Goethe and green

Mr. Knightly in blue Werther coat

In connection with my previous post on "the blue-green Goethe," I came across a short book by Angelika Overath, Das andere Blau: Zur Poetik einer Farbe im modernen Gedicht. The first chapter concerns "The Symbolism of Blue circa 1800," in which Overath discusses the representation of blue in Goethe's Dornburg poem beginning "Früh, wenn Tal, Gebirg und Garten/ Nebelschleiern sich enthüllen." I wrote about Goethe's Dornburg poems ages ago (go here), and Overath's discussion reminded me anew of how the poem, written in 1829, replicates the syntax of Werther's May 10 letter, written in the 1770s.

For Overath, the syntactic "dynamism" (the textual movement of the wenn/dann verse structuring) of the Dornburg poem reflects Goethe's view that colors are entities that the eye, so to speak, activates, brings into being: the one does not exist without the other. As Goethe writes in another connection:

Wär nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Die Sonne könnt' es nie erblicken;
Läg nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft,
Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?

(Were not the eye sunlike
It could never see the sun
Were not within us God's own force
How could we delight in anything divine?)

Even if The Sorrows of Young Werther contributed to the rage for blue in the late 18th century, Goethe found that the color, by itself, was cold. As he writes in Theory of Colors: "Blue gives an impression of coldness and also reminds us of shadows. We have already remarked on its affinity with black" (782). Further, "Rooms hung with pure blue appear to some degree larger, but are actually empty and cold" (783) and "Objects seen through a blue glass appear gloomy and melancholy" (784). These also seem to be "Romantic" associations with blue, as in Novalis's "blue flower."

Because of this coldness, Goethe thought that a bit of green (on the "plus" side of his color circle) would alleviate the "negative" aspects of blue. In particular: "Sea green is a rather pleasing [liebliche] color" (785).

Goethe's associations of blue with the sky and the sea with green are modern.

Michel Pastoureau, as I mentioned in my last post on his new book Red: The History of a Color, blue was a color that was seemingly absent in the consciousness of the earliest humans, with a meager presence in the ancient world, Egypt excepted, poorly adapted to transmitting ideas or evoking emotional or aesthetic responses. Blue was so unrepresented in Ancient Greek that even the sky and the sea were textually associated with other colors. The Latin terms, blavus and azureus, were imported from the Germanic languages and Arabic. It was only in the 12th century, with the creation of blue stained glass, that it began to achieve artistic existence. The Virgin, in earlier centuries portrayed in dark colors, became the first person in the West to be clothed in blue, if still in tones indicating mourning. The sky finally appeared as blue in illuminated manuscripts.

Something similar was the case with green, according to Pastoureau. Although ubiquitous in the plant world, a green pigment was made and mastered late and with difficulty. The Romans had a good word for it (viridis) — it was Nero’s favorite color (emeralds) — but it long remained a minor color, playing little role in social life, and its symbolic power was limited. Its rise accompanied that of blue in the Middle Ages, as the emblematic color of the plant world and the color of hope in life eternal among liturgical colors. (Since the 12th century, as Arabs distinguished themselves from Crusaders, green has been the sacred color of Islam.) It was the favorite color of “solitary walkers” in the late 18th century, associated with health and freedom. In the dark 19th century, urban dwellers longed for green spaces. In the 1880s, with the invention of artificial paints, available in tubes, artists left their studios for the outdoors, transforming landscape painting anew. In the new millennium green has replaced red as an ideological marker. It has become “the messianic color,” according to Pastoureau: “Long unnoticed, disliked, or rejected, now it is entrusted with the impossible mission of saving the planet.”

And, for many, Goethe has become a "Green."

The blue-green Goethe

M.s Sehnsuchtsbild by Guntram Erbe

Michel Pastoureau, French scholar of the Middle Ages, has produced some very lovely and also scholarly volumes on the history of colors, beginning with Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton UP, 2001). It was followed (in English translation) by Black (2008) and Green (2014), both subtitled "the history of a color" and also published by Princeton. I have just received Red (also Princeton UP; publication date is Valentine's Day), which I am reviewing for a national magazine. In preparation I have the pleasant task of going through the preceding volumes, beginning with Blue.

