Color: A Natural History of the Palette (11 page)

There were several big foreign buyers pushing up the price, but every time they did there was a phone bidder who matched them until it reached 786,625 Australian dollars and the hammer came down. As everyone was speculating on who the mystery buyer was, Wally Caruana of the National Gallery of Australia slipped back into the reserved seating section. He must have been shaken by his own actions, but from a telephone in the downstairs bar he had just paid more money than anybody had ever paid before for an Aboriginal artwork in order to keep the ochre painting (quickly dubbed by the local press
All That Big Dough Coming from Topside
) for Australia.

The modern art movement that had started in a place that wasn’t loved, pioneered by people who weren’t valued, had come a long way from the early days of Papunya. People who buy Aboriginal art are looking for many things: for movement and texture and tonal hue and stories. But they are also, I believe (in this coming together of paint, canvas and of the patterns made by people sitting under humpies in the desert and surrounded by dogs and four-wheel-drives but with glory in their minds) looking for something else. They are looking for country. They are looking for the crock of earth at the beginning of the Rainbow Serpent. And yet they don’t have to look so carefully anymore to see how it glitters.

2

Black and Brown

“As has been said, you begin with drawing.”

CENNINO CENNINI

“Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit and a little whitening and some coal dust and I will paint you a luminous picture if you give me time to gradate my mud and subdue my dust.”

JOHN RUSKIN

At first I found it odd to include black or brown in a book called Color. After all, one thing that had intrigued me originally was the brightness of my quest, and how our magpie needs for shiny colors had inspired incredible journeys. And anyway, I thought, there probably aren’t many interesting stories connected with people burning lumps of wood to make charcoal crayons, or collecting mud for dyeing. But I was wrong. As I read more, I began to hear intriguing stories about the “non-colors.” Of how black dye used to be sold by retired pirates in the Caribbean, how “pencil lead” was once so rare that armed security guards in northern England used to strip-search miners as they left after a long day in the heart of a hill, how white paint was a poison (but tantalizingly sweet tasting), and how both brown and black paints were once said to be made from dead bodies.

So before I set out on my travels to see Afghan jewels on a Virgin’s scarf, to enjoy the richness of an iodine sunset or to discover the secrets of lost green vases, I went first to the land of shadows. Every part of life has them, and in art, perhaps more obviously than anywhere else, it’s the shadows and the shit which make the light bits believable. “Ashes and decomposition” was how I described the non-colors dismissively to a conservator friend, before my research had really started. “Exactly,” she said with satisfaction. “Sums up the painter’s art perfectly . . . Have you watched an artist start a painting?” Of course, I protested. “Then watch again.” So I did. In rural Shropshire I watched the icon painter Aidan Hart transfer his pencil sketch of the head of Christ to a gessoed panel— by tracing it onto the back of paper that had been rubbed with brown ochre; in Indonesia I watched artists sketch with charcoal before adding any paint to their Hindu story designs; in China I watched a calligrapher painstakingly grind his pine-soot ink onto his grandfather’s ink stone before even selecting the paper he was to write on; in the National Gallery in London I stood for a long time in the near-darkness before Leonardo da Vinci’s full-size cartoon of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, drawn in charcoal and black and white chalk—soft materials to smooth in the highlights of the Christ Child’s shoulder and the tenderness of a mother’s face.

And each time I marvelled at how so many paintings begin with a period of alert attention accompanied by the careful rubbing of dirt—earth or mud or dust or soot or rock—onto a piece of cloth or paper or wood or wall. The bright colors and the translucence come later, and when the highlights are added they always need the lowlights or shadows to make them seem real. Sometimes the drawings are even better than the paintings. Giorgio Vasari
¹
wrote vividly about how sketches, “born in a moment from the fire of art,” have a quality that finished works sometimes lack. Perhaps it is simply the spontaneity, but perhaps it is also the effect of black, gray and white which makes a sketch seem so complete. Just as white light contains all the colors, so—as I would discover in my travels through the inkwell—black paint can incorporate the spectrum too.

