Color: A Natural History of the Palette (20 page)

The French Realist artist Gustave Courbet always hated that painting and disdainfully called it “
une apparition du spiritisme
”— a spirit medium summoned by clairvoyants. But then four years later he had an affair with fiery Jo, so he may have been biased.

4

Red

Gentlemen, I send you by this same post a little French box of—so called—“safe” colours. We have various scares here about scarlet-pink—girofleé—and carnation-darnation fevers; and I’ve just given this dozen of mortal sins to a young convalescent of six. Will you kindly analyse the temptations and see if they’re—not worse than apples and currents—if only mildly licked? And if really right—will you please make me another box, like this exactly, for ten pence . . .

Letter from JOHN RUSKIN to Messrs. Winsor & Newton, August 9, 1889

The painting should have had a streak of color in a sunset sky, but instead it just shows a gray wash over a dull afternoon. When Joseph Mallord William Turner ran his sable brush swiftly across the canvas of Waves Breaking against the Wind it carried a ruby slick of oil paint where the sun’s last colors were supposed to hit the clouds. But when you see it today the carmine pigment, like the day the artist was imagining, has disappeared into memory.
¹

They didn’t always listen, the Great Masters. Turner had been warned many times not to use paints that faded,
²
but that day in 1835 or so when he was gazing at his workbox thinking of the pink sunset and a violent sea, he chose his brightest red, even though he knew it would not last. Or perhaps he even liked the idea. After all, his paintings celebrate change—his skies and seas are a stormy riot of variety in nature and light—and the notion that the work would alter over time as well as canvas space may have been a delightful personal joke. According to Joyce Townsend, who is senior conservation scientist at Tate Britain in London: “Mr. Winsor, of Winsor & Newton, remonstrated with him about some of the pigments he was buying, saying he knew that these ‘aren’t going to last,’ but Turner told him to mind his own business. He didn’t care.”

Dr. Townsend has spent many hours in the studios and laboratories of the Tate’s Conservation Department poring over canvases and tiny fragments of paint with a microscope. “You learn a surprising amount about artists when you’re that close,” she said. In Turner’s case she has not only learned about his sloppy work practices, but has found that his bequest to the nation is considerably less colorful now than when he left it for future generations of art experts to study. Apparently if a customer marched in brandishing an oil painting or a watercolor that had already faded, Turner would not even deal with the issue. “He once said that if he repainted a watercolor for one person he would have to do it for everyone. And that would be to acknowledge publicly that there was a problem.”

No picture of Turner’s “is seen in perfection a month after it is painted,” wrote the art critic John Ruskin, adding that one painting—
The Opening of the Wallhalla
—had cracked within just eight days of being hung in the heated Royal Academy of Arts for the annual exhibition, because the artist had only just finished painting it. If Turner (who used to leave finished canvases in the damper corners of his studio, letting the rain drizzle on to them and green mold thrive on the egg-based primer, and who even ripped a tear into one painting to make a flap for his seven Manx cats
³
) cared little about eight days, it was unlikely he would have wasted his energy thinking 80 or 180 years ahead. Notoriously careless of posterity, at the moment that his art most mattered to him—which was the very moment it was being created—Turner would use the paint that served his immediate desire. And damn the future.

This particular red, carmine, is really made of blood. For centuries it was the treasure of the Incas and the Aztecs, and for centuries after that it was the treasure of the Spaniards, who guarded their secret crop jealously. It has been used on the robes of kings and cardinals, on the lips of screen goddesses, on the camel bags of nomads and on the canvases of great artists. And if it disappeared the next day many of its users didn’t care, because on the day it is fresh, carmine—or cochineal or crimson; it has many names—is one of the reddest dyes that the natural world has produced.

To understand how this particular color came to be in Turner’s paintbox, as well as in the makeup boxes of women and in the fridges of families around the world today, requires a journey through time and space. The quest for carmine leads to pre-colonial America, to the swaggering Conquistadors who exported it to the world, and into the private diaries of a young French adventurer. But the journey begins, as it should, with the little creature that was once the basis of a big industry. And for me the journey began, to my surprise, on a very short journey indeed: on an underground train in Santiago, Chile.

In the end it
was
the right train—zooming through dark corridors away from Las Condes, “the mountain end” of Santiago. But it didn’t feel right and my friends and I conferred loudly about station names. “Can I help?” came the words, in an Irish accent, from the crowd of dark-clothed Chilean commuters. Alan had blue eyes and a Guernsey sweater, and worked “in agriculture,” he said, once he had confirmed we were going the right way.

“You don’t know anything about cochineal, I suppose?” I asked optimistically. My color quests had not yet started then. But I had heard of the ancient Inca insects and knew that some were being cultivated in the deserts to the north of Chile, and I was curious to learn more. By coincidence it turned out that not only had he heard of cochineal, but his father had helped introduce the industry to the country a decade before. In fact, he added nonchalantly, he was just going to a meeting with the manager of a carmine plant—a man responsible for processing the cochineal into the bright scarlet sludge for which it is so greatly valued. Would I like to come too?

I never reached my planned destination that day—I left my friends to see the seashell collections of poet Pablo Neruda on their own, and instead found myself walking through the hard winter rain of Santiago with a complete stranger, to learn about bug blood. As we walked he talked about an episode in which one plantation owner apparently put poison in a consignment of cochineal from Peru. “Peruvian cochineal is cheaper—labor costs less and the cochineal grows wild so you don’t have all the hassle cultivating it. The only hope for Chile was if the Peruvian stuff was tainted,” he said.

