Chromophobia

Author: David Batchelor Year: 2000 (extract reprinted in Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006) Source type: chapter (extract from Chromophobia, Reaktion Books, London, 2000, pp. 21–23, 44–49; Intimus reprint pp. 31–36) Raw file: raw/chapters/batchelor-2006-chromophobia.md

Summary

Batchelor argues that Western culture, since Antiquity, has practised an "extreme prejudice" against colour — chromophobia — a prejudice "so all-embracing and generalized that, at one time or another, it has enrolled just about every other prejudice in its service." The prejudice operates through two moves: colour is assigned to 'foreign' bodies (the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer, the pathological) or relegated to the superficial, supplementary and cosmetic. The extract's case study is Le Corbusier: Batchelor shows that the rhetoric of order, purity and truth was inscribed in a pure, blinding white surface — while, as Mark Wigley has observed, almost all of Le Corbusier's buildings were actually coloured. Whiteness is not an empirical fact but a myth, "an aesthetic fantasy… so intense that it produces a blindness to colour, even when colour is literally in front of your face." The Intimus editors note that Batchelor's text "evidences how this sense of order remains a persistent factor in contemporary popular and design culture particularly in interiors."

Key Claims

• Chromophobia is a named cultural prejudice: "This loathing of colour, this fear of corruption through colour, needs a name: chromophobia" (p. 32). Its manifest loathing masks a fear of "contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable."
• The prejudice is systematic and long-lived: "in the West, since Antiquity, colour has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished and degraded" (p. 32); "generations of philosophers, artists, art historians and cultural theorists" have kept it "alive, warm, fed and groomed."
• Chromophobia enlists other prejudices: it "has enrolled just about every other prejudice in its service" (p. 32) — colour is coded as the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological.
• The purging of colour is accomplished in two ways: colour as property of a 'foreign' body (alien, dangerous), or colour relegated to the superficial, supplementary, inessential, cosmetic (trivial). "Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both. (It is typical of prejudices to conflate the sinister and the superficial.)" (p. 32)
• The opening prose-poem stages a sealed white interior — "No exchange, no seepage, no spillage. Rather: isolation, confinement" (p. 31) — a house whose "shutting-off began to speak more and more about what it excluded than what it contained": the analytical method is to ask why exclusion matters. "If colour doesn't matter, why does its abolition matter so much?" (p. 31)
• Colour has been bound up "with the fate of Western culture": it "mattered" to Melville, Conrad, Pater, Winckelmann, Le Corbusier — "it mattered because it got in the way. And it still matters because it still does" (p. 32).
• Le Corbusier's early writings had no white/colour opposition: "White was the precondition for colour; colour was intensified by its proximity to white; there was no sense of opposition between the two; they were co-dependent and co-operative" (p. 33). "The separation of whiteness and colour would come later."
• The 1920 crusade: in The Decorative Art of Today (1925) Le Corbusier declares "It is time to crusade for whitewash and Diogenes" (p. 33); "The architect was done with drugs… In their place: Order. Reason. Purity. Truth. Architecture. Whitewash."
• Le Corbusier aligned himself with Loos's evangelical whiteness ("Soon the streets of the city will shine like white walls! Like Zion, the Holy City" — Loos quoted p. 33): "Heaven is white; that which gets closest to God – the Parthenon, the Idea, Purity, Cleanliness – also sheds its colour" (p. 33).
• The Loos/Le Corbusier difference matters: "for Le Corbusier, ornament, clutter, glitter and colour were not so much signs of primitive 'degeneracy,' as they had been for Loos, as they were the particularly modern form of degeneration that we now call kitsch" (p. 33). Le Corbusier never attacked the authentic 'simplicity' of folk cultures ("Whitewash has been associated with human habitation since the birth of mankind" — quoted p. 33); the problem was modern industrialized ornamentation and colouring, which "reeked of confusion, disorder, dishonesty, imbalance, subservience, narcosis and dirt."
• The Law of Ripolin makes whiteness a moral technology: "Every citizen is required to replace his hangings, his damasks, his wall-papers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white ripolin… Then comes inner cleanness… When you are surrounded with shadows and dark corners you are at home only as far as the hazy edges of the darkness your eyes cannot penetrate. You are not master in your own house. Once you have put ripolin on your walls you will be master of your own house" (p. 34). White is "clean, clear, healthy, moral, rational, masterful."
• The whiteness myth was period-wide: van Doesburg — "WHITE is the spiritual colour of our times… our era is one of perfection, purity and certitude… WHITE pure white" (p. 34).
• The Wigley paradox: Le Corbusier's manifesto building, the Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau (1925), "was actually painted in ten different colours," and Le Corbusier "only ever made one white building" — yet there is "a self-imposed blindness… shared by almost all of the dominant historiographies… Colour is detached from the master narrative" of architecture (Wigley, quoted p. 34).
• Whiteness is a fantasy, not a fact: "we are not dealing with something as simple as white things and white surfaces… Rather, we are in the realm of whiteness. White as myth, as an aesthetic fantasy, a fantasy so strong that it summons up negative hallucinations, so intense that it produces a blindness to colour, even when colour is literally in front of your face" (p. 35).
• Purist colour theory establishes a hierarchy: three 'scales' of colour (major, dynamic, transitional); the major scale (ochre yellows, reds, earths, white, black, ultramarine) is 'strong', 'stable', 'constructive'; the dynamic scale is made of 'disturbing elements'; the transitional scale is 'not of construction' (p. 35).
• The hierarchy's real function is rhetorical subordination: "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" (p. 35). Cézanne's 'error' was accepting "the attractive offer of the colour-vendor"; "sensory jubilations of the paint tube" were left "to the clothes-dyers."
• Subordination inverts into dependence: "in a true and durable plastic work, it is form which comes first and everything else should be subordinated to it" — yet Le Corbusier concedes "my house does not seem white unless I have disposed the active forces of colours and values in the appropriate places" (quoted p. 36). "White must be whiter than white, and to achieve that, colour must be added."
• The verdict: "No longer intoxicating, narcotic or orgasmic, colour is learned, ordered, subordinated and tamed. Broken." (p. 36)
• What matters "is the show of force: the rhetorical subordination of colour to the rule of line and the higher concerns of the mind" (p. 36) — not the internal coherence of any colour cosmology.

