Critics claim the cool palette of Picasso’s blue period reflects the depression he experienced between 1901-1904. When standing in front of Picasso’s Death of Casagemas (1901), for example, we experience the weight of grief at the loss of his best friend. But for the next artist, blue can evoke the very opposite. Consider, for example, International Klein Blue, the dazzling ultramarine that defined the Yves Klein’s oeuvre. Face-to-face with the luscious electric blue of the French artist’s paintings, we want to dive in and revel in their vibrancy. The contrast between Picasso’s and Klein’s blues could not be more pronounced.

Alberto Giacometti at the 31st Venice Biennale in 1962. Photo by Paolo Monti. Courtesy of the Fondo Paolo Monti, BEIC, and Wikimedia Commons.

This variability in tone, texture, hue, and temperament can be found in different artists’ uses of the color gray. In the case of Giacometti’s portraits, the multiple uses of gray even can be found on a single canvas.

According to Giacometti, gray was the color “that I feel, that I see, that I want to reproduce,” the color that “means life itself to me.” But what was this life that he sought to reproduce, in gray?

Giacometti did not come to gray by chance. His critics and commentators like to explain the gray in which his figures are immersed on the canvas as an extension of the plaster and stone shavings that formed layers of dust over his chaotic studio. Others write about his use of gray as a disregard for, or negation of, the substance of paint. For them, gray is the background, the inconsequential space within which a human figure sits.

However, I don’t believe Giacometti pursued an aesthetic nihilism. Prior to World War II, his portraits were the same multicolored palette as those of the surrealists, expressionists, cubists, and formalists. After focusing his energy on sculpture during World War II, he returned to painting with two male busts and two standing women in 1946. These four paintings are gray. In 1947 and 1948, following a brief experimentation with a brown palette, Giacometti settled on gray for the remainder of his life. He never returned to other colors.

Critics like to explain Giacometti’s turn to gray as a response to photographs he saw of the suffering on the World War II battlefields, including images from the concentration camps.

But this explanation doesn’t match the complexity of Giacometti’s gray canvases. In an interview towards the end of his life, he discussed the reality of the streets he had been searching to recognize. He claimed that, prior to the war, reality presented itself to his eyes as a photograph, that he saw the world as if on a screen: distant, yet accessible from different perspectives. On his return to Paris, after the war, reality became unfamiliar, increasingly unstable, and eventually, unknowable. Reality on the Boulevard Montparnasse, outside Giacometti’s studio, might have been “marvelous,” but it became altogether out of reach for the artist.

Could it be that gray was the color best able to represent this feeling of a strange, unknowable reality? Certainly, the irresolution and ephemerality of the color gray seems well-suited to Giacometti’s ongoing and impossible search to represent modernity.

While siblings of the portraits can be found on the canvases of artists such as Francis Bacon, Giacometti’s figures find their closest relatives in literature. Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, and Hamm and Clov, are the literary cousins of Annette, Diego, and Caroline. They are all immersed in stagnant, gray worlds, always with a slither of light coming through a dirty window. Giacometti’s models recess into their gray backgrounds, as do Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist beings, their spiritual kin. The unidentifiable heads of Diego, Annette, Caroline and others are filled with an existentialist “nothingness” that defines their intrinsic lack of human self-identity. Indeed, Giacometti turns to gray to capture the fleeting moments as Sartrean-like human beings move along a path to ultimate disappearance.

Giacometti’s canvases also capture the myriad possibilities of existentialism in their materiality. Giacometti’s gray is tinged with purples and greens; it is, at times, steely blue, and at others, muddy brown. It can be highlighted in red or white, washed in rich earth tones, or, in a painting such as Dark Head (1959), gray is almost black. Giacometti’s gray not only opens itself to all other colors, but it also covers the spectrum from light to dark, and white to black. In the portrait, Diego (1958), gray is light itself, shining around the head of Giacometti’s brother, illuminating the shape of his nose. Gray often moves from ice cold to warm and sunny on a Giacometti canvas. As it oscillates between dichotomies, gray never sits still, bringing life to the figures and the backgrounds against which they are painted. Characteristic of both Giacometti’s conception of humanity after Sartre and the color itself, the rainbow of grays on Giacometti’s canvases are vibrant and always in process. They are neither—and both—figure and ground, representation and abstraction, perpetually in the process of becoming, often taking shape as what they are not.

In keeping with this colorful vibrancy, when we stand before them, the paintings come alive, we see figures as people with personalities given to them by their luminous gray faces. Giacometti’s figures have few individual characteristics; their only expression is in the variant gray tones of their bodies and faces, highlighted by the gray brushstrokes that surround them. True to the modernist challenge to classical portraiture, these works have nothing to do with capturing an individual’s identity or soul. They are about the perception of a body and face, distorted by its posture, in space. Like their sculpted siblings, the portraits are figures in which we identify the human. But, in the end, they are no more than manipulations of an anonymous, gray medium.