Not surprisingly, Blue includes a section on Goethe, both on his theory of colors as well as on the significance of Werther's blue-and-yellow outfit. According to Professor Pastoureau, Goethe gave his hero a blue coat because blue was in style in Germany in the 1770s. The novel, however, because of its popularity reinforced the fashion for blue, causing the color to leap from the realm of dress -- serving as the favored color of the French kings since the beginning of the 18th century and, in turn, of the nobility and the well-off bourgeoisie -- into the arts of painting, engraving, and porcelain.

Goethe's color circle

Pastoureau is very sympathetic to Goethe's color theory, even if he concedes that the discussion of physics and the chemistry of colors in the Farbenlehre is "flawed." As he writes: “Instead of creating a work based on his remarkable poetic intuition and his feeling that color always has an important anthropological dimension, he wished to write a learned treatise that would be recognized as such.” In his view,  the most original chapter of the didactic section of the Farbenlehre is the one on “physiological” colors, “in which Goethe argues forcefully for the subjective and cultural nature of perception, an idea that was almost completely novel at the time.” Challenging the Newtonians, Goethe was “the first to reintroduce the human being into the problems of color and to dare to declare that a color that no one sees is a color that does not exist.”

Since this is a book on blue, the Farbenlehre is of interest to Pastoureau because of the important place Goethe accords to that color, “which along with yellow is one of the poles of Goethe's color system. He saw in the juxtaposition (or the fusion) of these two colors the absolute form of chromatic harmony.” The lovely painting above by Guntram Erbe immediately made me think of Goethe's color preferences.

Blue Flower (Homage to Novalis) by H.H. Miyakawa (2011)

Alongside Goethe, Pastoreau cites Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen and the poet's search for the "little blue flower" as contributing to blue's status as "the world's most popular color," solidifying it as the color of love, melancholy, and dreams. (See my earlier post.) Yet, as can be gleaned from Blue, Goethe's embrace of blue has a long historical background.

It turns out that the rise of blue as a color preference was a very late emerging Western phenomenon. As Pastoreau writes in Blue, red, white, and black were the basic colors of all cultures from time immemorial, and all social codes and systems of representation were organized around these three. Blue, on the other hand, had no symbolic value, and it even seems that the ancients could not even "see" blue. In the ancient Greek language, for instance, blue was never used to describe the sky or the sea. The term glaukos, much used by Homer, could refer to gray, blue, and sometimes even yellow or brown. Eventually the Romans took their color terminology from Germanic and Arabic words: blavus and azureus. For the Romans blue appears to have had a negative value: it was associated with the underworld, while blue eyes were considered a deformity or a sign of bad character, not to forget that blue was the color of the eyes of the Germanic barbarians.

In the Carolingian period, the emperors and nobles followed the Roman custom, wearing red, white, and purple, while blue was worn only by those of low rank. A change occurred in the 12th century, with the creation of blue stained glass, but otherwise blue was essentially absent from Christian worship, with white being the supreme Christological color (innocence, purity) and black denoting abstinence, penance, and suffering. Red, of course, was the blood spilled by Christ, his passion, sacrifice, martyrdom, divine love. There developed by the 12th century a split between "chromophiles" and "chromophobes," represented, on the one hand, by the abbots of Cluny and, on the other, by the Cistercians. In the churches of the former blue and gold were united to evoke the splendor of God's creation, while the Cistercians were opposed to luxury in all forms, including color.

Hyacinthe Rigaud: Portrait of Louis XV as 5-year-old (detail)

The rise of the cult of the Virgin in the 12th century and also the adoption by French kings of blue in their coat of arms lent prestige to blue, while progress in dyeing techniques also assisted its success. French and German cities (including in Thuringia) were sustained by their dyeing industries. Saint Louis and Henry III began wearing blue, a custom not known among earlier kings. Naturally, their entourages followed suit. Even King Arthur was depicted in blue.