Connections

Concepts: chromophobia (the named prejudice), whiteness (white as myth/fantasy), colour-hierarchy (Purist scales; subordination of colour to line), kitsch (Le Corbusier's modern degeneration vs Loos's primitive degeneracy), architectural-ornament ("the flourish, the stain, the distracting din of colours and ornaments"), the-decorative (the "aesthetic of printed cloth" — art vs mere decoration), gender-and-the-interior (colour's 'foreign bodies': the feminine, the vulgar, the queer), modernism (the whiteness myth of modern architecture's historiography), tabula-rasa (Ripolin: "no action before thought"), inside-outside-dialectic (the sealed inside-out interior that "spoke about what it excluded"), sterility-of-perfection (the white regime's interior twin), ornament-vs-purity (debate).

Authors: batchelor-david, le-corbusier, loos-adolf, taylor-mark-preston-julieanna (editors of the reprint; their introduction frames the text's persistence "particularly in interiors").

Debates: ornament-vs-purity — colour as the purity position's other; the whiteness myth as the purity position's self-blinding.

Related source notes: source-notes/deyong-2018-history-style-modern-interior (Loos/Le Corbusier interior-exterior schism), source-notes/baldwin-2006-sterility-perfection-rule-breaker (the decorator's anti-perfection pole against the same regime of order), source-notes/webb-2018-inside-out (the inside-out interior as boundary riddle), source-notes/bachelard-2006-dialectics-outside-inside (the inside/outside dialectic the opening reworks), source-notes/taylor-preston-2006-proximities (the anthology's framing of ornament's suppression as gendered).