Giacometti’s tall, slender figures might be in motion, but they are trapped inside the frame. They are like their maker, who is also stuck on an idea, obsessively working and reworking their bodies until he tears their canvases. The worn, gray canvases bring out the substance of the material of painting, and simultaneously, expose what might be seen as their creator’s internal frustrations. The figures, in frames within frames within frames, are at the vanishing point of a mise-en-abîme of incarceration, sometimes about to fall out of the frame. They never succeed in freeing themselves fully from entrapment in their gray world. Together with their artist, they represent the curse of modern existence, mired in gray. In time, however, the portraits—like Beckett’s well-known characters—carry within them the promise of freedom.

The appeal of Giacometti’s portraits to the popular consciousness and the art market is inconsistent with their abstract philosophical complexity. But one thing is sure: Giacometti’s gray figures are not specific to their postwar historical moment, and neither do they belong solely to the existential crises of the 20th century.

Giacometti’s process made visible on the canvas is an expression of time, an evocation of memory and history. The figures are worked over in pencil, charcoal, or paint; rubbed out, smudged, drawn over until the canvas is torn. The “never-finishedness” of Giacometti’s portraits is evidence of his obsessive excavation of the past, as well as his belief in a future moment when resolution might occur.

When we stand before these paintings, we recognize that they are not simply unfinished. It is as though Giacometti is still working, and will continue to do so into infinity. We don’t need to hear from those who sat for him that Giacometti was a perfectionist of sorts. His models tell of endless sittings, and a continual postponement of the end. We see this exact perpetuation in the paintings themselves: Like gray, they are unfinished, ill-defined, uncertain, and still breathing possibility into the present. If Giacometti kept his sitters much longer than they anticipated, on the canvas, he never let their representations go, even when he claimed he was finished.

As much as Giacometti had a love affair with the placement of a figure in space, and an obsession for how and where, whether it was still or moving, what size and scale the figure should be, he also had a love affair with paint—with the material as opposed to the materialism of painting. That love affair gives the portraits life; in the scratches and scrawls and the swathes of gray, we see the hand of Giacometti at work, still. We meet with Giacometti on the painting to give it significance, creating an ongoing conversation between artist and viewer in the 21st century. As single-color field canvases, what can the portraits have to say about the complexity of the three-dimensional world, of the evolving patterns of human life? Everything, I would argue—just like the color in which they are painted.

The post What Giacometti’s Obsession With the Color Gray Really Meant appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The color is associated with introversion and introspection, but it’s also associated with the expansiveness and openness of oceans and skies. It’s a sacred color in the world’s religions, but blue movies are obscene movies. And while the color can represent life in many ways, it’s also true that “when we die, we turn blue,” said art historian Carol Mavor. Blue, she added, “does seem to depend on a sense of paradox.”

The color and all its permutations were the subject of a Zócalo/Getty “Open Art” event before a large and appreciative audience Thursday night at the Getty Center. On an auditorium stage bathed in blue light, in front of blue backdrop in a blue state, a blues quartet of a panel—a chemist, an art historian, a photographer and researcher of West Africa, and a comedian-musician-playwright—offered very different reflections on blue in an awe-inspiring array of contexts.

The conversation started with a look at the blues of the Morpho butterfly and the Giotto frescos in the 14th-century Arena Chapel in Italy, and covered bluestockings, blue bloods, blues music, blue-collar workers, blue eyes, the civil-rights era film A Patch of Blue (about a blind white girl who befriends Sidney Poitier), the iris in Vincent Van Gogh’s work, and the magic of that little blue pill, Viagra.

Oregon State chemist Mas Subramanian talked about his accidental discovery of a new shade of blue, “YInMn blue,” during work to create compounds that might improve the memory of computers. He said that is typical—blue is an unpredictable color, even a deceptive one.

“Nature plays tricks on us—many things that we think are blue are not really blue,” he said. “Living organisms are not very good at making blue.” The sky, for example, is not really blue. But, he added, deep bodies of water are actually blue, in that they absorb reds (which have longer wavelengths), leaving blues, which have shorter wavelengths.

Another panelist, Catherine McKinley, author of Indigo: In Search of the Color that Seduced the World, spoke of the value, financial and spiritual, of blue cloth—specifically indigo products—in west Africa, where she traveled along traditional indigo trade routes in 11 countries. In the 1800s, lengths of blue cloth were exchanged as part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In some contexts, a human being could be traded for two yards of cloth. During the American Civil War, the U.S. dollar became so devalued that trade was conducted in indigo cakes.

McKinley said that across different cultural contexts, there is often a connection of blue to life and death. “Blue as cool,” she explained, “representing a kind of spirituality, exemplified by a coolness.”

Panelist Garrett Morris, an original Saturday Night Live cast member who has worked as a musician, actor, and playwright, pointed out that blue is not just a color. “Blue is also something you can feel,” he said. He described how his grandfather, a Baptist preacher, introduced him to the blues when he was a young child in New Orleans, “even though he shouldn’t have” since the blues were considered evil and dirty.

Morris, who also has owned a comedy and blues club in Los Angeles, said he loved the “elusiveness” of the blues. “It’s not sad or happy. There’s a bittersweetness about the blues. It’s more sentimentality, melancholia, which can be good or bad … It doesn’t have to be definite.”

As the event went on, the panelists—and several audience members—exchanged a river’s full of facts and questions about the color blue.