It was this theory—that “black” happens when an object is absorbing all the colored wavelengths—which led many of the Impressionist painters to stop using black pigments in favor of mixtures of red, yellow and blue. “There is no black in nature” was the popular refrain of this group of nineteenth-century artists, whose intention was to capture the fleeting effects of light in their paintings. In Claude Monet’s
Gare Saint-Lazare
, for example, the pitch-dark locomotives in his busy station are actually made up of extremely vivid colors—including bright vermilion red, French ultramarine blue, and emerald green. Conservators at the National Gallery of Art in London report that in this painting Monet used almost no black pigment at all.
²

THE FIRST PAINTING

According to one Western classical legend, the first paint was black and the first artist female. When Pliny the Elder was writing his
Natural History
—a summary of everything available in the Roman marketplace and quite a few other things besides—he told a story of how the origin of art was found in epic love. After all, what better inspiration for art is there than passion? According to Pliny one of the first artists was a young woman in the town of Corinth in Greece who one evening was weepily saying good-bye to her lover before he set out on a long journey. Suddenly, between impassioned embraces, she noticed his shadow on the wall, cast by the light of a candle. So, spontaneously, she reached out for a piece of charcoal from the fire and filled in the pattern. I imagine her kissing the image and thinking that in this way something of his physical presence would be fixed close to her while his beloved body was far away in the distant Mediterranean.

As an origin theory it is a mythic image that has reappeared in paintings and drawings throughout the centuries since. It particularly appealed to the Georgians and Victorians, with their fashions both for cut-paper silhouettes and stories of desperate love.
³
In 1775 the Scottish portrait artist David Allan painted
The Origin of Painting
, showing a very flirty lady sitting on her film-star boyfriend’s knee as she fills in his profile on the wall. Her flowing robes have slipped to reveal her right breast, the sight of which is evidently keeping the young man occupied while she gets on with the serious business of the first portrait. Quite apart from the toga effect, it is a deliciously challenging image—of using something that has already burned out to symbolize a love you want to last forever.

THE OTHER EARLIEST PAINTINGS

Pliny had no access to anything like our modern theories about the world’s earliest paintings, which suggest that the first human artists were inspired by things like winter boredom, techniques of hunting lore, sacred ritual practices or even just by the simple joys of illustrated storytelling. The proof was there if he or anyone else had wanted to find it—beneath the Niaux cave paintings in the French Pyrenees, for example, the imprint of a Roman centurion’s sandal testifies that the Neolithic paintings had been seen by at least one man in the classical world. But the scholarly world was not, apparently, ready for anything more than Pliny’s charming mixture of anecdote and mythology, and the first of Europe’s major prehistoric cave-painting galleries would not be discovered by the academic world for nearly two millennia.

However, if this opinionated Roman natural historian had been given the chance to move forward through time, and witness the discovery of the Altamira caves in northern Spain, for example, I think he would have felt a little smug. He was not necessarily accurate about the inspiration for early Spanish paintings. There is a lot more hunting than lovemaking in these caves, although interestingly some Swedish petroglyphs of a slightly later date contained so many pictures of men with impressively large erections that their documenter, Carl Georg Brunius, had to consult his colleagues about whether or not the mid-nineteenth century audience was ready to see these early examples of Swedish porn.
⁴
The colleagues were divided on the matter. But Pliny was at least right about the painting materials. Ochre may have been undeniably the first colored paint, but even the earliest artists usually liked to draw their designs first with charcoal—sometimes just to make sure they got the shapes right before they committed to coloring them in, and sometimes to give their works powerful outlines. And if it was not necessarily a woman who had scribbled the early images with a lump of burned wood (and we do not know that it was not), it was at least a girl who discovered the extraordinary caves at Altamira.

In 1868 a hunter, stalking birds or deer one day in the area near Santander between the Atlantic Ocean and the mountains of northern Spain, stumbled across the entrance to a series of caves. After Modesto Peres told his landlord about it they led several amateur expeditions—lots of topcoats and tall candles—into a 20-meter-long cavern with a sloping roof and an uneven floor. There they found signs in the form of bear bones and fire ashes, intriguing trash from ancient human (and animal) habitation. But the real treasure of this long, rectangular gallery was only discovered eleven years later, in 1879: 1,800 years to the summer since Pliny suffocated under the most infamous flow of black gunge in history, in his hometown of Pompeii.