And then came the Reformation, which was already preceded by moralizing trends. The Reformists sought to cleanse churches of color, especially of red, which stood not for Christ's blood and passion but for folly and, in Luther's eyes, the papacy. The polychromy on church statues suggested idolotry, and the vestments of priests and the rituals of the mass were "a theater of color" distracting from the more crucial purpose of saving one's soul. For the Reformers, good Christians should wear sober colors, thus the rise of black in art. Pastoreau mentions Rembrandt, from Calvinist Holland, whose "color asceticism [was] based on a limited palette of dark and discreet tones." Rome, with the Counter-Reformation, responded in kind: thus, the blazing glory of Baroque and Jesuit art.

Perhaps because of its long absence from historical and theoretical reflection, blue was not affected by the "chromoclasm" of the Reformers. Indeed, according to Pastoreau, it became "the only honest color worthy of a good Christian." Thus, the great Reformers were portrayed as austerely dressed in black, set against a bright blue background suggesting heaven, to which they all aspired. Among French landscapists influenced by Jansenism, brown and indigo wash drawings of the 17th century created dream-like distant backgrounds that seemed to reach to infinity.

Newton's spectrum experiment

In 1666 Newton discovered the spectrum, an order of color that contained neither black nor white, which (for an Anglican like Newton) confirmed Protestant moral practices. The spectrum unended the ancient and medieval color hierarchy, in which red had resided dominantly. The center was now occupied by blue and green, and "colormetry" began to invade the arts and sciences. In being mastered, however, color lost much of its mastery. Here is where Goethe enters the picture.

Pastoreau mentions that Goethe's "personal taste" distanced him from red, but by the mid 1770s blue had become the favorite color of European society. (Can we imagine Werther wearing a red vest?) By the 18th century, slavery in the Americas lowered the cost of indigo production, and a variety of dark and solid blues could be produced that were resistant to sunlight and soap. Chemistry also began to play a role: it was in the early 18th century that "Prussian blue" was discovered in Berlin, which aided painters in producing strong or translucent tones, and numerous learned societies sponsored competitions to find solutions for obtaining more vivid and less costly blues and greens than those achieved by indigo.

Here is Werther speaking about his blue coat: “It cost me much to part with the blue coat which I wore the first time I danced with Charlotte. But I could not possibly wear it any longer. But I have ordered a new one, precisely similar, even to the collar and sleeves, as well as a new waistcoat and pantaloons. But it does not produce the same effect upon me. I know not how it is, but I hope in time I shall like it better.”

Picture credit: Guntram Erbe; Hikaru H. Miyakawa; Colour Management

An Eminent Victorian on Goethe's Color Theory

"It might be thought that Goethe had given himself but little trouble to understand the theorems of Newton and the experiments on which they were based. But it would be unjust to charge the poet with any want of diligence in this respect. He repeated Newton's experiments, and in almost every case obtained his results. But he complained of their incompleteness and lack of logical force. What appears to us as the very perfection of Newton's art, and absolutely essential to the purity of the experiments, was regarded by Goethe as needless complication and mere torturing of the light."

Rick, the scientist in our family, has been studying Goethe's scientific works for a while now. Indeed, when Amazon delivered my copy of Robert Richards' book on "romantic science" in Germany, it was a year before I had an opportunity to read it. As a physicist, however, Rick is more interested in Goethe's work on optics, in particular Die Farbenlehre, the so-called color theory. Thus, he recently brought to my attention the work of the eminent Victorian physicist John Tyndall (1820-1893), from whom the above quotation is taken.

The British Dictionary of National Biography describes Tyndall as "physicist and mountaineer." According to his obituary in the Times of London on December 5, 1893, "Although not the first to reach the summit of the Matterhorn, he was intimately associated with the early attempts on that remarkable mountain." A peak near the Matterhorn is named after him.