Did you know that Facebook is blue because Mark Zuckerberg is colorblind, and blue is the only color he sees well? Did you know that the Hindu god Vishnu is blue, and associated with life and death and rejuvenation? Subramanian noted how Indians became excited about perceived connections between the blue characters in the James Cameron film Avatar and aspects of Hindu religion and culture.

Morris pondered, “When was the first time someone said, ‘I feel blue.’ Why didn’t they say, ‘I feel green.’” (Other panelists suggested that the body can turn blue when it is hurt or ill). And a retired swimming pool contractor in the audience described how much work goes into making sure that when water fills a pool, it looks blue.

In response to an audience member’s question about how blue tastes, the art historian Mavor, who is the author of Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour, discussed a blue mushroom, the indigo milk cap, that bleeds a delicious milk. But she noted that many blue tastes are artificial—like blue jello—and desired by children.

The post This Color Can Be Dirty, Deceptive—and Divine appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How could a color be so valuable? In culture after culture, red commands the eye. We are drawn to its power, and to its passion, its sacrifice, its rage, its vitality. It’s not an accident that the color is red: It turns out that we humans are unusually susceptible to scarlet hues. Studies show that the color quickens our pulse and breath, perhaps because we link it with birth, blood, fire, sex, and death.

But for much of human existence, broad mastery of the color crimson was elusive. Only a few natural substances produce red dye. Henna, madder roots, brazilwood, archil lichens, and fermented stews of rancid olive oil, cow dung, and blood numbered among the sources over the centuries, but most of them fell short—faltering as dyes for textiles and setting into corals, russets, and persimmons instead of true scarlets. The worst of them faded fast into dull pinkish browns. True reds proved rare, and the evocative pigment became even more prized.

Thousands of years ago, however, Mesoamericans discovered that pinching an insect found on prickly pear cacti yielded a blood-red stain on fingers and fabric. The tiny creature—a parasitic scale insect known as cochineal—was transformed into a precious commodity. Breeders in Mexico’s southern highlands began cultivating cochineal, selecting for both quality and color over many generations.

The results were spectacular. The carminic acid in female cochineals could be used to create a dazzling spectrum of reds, from soft rose to gleaming scarlet to deepest burgundy. Though it took as many as 70,000 dried insects to make a pound of dye, they surpassed all other alternatives in potency and versatility.

An illustration of cochineal collection by Mexican priest and scientist José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez, 1777. Newberry Library, Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection.

Dried cochineal insects from the author’s study. Courtesy of Amy Butler Greenfield.

Cochineal spread through ancient Mexico and Central America, where it was used for the quotidian and the sacred. Textiles, furs, feathers, baskets, pots, medicines, skin, teeth, and even houses bore the brilliant red dye. Scribes colored the history of their people with its crimson ink.

Detail from a page of the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, a pictographic history and genealogical record from Mixtec region of Mexico between 1200-1521 A.C. The British Museum.

When the Spanish conquistadors landed in Mexico, they were struck by the stunning scarlets of the New World. The exotic source of the dye became a sensation back in Europe, where it was deemed the “perfect red.” The Spanish would go on to ship tons of the dried insects back to the Old World and beyond. Their monopoly on the color’s source made it one of their most valuable exports from Mexico, second only to silver.

Europeans largely used cochineal on textiles, where it produced red fabrics of an unmatchable sheen and intensity. (It could also be used to make shades of peach, pink, purple, and black—but the reds were what made cochineal famous.) To see this magnificent red was to see power. Court gowns and royal robes were made with cochineal, as were the uniforms of British officers. The scarlet dye even found its way back across the ocean, into the “broad stripes” of the embattled banner over Fort McHenry that inspired the U.S. national anthem.

Cochineal also found a spot in the artist’s paint box. If you were a European artist on a tight budget, you could procure your cochineal from shreds of dyed cloth, but fresh-ground insects yielded much better results. Artists usually combined their cochineal with a binder, creating a pigment known as a lake.

It’s impossible to tell with the naked eye which painters used cochineal to make their reds. But recent advances in chemical analysis have confirmed its presence in numerous masterpieces. Among those works is Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride.

Between the muted browns and golds, the bride’s red gown draws the eye. A combination of vermilion base and cochineal glaze allowed Rembrandt to give the dress its great depth and luster. Other painters of the period also loved to use cochineal lakes to paint glowing red fabrics, such as the shimmering scarlet silks in Anthony van Dyck’s Charity and possibly in the Portrait of Agostino Pallavicini as well.

Anthony van Dyck’s Charity. National Gallery, London.

Portrait of Agostina Pallavicini. Getty Museum.

Eye-catching though these cochineal lakes were, they had one great drawback. Unlike cochineal dye on cloth, which usually holds fast to its color, cochineal pigments in paint tended to fade with exposure to light. This was especially true of watercolors. J. M W. Turner’s cochineal-reddened sunsets, for example, literally pale in comparison to what he originally set down. Cochineal could be fugitive in oils too. A lake made with minimal cochineal, or cochineal of poor quality, faded in a matter of years. Even quality cochineal has dimmed over the centuries. The dowdy jacket in Thomas Gainsborough’s Dr. Ralph Schomberg and the blotchy pastel backdrop of Renoir’s Madame Léon Clapisson both are pale versions of the original.