And if on that particular day Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola had been able to find a babysitter for his eight-year-old daughter Maria and had not taken her out of the afternoon sunshine and into a strange and rather dangerous playroom, no one might have found the treasure for several decades. Later, in his darker moments, he must have wished that it had not been noticed and that his daughter had remained silent.

De Sautuola was an aristocrat, a hunter and a landowner, but most of all he was a man who liked finding things. His eyes were always fixed on the ground, checking for things that did not fit, things that had been introduced by humans and not by nature, and which could explain the history of the world in new ways. He must have been thrilled when his tenant found the cave entrance. It would have seemed a God-given opportunity to test out some of the theories of evolution and human history that no doubt he, like the rest of European intellectual society, was debating with his friends and associates at every opportunity.

So he went looking for information. Just a few minutes before de Sautuola’s life changed, the forty-eight-year-old was sitting on the cave floor, busily looking for Paleolithic bear droppings, early meal middens or other signs of ancient habitation. His daughter—who, from a photograph of her held at the Altamira museum, seems to have been a pretty child with short dark hair, who might have looked boyish were it not for her long earrings—was running around the cavern, inventing her own games in the torchlight. Suddenly, according to the well-told legend of the discovery, she stopped, and squealed in surprise, “
Mira, Papa, bueyes
”—Look, Papa, oxen. De Sautuola stood up, and he must have exclaimed too—although probably with stronger language. Because there, above them both, the ceiling was covered with huge red-and-black bison thundering across a stone field.

The charcoal of Altamira was applied in wide, confident sweeps—simple bold lines that double up as shadow and outline— and then red and yellow ochre were painted on, either with a brush or perhaps with soft chamois leather pads. There were twelve complete bison, two headless ones (powerful nevertheless, looking more as if the heads had disappeared into another dimension than that the beasts had been decapitated), three boars, three red deer looking rather bedazzled and a wild horse. There is a sense of speed and energy about them that suggests they were created quickly and without hesitation. And the bison in particular— each two meters long or more—are bristling with muscle and power. Vasari would have approved of the energy of these sketches.

De Sautuola and his adult friends had walked beneath them a dozen times and never looked up. Before that afternoon they had perhaps not been seen by human eyes for 15,000 years. They would have been drawn by men or perhaps women (several of them: the styles vary widely) by the light of burning torches that were vital not only for light but for heat. It was the end of the Ice Age in Europe and
Homo sapiens
would have been living and hunting—and painting, of course—in a very cool world indeed.

On that warm day in 1879 I imagine de Sautuola shivering with the premonition that this might be the greatest ever discovery of ancient art so far. Yet I wonder whether anything forewarned him that it would also spell his own ruin. He died just nine years later at the age of fifty-seven, a broken man accused of fraud and forgery because the paintings of bison created with charcoal and red ochre were deemed simply too beautiful to have been made by “savages.”

It is curious how artifacts often seem to be found just when history is almost ready for them. Since the publication of
The Origin of Species
in 1859, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories had swept through Western thought. Many people were suddenly open to the notion that humans may have been on earth for longer than the 4,000 years or so the Bible allowed them to be, and fossils and prehistory were even more of a fad among scholars than dinosaurs are among schoolchildren today. Yet this was in the years before carbon dating, and after publishing his amateur pamphlet on the findings at Altamira, de Sautuola had to live with what an English-language guidebook to the caves described as “a veritable shower of misunderstandings,” as well as taunts and accusations. Some gossips even suggested the paintings had been executed by a mute painter called Retier, who had been de Sautuola’s houseguest some time earlier. The artist’s inability to express his denial verbally would no doubt have been agonizing both to himself and his host. Twenty years later the academic world was forced to eat its archaeological top hat, and admit that the paintings were not forgeries. Maria, by then an adult, would no doubt have taken some pleasure in that, although having seen her father’s suffering before his death she would almost certainly have had mixed feelings about the whole episode.