Colour Hierarchy

Definition

The colour hierarchy is the rationalized form of chromophobia: colour allowed into a work of art or architecture, but only under a classification that subordinates it to form. In Batchelor's account, Le Corbusier and Ozenfant's Purist manifesto (1920) concedes "when one says painting, inevitably he says colour" — but in the Purist universe colour is a problem, a "perilous agent" with the "properties of shock" and a "formidable fatality," which often "destroys or disorganises" art addressed "to the elevated faculties of the mind." "Colour, then, must be controlled. It must be ordered and classified; a hierarchy must be established."

The Purist solution: three 'scales' of colour —

• The major scale: 'ochre yellows, reds, earths, white, black, ultramarine blue' and derivatives — 'strong' and 'stable', giving 'unity' and 'balance'; these colours are 'constructive', employed 'in all the great periods' (and almost exactly the colours of the 1925 Pavilion).
• The dynamic scale: 'disturbing elements' — citron yellow, oranges, vermilions, other 'animated', 'agitated' colours.
• The transitional scale: 'the madders, emerald green, and all the lakes' — simply 'not of construction'.

The scale's rhetorical function: "the further one drifts down the scale of colour, the further one drifts from the 'architectural aesthetic' to the 'aesthetic of printed cloth' – that is, the further one drifts from art to mere decoration." Cézanne's 'error' was accepting "without examination the attractive offer of the colour-vendor"; "sensory jubilations of the paint tube" belong "to the clothes-dyers." The hierarchy's real content is not cosmological: "It doesn't much matter whether this hierarchy of colours is coherent… What matters is the show of force: the rhetorical subordination of colour to the rule of line and the higher concerns of the mind. No longer intoxicating, narcotic or orgasmic, colour is learned, ordered, subordinated and tamed. Broken."

The hierarchy's dependence paradox: form "comes first and everything else should be subordinated to it" — yet the subordinated colour is what secures form's supreme value: "my house does not seem white unless I have disposed the active forces of colours and values in the appropriate places" — "White must be whiter than white, and to achieve that, colour must be added."

Key Thinkers

• David Batchelor — the hierarchy's analyst: the show of force as the hierarchy's real content; colour "broken."
• Le Corbusier & Amédée Ozenfant — the hierarchy's authors ('Purism', 1920): the three scales, the colour-vendor and clothes-dyers, Cézanne's 'error' (Ozenfant not paged — see log).
• Charles Blanc — the academic ancestor Batchelor invokes: the earlier theorist who was "forced by his own logic to recognize the presence of colour in a work" and subordinated it similarly (discussed in the source, not paged — see log).

Related Concepts

• Chromophobia — the prejudice the hierarchy rationalizes: colour not abolished but controlled, classified, broken.
• Whiteness — the hierarchy's telos: colour added to make the white house "seem white."
• The Decorative — the hierarchy's bottom rung: the "aesthetic of printed cloth," art's drift to "mere decoration" — the point where colour becomes interior-design work.
• Style — the 'major scale' as the 'constructive' colours "employed in all the great periods": the hierarchy naturalizes a palette into tradition.
• Modernism — the hierarchy as modernism's characteristic compromise: not abolition of colour but its technocratic management.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — colour's passage from moral symbol to functional value: the traditional system's "psychological and moral overtones"; the bourgeois "tints and shades" and zero-colour dignity; the "calculated balance between hot and cold tones"; and colour as "an abstract conceptual instrument of calculation" (see atmospheric-values, chromophobia).

• Chromophobia (Batchelor 2000/2006) — the three Purist scales (p. 35); the colour-vendor, the clothes-dyers, Cézanne's 'error' (p. 35); "the show of force: the rhetorical subordination of colour to the rule of line" (p. 36); "White must be whiter than white" (p. 36).

• Structures of Atmosphere (Baudrillard 1968/2006) — the sociological account of the same rationalization at the interior's scale: traditional colour, bound by "psychological and moral overtones" and "circumscribed by form" (p. 37), is stripped of "moral and symbolic status in favour of an abstract quality which makes their systematization and interplay possible" (p. 40); the abstract shade system then organizes colour as calculated sign-value — the "calculated balance between hot and cold tones" (p. 39) — which is the consumer-system counterpart of the Purist hierarchy: colour not subordinated to form but systematized as atmospheric value.

• A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — the hierarchy's motive named from the conventions side: "The repeated efforts to develop a definitive science of color effects, either functionally, linguistically, or psychologically are all efforts to excise such subjectivities from architecture" (p. 61) — the Purist scales as one instance of the science program whose target is taste ("affiliated with intuition, irrationality, and the feminine"); and the persistent gap between practice and discourse — "Colors are selected and applied in projects everywhere with little of the critical discussion received by the forms to which they are applied" (p. 61). Braham also supplies the palette-history counter-model: nineteenth-century structural polychromy, where "the facts of endurance and weathering draw a line precisely between colorful natural materials and applied colors" (p. 58). See natural-finishes.

• On the Means by which Repose is Attainable in Decoration (Dresser 1876/2006) — the pre-Purist alternative regime of colour management: Dresser admits the primaries at full strength ("blue, red, and yellow may be used upon a wall… either alone, or together with white, gold, or black, and be so mingled that the general effect will be perfectly neutral") and manages them by balance to neutrality rather than by classification — no scale, no forbidden tints, only proportion ("the yellow being in relation to the blue and the red as two is to one") and mass ("in very small masses"), with the result "refined and glowing in effect." Where Purism subordinates colour to form, Dresser sums colour to rest — and cites his own treatise (Principles of Decorative Design, 1873) as the exact science behind the proportion. A colour-science fifty years before the scales, with a different logic: see neutral-colour-effect.

• 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 major/dynamic/transitional hierarchy have any afterlife in modern interior colour practice (colour consultants, colour systems), or only in painting historiography?
• Batchelor compares the Purist hierarchy to Charles Blanc's colour cosmology — is the hierarchy a distinctively modern repetition of an academic structure, or a new form?
• The hierarchy's dependence paradox ("colour must be added" for the house to "seem white") — is this the same structure Venturi later names as modernism's "unadmitted decoration" (see decorated-shed)?
• Where do the 'disturbing' colours of the dynamic scale live if not in great painting — is the dynamic scale precisely the palette of the commercial interior, the shopfront, the clothes-dyer's trade?