Thomas Gainsborough’s Dr. Ralph Schomberg, 1770. National Gallery, London.

Yet while Dr. Schomberg is consigned to his discolored suit for the foreseeable future, Madame Clapisson recently was given new life. A team at Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago analyzed the cochineal that remained in the portrait and digitally recreated the painting in all its glory. Regard the original and the restoration, and you can see both the force of cochineal and its weakness.

Renoir’s 1883 portrait of Madame Léon Clapisson and the digital recolorization. Art Institute of Chicago via the BBC.

When new artificial reds like alizarins made from coal tar became available in the late 19th century—ones more lasting and less expensive than those created by the naturally occurring insect—artists eagerly picked them up. By the late 20th century, artists had abandoned cochineal. Dyers, too, turned to cheaper alternatives. Even in its homeland, the insect nearly disappeared.

Today, in a surprising turn of history, the cochineal market is booming again—thanks to contemporary demand for safe food and cosmetic coloring. See names like carmine, carminic acid, crimson lake, Natural Red 4, or E120 on a label, and you may be looking at a modern manifestation of the color once fit for kings.

A few artists and dyers, too, have been tempted back by its revival—drawn to its intensity and sheen, its historical and cultural resonances. One is Elena Osterwalder, whose stunning installations employ both cochineal and the amatl bark-paper used by Mesoamericans before the Conquest.

“Red Room” installation by Elena Osterwalder. Courtesy of Elena Osterwalder.

In Oaxaca, once the epicenter of the cochineal trade, you can still find traditional weavers breathing new life into the ancient color.

Traditional tapate—belonging to the author—that was woven by Fidel Cruz Lazo of Teotitlán del Valle, who colors his yarns with only cochineal and other local natural dyes. Courtesy of Amy Butler Greenfield.

Though the high era of cochineal may have ended, the power conveyed by its potent hue remains. Over centuries and continents, we humans have always been drawn in by red. After all, it’s in our blood.

The post The Bug That Had the World Seeing Red appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It is also a textbook example of what Adams famously referred to as the “Zone System,” a technique that transforms the photographic surface into a study in contrasts. By manipulating the light-sensitive silver within the film and the printing paper, Adams created a gleaming array of ultra-whites, shimmering silvers, and inky blacks—transforming the composition into a formalist study in abstraction and the face of Half Dome itself into a minimalist canvas, with much of the surface area covered in dark tonal variations.

As with a minimalist painting, in which the work is divested of all but the medium’s most essential properties, these deliberately blackened areas represent a scouring of light from the recesses of the picture plane. That scouring, in turn, produces fields of darkness in which the graphic contrasts that are abundant elsewhere in the image all but disappear. By blackening areas of the image to unnatural extremes, he leveraged the combination of mechanical, chemical, and creative elements that comprise the photographic process. As a result, in Half Dome, Blowing Snow, Yosemite National Park, the rocky face of the iconic peak is transformed into a riveting study in graphic manipulation, where what we see most clearly is Adams’ mastery of the medium.

Adams blurred the fine line between notions of photographic objectivity and the artist’s ability to manipulate and obscure. When the Half Dome picture was made (circa 1955), Adams’ reputation as America’s foremost landscape photographer was secure and he was less bound by expectations of accuracy in his images and thus freer to flaunt the creative skills for which he had become famous. This confidence fueled his increasing presence in Yosemite, where his popular workshops helped cement the hegemony of his vision.

Adams’ unabashedly inspiring version of nature became less about the specificities of the place than its role as an abstraction, one designed to evoke intangible emotions over rock and granite. In other words, by mid-century, his photos were relevant in large part because of the widespread willingness to interpret them in aspirational, rather than realistic terms; as dramatic metaphors rather than transcriptions of nature. Highly aestheticized yet entirely accessible, Adams’ work was a response to an elitist New York art scene intent on purging the canvas of references to the visible world, and to the mounting political tensions and anxieties of the Cold War. In Adams’ vision, Yosemite’s granite walls were at once welcoming in their majesty and reassuring in their solidity, a bulwark against both societal snobbery and the specter of capricious, foreign regimes.

Photographic reality is a fragile thing—more dependent on the audience that chooses to see it as such than on the image itself. As his popularity grew and exhibitions of his work attracted larger audiences, Adams doubled down on his vision of nature as a place where clarity of vision powered by graphic extremes and willful omissions widened the gap between perception and reality. These “blind spots” in his photos—as some scholars have termed them—went beyond the tourists, traffic, and trash that Adams is known to have overlooked to include broader changes in postwar American society such as the struggle for racial equality.

Throughout his career, Adams dismissed what he termed “soap-box” art. But his work did not exist in a social vacuum. Rather, at the dawn of the civil rights era, Adams intensified his use of tonal extremes to amplify the metaphorical powers of Yosemite, turning it into a visual ideal that echoed in its aspirational status the more perfect union envisioned when Abraham Lincoln set aside its central valley as a California state park in the midst of the Civil War.

