 19th century, colour mixing of a rather traditional kind, that if you add this to this, you'll get this, etc. And you probably would have had to make a colour circle to prove that you could do it. We don't need to do that anymore. We can just get it out of a tin. And I think a lot of artists, certainly including myself, there's a certain pleasure to having colour as a ready-made. And the industry of colour, chemical industry of colour, which is huge, has given us a vast range of colour samples to work with. We don't need a grammar of colour in the same way that perhaps you did in the 19th century, where you'd have the sense of the primaries, the secondary colours. We didn't have a hierarchy of colours in the same way. To some extent, every colour becomes the equivalent of every other colour, because you get it in the same size tin, and you can just go and pick it. And I think there's a lovely equivalence of colour in Warhol's work. No blue and yellow and red as the primaries of paint aren't privileged over pink and orange and a wide range of colours. And I think that's a kind of liberation for artists to treat colour as an independent value, and also independent of a kind of grammar, an attempt to kind of control colour within a colour circle or a sphere. And I think my argument would be that colour always escapes these containers that we put it in. It's always richer than our ability to describe it or to shape it or organise it. We're always reaching for metaphors, aren't we, when we come to colour? We are, and we're also trying to, you know, all colour circles are always, they're circles, they're geometry. And there's always an attempt to kind of enclose colour in a simple geometry, be it a star shape or a sphere or a circle. Unfortunately, it just doesn't work like that. It isn't geometrical. Thank you so much. We've covered, I guess, the main ideas that you have brought to us in your book, Chromophobia. So I will end our time on the podcast with a question from our audience. Someone's written to us on YouTube and they've said, and cars are now mostly black, white, grey and silver, I begin to feel I'd be out of place if I wore colourful clothes. So 25 years on from this book, do you still see chromophobia in Western society? I think, I hope that what I would say now about colour is a bit more nuanced than what I said 25 years ago. And I would say that we, it's not that the world is divided between chromophobes and chromophiles, people who hate colour and people who love colour. I would say now that I think that we are all both of those things. We are all both drawn to colour and we're probably repelled from it in some respects too. And I think that exists in all of us to a greater or lesser degree. Is the world out there more colourful or less colourful than it once was? Well, again, I think the answer is probably both. You know, 25 years ago, my Amstrad didn't have a colour screen. So now the colour screens we have around us, we have vivid, vivid colours in our pockets, literally. So in that sense, we live in a great deal more colourised world. And we have huge LED billboards beaming, you know, moving colour at us all the time. So in that sense, there's a lot more colour around in our daily lives. But I think there's also this tendency towards what's being called greige, this sort of combination of grey and beige, often in sort of Instagram images, which is a sort of desaturation. There's a bit of an interior design trend, hasn't there? Well, perhaps maybe earlier in the 2020s, the most famous example, I think probably is Mrs Hinch, a cleaning influencer who has a very, very grey house. There you go. I've only heard of this Mrs Hinch very recently. I had absolutely no idea what it referred to. That's the explanation. And there's also a TikTok trend called Sad Beige Baby, which is essentially this idea that people are kind of slightly outraged that parents are choosing to bring their children up in a kind of colourless world of neutrals, beiges, without colour. The problem I have with beige is I think it's a passive aggressive colour. It's a colour that isn't a colour but occupies the space of colour, pretends to be a colour. It reminds me that in Thomas Pynchon's great Gravity's Rainbow, where there are a lot of colour references, obviously beginning with the rainbow, he refers at one point to fluorescent beige. Fluorescent beige. As if that could ever exist. Well, I think that's a very good note for us to conclude today's episode of Stories on Colour. If the audience have got more questions about the story of colour or the visual culture of colour, you can email us. We're on podcast.nationalgallery.org.uk or you can reach us on the National Gallery's social media channels. Just mention the podcast and we will try and answer some of those questions for you in our next series of Stories in Colour. So we will hopefully see you next time. Thank you so much for joining us for today's episode. With enormous thanks to our guest, David Batchelor. I have been your host, Bex Leary. Our producer was Harry Rosehill. Our researcher was Hannah Rogers. Our scientific advisor was Marika Spring. Our technicians were Ian Warren, Tom Gulliver and our video producer was Jan Kenyon. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you. Thank you very much.