As an impecunious young man Tyndall went to Marburg, where he attended lectures on experimental and practical chemistry in the laboratory of Robert Bunsen and on mathematics and physics with C.L. Gerling and K.H. Knoblauch. He graduated doctor of philosophy in 1850, after two years, an achievement that seems to have been par for the course among some Victorians. In 1851 he went to Berlin and did diamagnetic research in the laboratory of Gustav Magnus and became acquainted with many German scientists, including Helmholtz.

It was also in 1851 that he began a friendship with T.H. Huxley. In 1853 Tyndall was chosen professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution in London, which made him a colleague of Faraday. If those weren't famous friends enough, he and Thomas Carlyle were also friends, and it was at Carlyle's instigation, according to Tyndall, that he decided to undertake an investigation of Goethe's color theory, which appeared as a two-part essay in Popular Science Monthly (vol. 17) in 1880. It begins by drawing attention to his hesitations concerning the color theory:

My reverence for the poet had been awakened by the writings of Mr. Carlyle, and it was afterward confirmed and consolidated by the writings of Goethe himself. But there was one of the poet's works, which, though it lay directly in the line of my own studies, remained for a long time only imperfectly known to me. My opinion of that work was not formed on hearsay. I dipped into it so far as to make myself acquainted with its style, its logic, and its general aim; but having done this I laid it aside, as something which jarred upon my conception of Goethe's grandeur.

Tyndall thus decided to abandon the "Farbenlehre" and to look up to Goethe "on that side where his greatness was uncontested and supreme." In May of 1878, however, Carlyle paid him a visit. "He was then in his eighty-third year, and looking in his solemn fashion toward that portal to which we are all so rapidly hastening." As a "farewell gift," Carlyle presented him with "the two octavo volumes of letter press and the single folio volume, consisting in great part of colored diagrams," that Goethe had sent to Carlyle in June 1830.

By 1880 Tyndall (pictured here in a portrait by George Richmond), along with Huxley and Charles Darwin, were the most famous scientists in Britain, and Tyndall is in fact associated with the same scientific materialism. Some of his scientific work touches on areas of Goethe's interest. For instance, the "Tyndall effect" concerns the scattering of light particles in the atmosphere. Among the research cited by the Dictionary of Scientific Biography are Tyndall's efforts to verify the high absorptive and radiative power of aqueous vapor and to explain the selective difference of the atmosphere on different sounds.

 Like Goethe, Tyndall seems to have been interested in practical matters. His investigations on sound, for instance, attempted to establish efficient fog signals upon British coasts.  Also in a sense replicating Goethe is Tyndall's The Glaciers of the Alps (1860), based on his measurements of glaciers of Switzerland.

For anyone interested in Goethe's color theory, Tyndall provides the most lucid of introductions as well as an analysis, from the point of view of a scientist, of where Goethe went wrong. He truly grappled with Goethe's way of thinking, and comes to a conclusion with which many of us can identify: "I can not even now say with confidence that I fully realize all the thoughts of Goethe. Many of them are strange to the scientific man. They demand for their interpretation a sympathy beyond that required or even tolerated in severe physical research." He gives full credit to Goethe's industry ("The observations and experiments there recorded astonish us by their variety and number"). He goes right to the center of Goethe's thinking and to his missteps.

This question of turbid media took entire possession of the poet's mind. It was ever present to his observation. It was illustrated by the azure of noonday, and by the daffodil and crimson of the evening sky. The inimitable lines written at Ilmenau ["Über allen Gipfeln/ Ist Ruh'/ In allen Wipfeln/ Spürest du/ Kaum einen Hauch"] suggest a stillness of the atmosphere which would allow the columns of fine smoke from the foresters' cottages to rise high into the air. He would thus have an opportunity of seeing the upper portion of the column projected against bright clouds, and the lower portion against dark pines, the brownish yellow of the one and the blue of the other being strikingly and at once revealed.

As long as Goethe remained in the region of fact, Tyndall finds that his observations are of permanent value, "but by the coercion of a powerful imagination he forced his turbid media into regions to which they did not belong, and sought to overthrow by their agency the irrefragable demonstrations of Newton." In the end, "his turbid media entangle him everywhere, leading him captive and committing him to almost incredible delusions."