Earlier in his career, Adams had made a rare foray into questions of both social and racial inequality, in his series on the incarceration of Japanese-Americans at the Manzanar camp, titled Born Free and Equal, which drew both criticism and praise for his sympathetic view of its residents as productive, loyal citizens. Thus, while Adams’ take on Yosemite did not overtly confront the political climate, nor did he erase it, embracing the concept of a society improved through a return to its core values.

By 1955, Adams’ darkroom wizardry was producing graphic extravaganzas that promoted patterns of seeing that had little to do with the experience of most Yosemite visitors. As the French philosopher Roland Barthes claimed, a “photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.” By the 1950s, Yosemite was a heavily trafficked destination, struggling with a sagging infrastructure and in danger of being “loved to death.” Under increasing demands for novelty, multiple diversions had popped up on the valley floor catering to the growing crowds and diverting attention away from its natural environment. Among these were drive-through, hollowed-out trees in the Mariposa Grove and Camp Curry’s “firefall,” when glowing embers were pushed from overhanging rock to create a dramatic evening spectacle. The gap between such images and the day-to-day reality of Yosemite was thus widely known and impossible to ignore.

But in Half Dome, Blowing Snow, Yosemite National Park, Adams was determined to resurrect the park’s metaphoric might, and along with it a time and a place when the promise of a more inclusive society seemed close at hand.

The post Why Ansel Adams Made His Black Even Blacker appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In popular culture, black and white are thought of as simple opposites, but my colleague Jose-Manuel Alonso and I have been uncovering ways that we perceive black and white differently, and how our brains have evolved mechanisms that create these differences. I want to walk you through some of our experiments that have led to an interesting answer to a 400-year-old puzzle.

If you look at the left side of the two busts of Caesar paired at the top, you’ll see a three-dimensional white sculpture, because we interpret the two-dimensional variations of brightness in the image as shading caused by light reflected from an object. In the photo on the right, we perceive essentially the same three-dimensional shape, but lit from the opposite side, and appearing to be made of a darker material. So not only is our judgment of the illumination different, but so is our judgment of the object’s material properties. This photo is just the contrast reversal (photo negative) of the photo with the white bust, so comparing the two illustrates how we interpret gradual variations of light versus variations of dark.

The difference in how we use black and white cues to infer the properties of an object is even more evident when the changes in brightness are more distinct. The bright streaks on the black bust above appear to be highlights, and from their sharpness and small scale relative to the object, we can estimate the glossiness of the material. If the contrast of the image is reversed (the right side of the image pair above), we see a white or even metallic bust, and the black streaks appear to be smudges or paint. In this situation the two tones give entirely different sorts of clues about illumination and material properties.

These examples illustrate a basic asymmetry in the way we perceive white and black: We interpret difference in lights as information about illumination, while differences in darks reveal something about materials. These interpretations fit well with the physics of the world: Illuminants light up objects, and are reflected less by highly absorbent materials and holes.

Other basic asymmetries have been noted for centuries. Galileo Galilei, who was as perceptive as he was creative, observed that Venus appeared larger through his telescope as a light object against the dark night sky than it appeared as a dark object against the bright day sky. Ernst Mach, for whom the speed of sound is named, demonstrated that letters are difficult to recognize if some strokes are white and others black, suggesting that the two shades may be processed separately by the brain.

We began our experiments by testing whether subjects could pick out blacks and whites on unbiased backgrounds with equal ease. We created randomly arranged background panels with an equal number of equal-sized black and white pixels, and then asked observers to count the number of larger targets presented on the background as quickly as possible. To make the targets clearly different from the background pixels, we made them nine times larger in area. The targets were either all black or all white. To our surprise we found that people counted black targets significantly faster and with many fewer errors. You can see that black targets are easier to identify than white ones in these 12 examples:

How could we explain this discrepancy? Galileo had attributed the illusion of Venus’ size to light scatter in the eye, which would enlarge the image of a light area compared to a dark area. Herman von Helmholtz, the polymath physicist and physician, showed that there was too little light scatter in the eye for Galileo’s explanation to be complete, but the actual cause remained unclear. Helmholtz took Galileo’s observation and made a simpler, abstract version of it with equal-sized white and black squares on the opposite backgrounds. The white square appeared larger, so he called it the “irradiation illusion.” We noticed that something akin to the irradiation illusion was occurring in our backgrounds, too: Even though there were equal areas of black and white, there appeared to be more white area.

We measured the magnitude of Helmholtz’s irradiation illusion by asking people to increase the area of the black square until it appeared to be the same size as the white. Then we calculated the ratio of the physical sizes of the squares. Similarly, we measured the magnitude of the area illusion in the background by having people increase the ratio of black to white pixels until the areas appeared equal. Since the ratios required by the two corrections were approximately equal, we reasoned that both illusions must share an underlying cause. We became more convinced that our ability to see black versus white targets was influenced by the irradiation illusion when we found that if we used backgrounds with what people saw as the “balanced” ratio of black to white, targets of the two shades were equally easy for viewers to see and count.

