Chromophobia

Definition

Chromophobia is David Batchelor's name for the West's "extreme prejudice" against colour — a fear of "contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable" that has operated "since Antiquity" and that manifests as "the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity." Batchelor stresses the prejudice's scale: it is "so all-embracing and generalized that, at one time or another, it has enrolled just about every other prejudice in its service" — "if its object were a furry animal, it would be protected by international law," but because its object "is almost nothing… a part of almost everything," it passes unnoticed and unchecked.

The prejudice works through two complementary purging-moves:

1. The foreign-body move: colour "is made out to be the property of some 'foreign' body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological." Colour is alien, therefore dangerous.
2. The cosmetic move: colour "is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic." Colour is a secondary quality of experience, unworthy of serious consideration.

"Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both. (It is typical of prejudices to conflate the sinister and the superficial.)" Either way, "colour is routinely excluded from the higher concerns of the Mind. It is other to the higher values of Western culture." Batchelor's diagnostic paradox — "If colour doesn't matter, why does its abolition matter so much?" — converts the prejudice's force into evidence of colour's importance: colour "mattered… because it got in the way."

In architecture, chromophobia is embodied in the modernist rhetoric of whiteness (see whiteness): Le Corbusier's "crusade for whitewash and Diogenes," the Law of Ripolin as moral technology, and the subordination of colour to "the rule of line and the higher concerns of the mind" (see colour-hierarchy). The Intimus editors note that Batchelor "evidences how this sense of order remains a persistent factor in contemporary popular and design culture particularly in interiors" — the all-white interior as the prejudice's living form.

Key Thinkers

• David Batchelor — the concept's author: Chromophobia (Reaktion, 2000) names the prejudice, traces its two purging-moves, and enacts its analysis through Le Corbusier's whiteness.
• Adolf Loos — the evangelical pole: "Soon the streets of the city will shine like white walls! Like Zion, the Holy City, Heaven's capital" (quoted in the extract) — ornament and colour as signs of primitive 'degeneracy'.
• Le Corbusier — the modern pole: colour/ornament/glitter as the modern degeneration called kitsch; the Law of Ripolin ("we would perform a moral act: to love purity!"); white as "clean, clear, healthy, moral, rational, masterful."
• Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the Intimus editors who reprint the extract and locate its persistence "particularly in interiors."

Related Concepts

• Whiteness — chromophobia's positive ideal: white as myth and aesthetic fantasy, not an empirical property of surfaces.
• Colour Hierarchy — chromophobia's rationalized form: the Purist scales that order, subordinated and tamed colour, "broken."
• Kitsch — the specifically modern form of degeneration colour/ornament/glitter signify for Le Corbusier (vs Loos's primitive degeneracy).
• The Decorative — colour's interior-design destination: the drift "from art to mere decoration," to the "aesthetic of printed cloth."
• Gender and the Interior — chromophobia "enrolls" the prejudice against the feminine (and the queer, the oriental, the primitive): the colour/feminine conflation as one instance of the general gendering of interior-coded qualities.
• Natural Finishes — the palette-form of the prejudice: applied colour allied with "artifice, complexity, curviness, and femininity," while white/off-white "even where it is obtained with paint, is felt to constitute the natural color" — the whiteness myth made operational (Braham).
• Ornament vs. Purity — the architectural debate chromophobia deepens: "the flourish, the stain, the distracting din of colours and ornaments" as the purity position's target-set.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the interior-sociological confirmation of chromophobia: the bourgeois interior's "moral refusal of both colour and space"; "black, white, grey – whatever registers zero on the colour scale – is correspondingly paradigmatic of dignity, repression, and moral standing"; the "obscenity of colour"; and the reign of pastels.

• Chromophobia (Batchelor 2000/2006) — the primary source: the naming of the prejudice (p. 32); the two purging-moves (p. 32); the enlisting of other prejudices (p. 32); Le Corbusier's whiteness rhetoric and the Wigley paradox of the ten-colour Pavilion (pp. 32–35); colour "learned, ordered, subordinated and tamed. Broken" (p. 36).

• A history of style and the modern interior (Deyong 2018) — the complementary historiographic frame: Loos's split practice (austere white exteriors, tactile luxurious interiors) shows the chromophobic regime operating on the facade while the interior escapes into fur and colour.

• Structures of Atmosphere (Baudrillard 1968/2006) — the interior-sociological confirmation of the prejudice: the bourgeois interior reduces colour to "discreet 'tints' and 'shades'" — "Grey, mauve, garnet, beige… imply a moral refusal of both colour and space"; colour "deemed too spectacular, and a threat to inwardness"; and the zero-colour moral code — "black, white, grey – whatever registers zero on the colour scale – is correspondingly paradigmatic of dignity, repression, and moral standing" (p. 38). Baudrillard adds the post-puritan sequel Batchelor's art-theoretical account stops short of: the modern compromise that neither rejects colour nor lives it — "'natural' colours… nothing but an impossible echo of the state of nature," "the order, or reign, of pastels… merely signs for them, complete with a dash of moralism" (p. 39). See atmospheric-values.