He led me up to his small, grimy office where a man and a woman were peering in 40-watt gloom at the green screens of ancient computers. They told him the carmine man had cancelled, so he strode out again with me following through wintry, soggy streets without an umbrella. We sat in an empty restaurant drinking cold percolated coffee as Alan drew pictures of the cochineal bug on a notepad: an oval cartoon insect the size of a little fingernail, with tiny wavy legs and a big body bursting with potential. “Is it cruel?” I asked him about the cochineal industry in general. “Only for the cactuses: the insects eat them alive.”

Spanish Red, I noted in my diary that night, is usually born between the fog and the frost in places where land is cheap and the prickly pear, on which it is a parasite, grows in abundance on the desert sands. It is a holy blight, a noble rot where the treasure is rubies rather than the gold of dessert wine. It is a deep, intensely colored organic red, but it will never be used for Buddhist robes because there is too much death in it. In the twenty-first century women around the world coat their lips with insect blood, we apparently dab our cheeks with it, and in the United States it is one of few permitted red constituents of eye shadow. “And finally,” I wrote with a happy frisson, “Cherry Coke is full of it; it is color additive E120.”

THE PLANTATION

A week later I took a short flight to the Colores de Chile plantation in the Elqui Valley near La Serena—an attractive colonial town 350 kilometers north of the capital. While Santiago had been icy and wet, La Serena was dry and perfectly spring warm. I was picked up by the station manager, Javier Lavin Carrusco, in his new four-wheel-drive. As we headed toward the mountains, the air was clear and smelled of eucalyptus. It seemed we had passed several miles of umbrella-like papaya trees, chirimoya orchards and vineyards when he turned right onto an unmarked driveway and we bumped our way past gorse underbrush. “There,” he said, and waved his hands dramatically toward the gently sloping hillsides, spreading out into the distance. “That’s the first infestation: the pregnancy.” Everywhere there were prickly pears, huddling sullenly and cruelly together in long rows, 45,000 of them per hectare. I imagined a spaghetti western scene with the horses rearing up and the most cowardly cowboy saying: “We can’t go on through this goddamn country: let’s turn back.”

Javier switched off the engine and we got out. From the sunny side of the hill it looked as if it had been snowing in the desert— everything was clouded in white flour. On the shadowy side the thick, flat nopal leaves looked almost healthy. The noisy picaflor bird flew from plant to plant: “It’s greedy, it likes the cactus flower,” he said. He scooped a tiny white creature—big as a bedbug—and put it on my hand. “Squeeze,” he said, and I squeezed, and for a moment the creature’s hard body resisted, and then it popped like a piece of bubble wrap, leaving a thick dark scarlet stain on my palm. “These are the women,” he said, indicating the fat ones, covered in a white down, one of which I had just killed. “And this is the man.” The “men,” thin, ghost-like creatures, have even shorter lives than the females—they live for only two or three days, using their energy to fly through the air and fertilize their species. We looked up to the mountains, haloed with wisps of ice cloud. “You have a virgin nose,” Javier said, which bewildered me until I realized he was talking about the fresh fall of snows on the Andes.

Prickly pear

Prickly pear, or “nopal” as the Spaniards call it, is easy to grow in the right conditions—25 degrees Centigrade, little rain—but it is temperamental. Two degrees more or less and it dies. The leaves propagate without human interference: they fall off naturally and their tiny prickles turn into roots. The nopal even waters itself. The wide surface of the leaf is its own water bowl—it draws the dew in the night, and drinks it during the day. If they are left to their own devices the insects kill the plants: it is the farm manager’s job to strike a balance between letting the cochineals grow to their maximum size and keeping the cactuses alive. “In two weeks we will go through this field with an air compressor and collect the cochineal,” Javier explained, when we stopped on another hill. “The plants will have two to three months’ rest, and then we will infest them again,” he said, showing me one of the little boxes full of pregnant insects that would be tucked under each prickly plant. They would live for five months before collection time came round again.

Harvesting the cochineal—or “grana” as it is locally called—is intensive work. The plantation employs fourteen human laborers per hectare: we watched them silently trudging along the rows with their compressors, shooting the live snow into buckets. They made a surreal scene, with their hoods and gloves and glasses, and the constant hiss of the compressors echoing around the fields like the soundtrack of a science fiction film. The protection was necessary: one of those fine spines in the eye and a worker can go blind; even on the skin it is difficult to remove. “We’re used to the prickles round here,” Javier said, flicking at his hand.

The owner of the plantation was Antonio Bustamente. He appeared as if from nowhere, just as I was taking a photograph of a woman scooping the insects off the leaves. I looked around and suddenly he was there. With his keen eyes, charisma and jaunty panama hat, he looked like an adventurer. And he probably was. He had lived in Africa for many years, he told me in immaculate English. Then in the 1970s he moved to Peru, starting a business selling tractors. But in 1982 El Niño arrived, and that mischievous weather urchin put all the local farmers into terrible debt. “I was wiped out: they couldn’t pay me,” Antonio said. But one farmer could pay him—in land. He gave Antonio a tract in the Peruvian desert. It had only a small well and brackish water. The only thing that could grow