Our next step was to search for a brain mechanism that could explain the irradiation illusion. When Keffer Hartline recorded the first electric signals from single retinal nerves responding to light stimulation, he found two types of nerves whose responses are shown on the left side of the figure below. One kind of neuron generated spiking electrical signals when exposed to light (bottom two rows). The other kind generated spikes in the dark, but turned off when exposed to light (top row). Since then, such cells have been found in eyes of many species as disparate as insects and mammals, separated by more than 500 million years of distinct evolutionary pressures, suggesting that this neural strategy fits something fundamental about the world, across many environmental niches.

These neurons are called ON and OFF cells, because of their behavior in response to light. Until recently, they had been generally considered to be opposite but equal. However, we found that when we measured the responses of ON cells to increasing equal increments of light on a black background, the response increased rapidly but then plateaued (red curve). On the other hand, OFF cell responses increased roughly in a straight line as light was decreased on a white background (blue curve). The more rapid initial increase in ON outputs explains why we are more sensitive to small increases of light in dark settings than to small decreases of light in bright settings. The plateau at the top of the ON response curve explains why we are more limited at distinguishing progressively lighter shades than we are darker shades. The neural explanation for both the irradiation illusion and Galileo’s observation arises from the same difference in the response curves.

Remarkably, these simple but different responses of the ON and OFF cells also explain some black-white asymmetries that seem almost paradoxical. For example, it is easier to make out black text on a white background than white text on a black background, despite the fact that we are capable of seeing much tinier white dots on black backgrounds than black dots on white backgrounds. The reason for this is that the ON response expands strokes of white letters slightly so that they become more difficult to distinguish. The same effect “expands” a white background, making small black dots seem smaller.

Whites and blacks in images of the world thus arise from different physical causes, provide information about different aspects of the world, and are processed differently by the brain. The differences in how we see shades originate in the beginnings of sensory neural processing. We have yet to figure out the neural mechanisms that allow us to make inferences about illumination and materials from different scales of lights and darks, so we may have much to learn from the strategies that artists use to depict them. If you look at black and white drawings not as impoverished versions of the colored world, but as pared-down illustrations of the cues we use to understand what we are looking at, you can enjoy them as intellectual puzzles, and it may change the way you look at art.

The post Black and White Aren’t Opposites After All appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My work starts on dark, black nights, when there is no moon or reflection from it. The telescopes I use have to be in places with three qualities: High, dry, and—you guessed it—very dark. And so, I search for planets atop the summit of the highest, driest, and darkest peak in Hawaii. Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano—where the world-famous Keck Observatory is located—minimizes the “noise” in the images from Earth’s constantly swirling atmosphere and the light drifting in from cities.

Because black is defined by the absence of light, you might not think there are different gradations of black—but there are when you are hunting for other planets in our galaxy. Every day, I am looking through images that appear, at first, like exposures devoid of any light. In reality, shades of black can hide amazing worlds—some of which could be habitable or inhabited by life forms.

Seeing the color black in fact is a comforting affirmation that I’m searching in the right direction, for a planet must be so faint as to appear to not be there at all. If an image has many bright dots of light, that means I am looking at a field full of stars. I am not interested in objects that emit their own light. A star is too extreme an environment for life as we know it—it’s an enormous ball of hot plasma and even if it had a solid surface to stand on, which it doesn’t, life forms like us would get crushed under the star’s tremendous gravitational pull.

What I’m trying to find are very faint objects that reflect and re-emit the light from a host star nearby. These planets outside our solar system—which are known as exoplanets—are companions to stars, swimming in their own sea of darkness. Finding these planets tells us about the architecture of planetary systems. It also lets us know how common exoplanets are in the habitable regions around stars, where the temperatures are not too hot and not too cold, where liquid water can exist, and complex molecules may have figured out the processes we call life.

Sample image of searching for a planet around a mature star, taken in March 2016 with the NIRC2 camera on Keck II telescope.

 
My research uses the newest planet-hunting technique—“direct imaging.” Put simply, we place a small piece of black film in the field of view of the telescope to dampen the light from the parent star. Then, astronomers like myself can make out the faint planet companions orbiting the star. We rotate the powerful Keck telescope, taking pictures in a time-lapsed sequence, and then apply an intensive mathematical data analysis procedure. Through this process, we can carefully distinguish the feeble signal of a planet from the overwhelming glow of the host star. The dark piece of film is called a coronagraph, and it is a key component of the direct imaging technique.

That’s right, I am actually trying to make the picture darker because the natural blackness of space is not enough to be able to see what we want to see. In order to extract the signal of a planet in an image, there is a lot of interference I have to take out: the random noise from the camera’s own electronics, the scattered light around the coronagraph, and the rotation of the individual exposures. The final image, a deeper tone of black, is the result of stacking cleaned-up exposures to reveal a clear signal from the planetary system. Galileo Galilei, the first observational astronomer, would be fascinated to see how we’ve progressed in the last 400 years. We are now seeing planets in the blackness around other stars, very much in the same way he discovered the faint moon companions around Jupiter.

I did not set out to stare at blackness all day long. I came to astronomy by way of mathematics, which is a great tool for designing ways to see very small perturbations in data. But as I learned more about how astronomy could help expand the boundaries of human knowledge, I became more and more interested in trying to see what the universe conceals in the darkness.

