Colour Me Thrilled: Art and Nature in Stuttgart and Innsbruck
Two paintings, a castle, and some wildlife: how the book I read at breakfast is changing how I think about writing and looking.
“Hot air balloons? Too expensive. Giant slingshot? Too conspicuous. Enormous wooden horse? Too Greek!"
In Pixar’s 2001 movie Monsters, Inc., a human child accidentally rocks up in Monstropolis, a parallel universe in which monsters are normal and human children are a terrifying prospect. Mike Wazowski, a monster shaped like a giant green marble with matchsticks for limbs, cannot imagine how to get the child out of the city undetected.
I’m writing this hastily while on the road. My Scrivener bucket for pitch and newsletter ideas contains about eleventy million documents in themed folders. Yet none of them seem to be completable this week. To paraphrase Mike Wazowski, each is too long, too difficult, or too Greek (well, too arcane) for newsletter number 13 (the curse is for real).
What to do? I returned to my newsletter’s About page to see what I had promised everyone in November. Aha - yes, a zany buffet of adventures on the road and in the archive; arts and culture reflections and recommendations; and the inner workings of my mind as I experimented in new literary styles and genres. Apparently I can tick “inner workings” off this week already.
What’s happening /re-learning to write
My anonymous peer review reports are in! My fervent thanks go out to the readers. Their feedback is just what I need to see the manuscript afresh, to articulate more explicitly the stakes of my book, and to deepen and clarify the argument. Also in hand are Track Changes feedback comments from friends (thank you!). Working through these responses makes revising this book feel like a conversation, not a monologue.
Takes and recs: James Fox’s The World According to Colour: A Cultural History
A book in my luggage this week is The World According to Colour: A Cultural History, by the art historian James Fox. I had first flicked through the book in the brimming-with-history Gower Street branch of Waterstones in London. It was, I thought, a potential comparable book for my next book project - one of the answers to the “next to what will your book be shelved in the store?” question in a book proposal.
And then I noticed that The World According to Colour moved across space and time from one paragraph to the next, with occasional references to novels and movies, in a fashion that was immediately recognizable.
This is something that happens in the first draft of Humans: A Monstrous History, my current manuscript! While I had established some time ago that yes, the general layout of my chapters was fine and far from unprecedented, something about The World According to Colour or the moment when I ran across it filled me with relief and validation.
Perhaps what writers fear the most is realizing that that long manuscript needs to be totally re-thought, re-structured, re-researched, and re-written in a different voice. I love re-everything-ing writing, but… it’s one thing for revision to happen incrementally, and another to decide, all at once, that nothing in the bucket of words that had sweated out of your brain is usable.
A readable book on a totally different topic that had a similar overarching structure to Humans meant that there was no reason to wonder whether to re-do EVERYTHING. My own basic structure was fine! I could save time, energy, and bandwidth for the next level down from “is this a reasonable structure?”
But The World According to Colour is more than just a structural example for Humans or even a “comparable book” for the book after Humans. It is a book worth reading cover to cover on its own terms. Fox has penned a lyrical, absorbing account of how cultures have thought about, sought out, manufactured, and made things in seven different colours.
One morning last week I read the chapter on the colour purple over breakfast. Purple was much-valued in classical antiquity. It was expensive, unpleasant, and difficult to transform into a pigment (think smelly vats of rotting shellfish). Moreover, purple is an intriguing (and I would say delightfully category-bendingly monstrous) continuum from red to blue, one that bypasses the yellows and greens that lie between them in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. As Fox relates, during the nineteenth century, all manner of industrially produced hues of purple began to enter the market for the rich and then for the middling sorts in Europe.
Later that day, in the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart, I came across this Otto Dix painting: “Portrait of the industrialist Dr. Julius Hesse with Color Sample” (1926).
Connecting Fox’s vivid narrative on the entangled rise of industrial chemistry, consumer taste, and shades of purple with this painting - and with the crimsony-burgundy sample in Hesse’s hand - was an unexpected thrill. It … real! Perhaps some of the painting’s first viewers would have looked at that scrap of paint and remembered how the world had gone purple in their lifetimes?
I haven’t had time to research this, but surely Dix’s choice of paint colour was no accident. He also painted an iconic portrait of the dancer Anita Berber in the same year. This work celebrates another purply hue (even the same hue?) at the red end of the purpliverse.
Dix had seen battlefield action at the start of World War I. It had given him a nervous breakdown. He had painted harrowing paintings of battlefields and of urban chaos. I can’t help wondering whether these electric-blood hues at one end of the world of purple didn’t also remind him and some of his audience of the machinated horrors of war. And blood too has a spectrum from red to blue: figuratively, optically, and chemically so.
This morning, I was eating breakfast (again), this time with the chapter on green. What did I see a couple of hours later at Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck but…. peacocks strutting their stuff, spring-style.
What caught my eye was the zone from green to blue in the peacock’s eyeballish tail feathers. They are mesmerizing: it’s like falling into a vortex of jade in a turquoise lagoon.
One way you know you’ve really paid attention while reading is when you see the content manifested everywhere. And, of course, that’s also the sign of an immensely engaging, widely relevant book.
Postscript
There is A LOT more to see at Schloss Ambras besides peacocks. My brain is blown with it, but there is no room for it here… to be continued!
References
James Fox, The World According to Colour: A Cultural History, (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2021).
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