• A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — the prejudice in operational, convention-level form, independently converging with Batchelor: Hitchcock and Johnson's International Style doctrine that "In surfaces of stucco, white or off-white, even where it is obtained with paint, is felt to constitute the natural color" (p. 56) — paint granted "natural" status by convention, the whiteness myth without a theory; bright colour's slide — "It ceased to startle and began to bore; its mechanical sharpness and freshness became rapidly tawdry" (p. 56); the contemporary polarization that "aligns ornament and applied colors with artifice, complexity, curviness, and femininity" (p. 59); and the bright-colour target's billboards clause ("If architecture is not to resemble billboards," p. 56). See natural-finishes, whiteness.

• A House for Josephine Baker (Burns 1997/2006) — the monochrome edge case and the race-code within the chromatic regime: Loos's Baker House facade — "the bands of black and white marble" — read by its biographers as "an exotic and mysterious image, vaguely evocative of African architecture" (Tournikiotis, quoted p. 64). The house's zero-colour palette (black/white, the "safe" end of Baudrillard's colour scale) is precisely what allows difference to be read into it without colour: otherness assigned through pattern and blankness, sending "the referent 'Africa' into a hazy and apparently unfocusable, imprecise reading (a smudge)" (p. 65). A demonstration that chromophobia's target-list ("the feminine, the oriental, the primitive," p. 32) can operate even in the absence of colour — race as the monochrome's unspoken chromatics. See primitivism, whiteness.

• Movement and Myth (Croft 2000/2006) — the archival mechanism of the erasure: the Schröder House's contemporaries "were more impressed by the bold use of colour, sadly lost to us in the black and white photographs that record the house's original form" (p. 77) — the modern interior's chromatic life disappearing into its documentary record, so that a famously colourful De Stijl interior survives as a white-and-grey icon. The archive as chromophobia's passive agent: not a rhetoric against colour but a technology (black-and-white photography) that simply loses it. See whiteness, schroder-house.

• On the Means by which Repose is Attainable in Decoration (Dresser 1876/2006) — the historical counter-evidence from before the doctrine: a Victorian colour-theorist condemning white ceilings as "almost fatal to the production of those qualities which yield the sense of repose or rest," asserting that "there is no reason whatever why a ceiling should not be blue, or any dark colour," and that "the highest sense of repose… may be realised where the brightest colours are employed" (pp. 86–87). The white interior was thus not the inherited default that modernism merely maintained — it was a convention that design-reform discourse had actively displaced, with dark rooms "often desirable" and white-and-gold furniture "invariably execrable." The whiteness myth of 1932 (see whiteness) reinstated what 1876 had argued against: the strongest evidence that chromophobia's white interior is a contingent convention rather than a historical constant.

• Volatile Architectures (Drobnick 2002/2006) — the generalization the odour open question asks for: the white cube gallery's "pollution-free pristine state… relegates architecture to a purely visual state" (editors, p. 89) — the purging extended from colour to odour, the gallery as engineered anosmia; Drobnick's "circuitous defence of ocularcentrism" (p. 93) names the same prejudice-structure at the level of the senses that Batchelor names at the level of colour: the sense purged as "cosmetic," "mediated," unworthy of serious consideration. The chromophobic purging-moves restated olfactorily: smell as "foreign body" (pollution) and smell as "superficial" (mere effect, mere marketing). See white-cube, olfaction, heterosmia.

• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Does the "aesthetic of printed cloth" — art's drift to decoration when it drifts down the colour scale — supply the missing bridge between colour theory and the Intimus editors' gendered suppression of the decorative?
• Is the all-white contemporary interior (gallery, showroom, minimal home) a continuation of chromophobia or its kitsch self-parody — whiteness as style rather than crusade?
• Batchelor's purging-moves (foreign-body vs cosmetic) — can they be generalized from colour to other senses systematically purged from interiors (odour, noise, texture)?
• Does chromophobia operate differently on the interior than the facade — Le Corbusier built coloured buildings under a white rhetoric; is the interior the site where the rhetoric is most thoroughly realized (Ripolin) precisely because it is least policed by the master narrative?
• Baudrillard's "reign of pastels" — the compromise that neither rejects colour nor permits it to live — suggests a third purging-move beyond Batchelor's two (foreign-body, cosmetic): the simulacral move, colour replaced by its sign. Does the contemporary palette of muted "natural" tones confirm that chromophobia's mature form is not whiteness but pastel?