Ultimately, this is what all research is—seeking light in the darkness of the unknown. Our bodies are limited by the sensitivity of the human eye, but we have expanded our searches by manipulating the pixels of more sensitive cameras, and can thus capture evidence of real physical phenomena with our machines. If humans are to learn about how we came to be and search for life beyond ourselves, we must continue to look for answers in the deep blackness of space. And of course, we have to combine that with a little patience for staring into what may seem like a lot of nothingness.

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Martin is best known for her sublime abstract paintings of grids and lines, which at first glance may look like hand-drawn ledgers. Her early work from the 1950s and 1960s is mainly black, white, and earthen tones. In her long career, Martin did not solely rely on a monochromatic palette—she went into color, in a subdued way, in the 1970s—but she did return to it again and again.

After seeing “Agnes Martin,” the breathtaking retrospective of her work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (through Sept. 11), a show that reminded me of the extraordinary beauty and discipline of her art practice, I wanted to explore some possible reasons why.

I found a clue in the opening lines of “The Untroubled Mind,” Martin’s thoughts from 1972, when she was returning to making art again after a hiatus of several years. These thoughts were recorded like a poem, in phrases, and read like a quiet but self-assured manifesto.

People think that painting is about color
It’s mostly composition
It’s composition that’s the whole thing.
The classic image—
Two late Tang dishes, one with a flower image
one empty. The empty form goes all the way to heaven.

The reference to the Tang dynasty of China is not accidental. In her writings and interviews, Martin often cited the strong influence of Asian philosophies. “My greatest spiritual inspiration came from the Chinese spiritual teachers, especially Lao Tzu,” she once said. Lao Tzu (now Laozi) has been generally accepted as author of the famous Tao Te Ching and founder of Taoism. In the same statement she also mentioned the influence of Buddhism, especially the Zen branch. Scholars can only conjecture as to where she picked up this knowledge, but it had a deep impact on her painting and her discipline.

Later in life Martin repeatedly spoke of the need for humility and ego-lessness, which is in sync with Taoism’s call for naturalness and simplicity. And as an adult, she meditated regularly, a Zen practice. She advocated looking inwards and of emptying the mind, tenets of Zen monks, some of whom became known for their monochrome painting. (She famously refused to accept awards or honorary degrees because, she said in an interview, “I don’t really think I’m responsible, so I don’t accept any awards.”)

In the late 1950s, Martin had moved to New York City at the urging of her dealer, Betty Parsons. However, she left in 1967, packing up her things and going on a road trip for 18 months. She eventually settled in New Mexico, and reducing the distractions of daily life—diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, she had had more than one breakdown while in New York. In 1973, she announced her return to the art world with a series of 30 monochromatic screenprints, “On a Clear Day.” Each print is composed of thin black lines in grids or horizontal lines. “These prints express innocence of mind,” she wrote in 1979. “If you can go with them and hold your mind as empty and tranquil as they are and recognize your feelings at the same time you will realize your full response to this work.”

In this latter period, she often said that her work was about happiness, perhaps her way of describing inner peace. I find that looking at her work demands focus and shutting out distractions. Your eye swims around the soft lines, simple forms, and translucent pastel colors, until your mind finally comes to rest. The newly re-opened San Francisco Museum of Modern Art very deliberately sets her work apart, presenting seven of her paintings in an octagonal room, with seating in the middle, a kind of Martin “chapel” which facilitates quiet and contemplation.

Basic black-and-white drawings and paintings show composition most clearly. She must also have appreciated Chinese brush painting, which is traditionally done with a soot-based ink with highly flexible brushes. Arne Glimcher, her longtime dealer and friend, recalls in Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances that in the 1980s he had sent her a book on such work. On his next visit he saw “a series of grey canvases, each with diluted India ink washes under pencil grids, some with horizontal lines and others with vertical and horizontal lines.” Martin said to him, “Imagine yourself one of those little Chinese men in a brush painting and get into those boxes and look around.”

She did take up color—pastel washes worked into bars and grids, perhaps a reflection of the New Mexico sky and landscape. Still, I find it interesting that towards the end of her life she went back to the monochromatic palette in such important works as “Homage to Life” and “The Sea,” both from 2003, a year before she died.

In the latter, the black is intense, and the composition insistent—it is mostly black, with thin white horizontal lines pulsing across the large, 5-foot-by-5-foot canvas. Something in the slight irregularity of the white lines gives them a sense of movement, of surging rhythm, as of ocean waves that can be ever changing and yet patterned at the same time. It’s true, Martin had long avoided representing the outside world, and was more concerned with the truth within. Still, I do not think she could turn her back to the world completely—she just had to represent the elemental in her own way.

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Who was she? The woman who—simply by wearing all black—makes you feel stupidly ostentatious for wearing anything else. Even in yoga class.

Legs over head, I tried to steal a glance to pinpoint why some women look so good in black that you’d rather look at them than the mountains behind them. How do they look like Paloma Picasso while others like students on a budget? What could be easier than wearing all black?

Like most enviable skills, wearing all black is not nearly as easy as it looks. I covered fashion in New York in the 1990s so I spent a lot of time staring across a runway, studying row after row of women in black. (In those pre-Instagram years, the only person not in black was Anna Wintour.) And I think I’ve come up with the secret to pulling it off: It’s all about the grooming and the accessories.