Tyndall finds it natural that such a singular "character" as Newton would have arrested Goethe's attention and that he must "add it" to a theory of Newton. And here, according to Tyndall, "the great German is at home," prefacing his sketch of his rival's character "by reflections and considerations regarding character in general. Tyndall concludes that the ethical image Goethe draws of Newton --  "vehement persistence in wrong thinking" -- may perhaps coincide with Goethe himself.

I think this provides some flavor of the great Tyndall. He was among the great popularizers of science in the Victorian era. (The illustration at the top of the post is one of his experimental apparatuses for showing that sound is reflected in air at the interface between air masses of different densities.) Tyndall's popular lectures were published as Fragments of Science for Unscientific People. Something of the character of the man can be seen from the fellowships he endowed for students at three American colleges after his lecture tours in the U.S. in 1872-73.

Goethe's Color Theory and Modern Artists

There is currently an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1969. As the exhibition brochure has it, the exhibition "traces how Asian art, literature, and philosophy were transmitted and transformed within American cultural and intellectual currents, influencing the articulation of new visual and conceptual languages." (I love that word "articulation," which has found its way into postmodern conceptual vocabulary. Actually I use it a lot myself these days.)

Yesterday I had a little time, 45 minutes, which allowed me to pop in at the Guggenheim. (Am I lucky to live in Manhattan, or what?) A description of the works in the rotunda would be somewhat banal, so I recommend going to the Guggenheim's website and looking at the interactive show. It focuses on the happenings, performance art, and multimedia and interactive installations -- "process art." One is called "human carriage," by Ann Hamilton ("invited," so the brochure, by the museum to offer a site-specific installation). It is a mechanism composed of "book weights" made from thousands of cut-up books that ascend and descend the heights of the museum's rotunda via a pulley system, and a pair of Tibetan cymbals encased in a white silk "bell carriage" that cascades down the balustrade along the rotunda spiral. The effect? "Its purifying ring awakens visitors with random chimes."

Inevitably, exhibits in the "Buddhism and the Neo-Avant Garde" section -- featuring John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg -- look amateur by comparison. I am not being cynical. Installations like that by Hamilton are really lots of fun, and perhaps that is the purpose of art in an affluent age. The museum was packed.

I made my way up the rotunda to one of the side rooms. It contained works by the usual suspects -- James McNeill Whistler and Mary Cassatt -- as well as by Arthur Dow and Georgia O'Keeffee. Yes, one sees the affinities these artists had with Japanese art. Clearly Cassatt learned a lot from Japanese printmakers.

My favorite in this room was by an artist I had not heard of before, Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890-1973), cofounder in 1913 of what was called the Synchromist movement. The painting at the top of the post, called "Dragon Trail," is from the Hirschorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

I think Goethe would have liked the idea (if not the resulting art) of the Synchromist movement: since color and sound are similar phenomena, the colors in a painting can be orchestrated in the same harmonious way that a composer arranges notes in a symphony. The idea was to paint in color scales, thereby evoking musical sensations. I have discovered that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a MacDonald-Wright painting, Airplane Synchromy in Yellow-Orange, from 1920 (at the right).

A few years earlier Wassily Kandinsky, in his small treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, had advanced similar ideas about the spiritual qualities of abstract art. When I was still teaching the "Great Books," I loved introducing students to this small book. The Guggenheim has a number of works by Kandinsky. Kandinsky was certainly correct about the spiritual effects of color. In any case, I have always been drawn me to his colorful canvases, which in turn drew me yesterday to MacDonald-Wright's painting.

According to the Wikipedia entry on MacDonald-Wright, he didn't get interested in Japanese art until after World War II, so it seems more the case that Synchromy emerged from the artistic milieu around Kandinsky. It is well known that J.M.W. Turner traveled with a copy of Goethe's Farbenlehre, but early-20th-century artists must also have known of Goethe's color theories. Undoubtedly this is a subject that has been well mined, and when I have time (!), I will look into it.