Direct Quotes

"No exchange, no seepage, no spillage. Rather: isolation, confinement. But this shutting-off began to speak more and more about what it excluded than what it contained." (p. 31)

"If colour is unimportant, I began to wonder, why is it so important to exclude it so forcefully? If colour doesn't matter, why does its abolition matter so much?" (p. 31)

"In the West, since Antiquity, colour has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished and degraded." (p. 32)

"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. This loathing of colour, this fear of corruption through colour, needs a name: chromophobia." (p. 32)

"In the first, 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. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic." (p. 32)

"Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both. (It is typical of prejudices to conflate the sinister and the superficial.)" (p. 32)

"Either way, colour is routinely excluded from the higher concerns of the Mind. It is other to the higher values of Western culture." (p. 32)

"White was the precondition for colour; colour was intensified by its proximity to white; there was no sense of opposition between the two; they were co-dependent and co-operative." (p. 33)

"It is time to crusade for whitewash and Diogenes." — Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, quoted (p. 33)

"The architect was done with drugs. He had been off them since at least 1920; the Great War had seen to that. In their place: Order. Reason. Purity. Truth. Architecture. Whitewash." (p. 33)

"Heaven is white; that which gets closest to God – the Parthenon, the Idea, Purity, Cleanliness – also sheds its colour." (p. 33)

"But for Le Corbusier, ornament, clutter, glitter and colour were not so much signs of primitive 'degeneracy,' as they had been for Loos, as they were the particularly modern form of degeneration that we now call kitsch." (p. 33)

"Every citizen is required to replace his hangings, his damasks, his wall-papers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white ripolin. His home is made clean. There are no more dirty, dark corners. Everything is shown as it is." — Le Corbusier, quoted (p. 34)

"When you are surrounded with shadows and dark corners you are at home only as far as the hazy edges of the darkness your eyes cannot penetrate. You are not master in your own house. Once you have put ripolin on your walls you will be master of your own house." — Le Corbusier, quoted (p. 34)

"WHITE is the spiritual colour of our times, the clearness which directs all our actions… our era is one of perfection, purity and certitude. WHITE it includes everything." — Theo van Doesburg, quoted (p. 34)

"there is 'a self-imposed blindness … shared by almost all of the dominant historiographies … Colour is detached from the master narrative' of architecture" — Mark Wigley, quoted (p. 34)

"Rather, we are in the realm of whiteness. White as myth, as an aesthetic fantasy, a fantasy so strong that it summons up negative hallucinations, so intense that it produces a blindness to colour, even when colour is literally in front of your face." (p. 35)

"'when one says painting, inevitably he says colour.' And in the Purist universe, colour is a problem, a 'perilous agent;' it has the 'properties of shock' and a 'formidable fatality'" (p. 35)

"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." (p. 35)

"Such 'sensory jubilations of the paint tube' were best left 'to the clothes-dyers,' because while painting could not be made without colour, 'in a true and durable plastic work, it is form which comes first and everything else should be subordinated to it.'" (p. 35)

"To tell the truth, my house does not seem white unless I have disposed the active forces of colours and values in the appropriate places." — Le Corbusier, quoted (p. 36)

"White must be whiter than white, and to achieve that, colour must be added." (p. 36)

"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." (p. 36)

Open Questions

• Batchelor names the two purging-moves (foreign-body vs cosmetic relegation) — do both operate simultaneously in contemporary interior design culture (all-white minimalism as both 'pure' and 'cosmetic')?
• The extract analyses Le Corbusier's rhetoric rather than the experience of coloured buildings — what does the tenant of the ten-colour Pavilion interior actually see, and does interior inhabitation dissolve the whiteness myth?
• How does the "aesthetic of printed cloth" (art's drift to decoration) connect to the Intimus editors' gendered suppression of the decorative — is chromophobia the colour-theory wing of the same prejudice taylor-mark-preston-julieanna diagnose?
• Wigley's White Walls, Designer Dresses (1995) is the extract's key secondary source — is the blindness "shared by almost all of the dominant historiographies" still operative in contemporary histories of the modern interior?
• Does Batchelor's class-of-prejudice claim (colour coded feminine/vulgar/queer) hold for the white modern interior specifically, given that the whiteness regime targeted feminine-coded interiors (hangings, damasks, wall-papers) for demolition?