Wear all black without perfect lipstick and hair and you can be mistaken for someone who just can’t be bothered with dry cleaning bills. The woman next to me at yoga—in gym clothes for crying out loud—had nary a hair out of place. Even in sweats, the black Lycra worked as a backdrop for her simple but stunning earrings.

Which is why the most successful wearers of all black tend to hail from the design industry. They are the kind of people who can find integrity in a chair, or distinguish a deep, rich blue-black (good) from a faded grey-black (bad—a sign of a garment in need of replacing) at 20 paces. They are ruthless in their design aesthetic—and nothing draws attention to good design better than removing anything, like color, that distracts from it. Similarly, the beatniks wore black to underscore their intellectual rigor. Nothing said square like Lily Pulitzer prints.

In matters of wearing black, it seems little has changed in the last 50 years. A recent study by a U.K. T-shirt manufacturer found that people who wear all black are seen as serious and reliable compared to their chromatic brethren. Which explains why it’s so common in boardrooms—even though a shapeless black suit doesn’t have any of the same appeal as the well-tailored pieces worn by the design cognoscenti.

“When you go to the office, a business meeting or networking event, everyone is wearing black, or gray,” says Jacqueline Allen, the founder of Edit-London, a personal styling firm that focuses only on executives. “The net result is that no one looks particularly senior, distinguished, or influential because everyone looks generic. Rather than enhancing the individual it becomes an equalizer and, instead of appearing unique and authoritative, you appear diminished and lacking confidence.”

For those without a personal stylist, black can also seem safe and speedy. Safe, because if you’re not at the top of the corporate ladder, standing out might be more risky than blending in. Speedy, because it limits the number of decisions to be made in the early morning hours. But unless you get the details perfect, you risk fading away into the background.

Outside of corporate life, color and prints are more popular than ever, but need to be worn with care. Standing out is risky business—remember it was Joseph’s coat of many colors that got him into trouble with his brothers.

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Ozzie’s my fourth black dog. Starting with a sweet Labrador mix in childhood, I have nurtured a love affair with dark-coated canines for decades. I’m not alone in this bias; Labrador retrievers are the most popular dog breed, according to the American Kennel Club, and black labs in particular are bred for their intelligence, energy, and protectiveness. My childhood companion, Lena, was a well-mannered black lab/springer spaniel mix who had all of these qualities in abundance. She was a constant companion on road trips, family outings to the park, and even at my father’s office.

Yet if you listen to many animal workers, and many pet owners, you would think my infatuation is unusual. Black animals generally are thought to repel, not attract. Humane shelters report that large black dogs have more trouble finding homes than do other dogs. The phenomenon even has a name: black dog syndrome.

There are practical explanations. Black animals can be frightening. Black animals of all sizes and breeds are harder to photograph in the shadows of a kennel. Their expressions are harder to read due to the lack of facial contrast. But as a psychologist, I’ve studied the phenomenon, and my research suggests that the explanation for this syndrome, if it actually exists, has nothing to do with the nature of the animal. Instead, it’s based in the cultural associations of the color black itself.

Across nations, folklore, literature, and popular culture have long portrayed black animals as undesirable. Black is widely perceived as the color of evil and doom. The Egyptian god of the underworld, Anubis, was depicted as a black dog (or as a man with a dog’s head) to represent the discoloration of a corpse after embalming. In the folklore of the British Isles, a black dog was a ghostly being whose appearance was regarded as a harbinger of death. Perhaps drawing on this cultural metaphor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used the image of a black dog as his specter of horror in The Hound of the Baskervilles. The term “black dog” has been used since at least as far back as Samuel Johnson to describe the darkest depths of depression. Black cats also have negative connotations. In the Middle Ages, they were associated with witchcraft, often joining their owners in a fiery death at the stake. In much of the western world, they still are perceived as unlucky. (Although in parts of Asia and the United Kingdom, black cats actually are associated with good luck—except when one crosses an intended path.)

Psychological research confirms these traditional associations. In one study, for instance, the penalty records of National Football League and National Hockey League teams with black uniforms were found to rank near the top of the leagues. Furthermore, people who looked at pictures of these teams consistently dubbed them as more “aggressive” and “bad” than teams wearing lighter colors. These findings suggest that the color black may bias the judgments of referees, and even increase the aggressiveness of players themselves.

Conversely, studies also show that vibrant color, and especially color contrast, is highly appealing. Attractive color has been identified as a critical factor in product purchases in up to 90 percent of impulse buys. Web design research indicates that contrast in color (known as the isolation effect) can visually guide people to click on computer images. Color seems to be an important feature of branding in all fields of marketing, including pets.

But surprisingly, in the case of dogs, these psychological associations actually might not matter. Black dog syndrome, as a psychological phenomenon, is probably nonexistent. Since my early research on the topic, numerous studies have found that the syndrome may simply be an artifact of something called “base rate fallacy.” Due to the dominance of the dark-coat color gene, there are more black dogs and cats than any other color. This preponderance makes it appear that these animals are disproportionately represented in the shelter population. Moreover, contemporary research shows that prejudice against black dogs is not as prevalent as previously thought. In a 2013 study, participants were asked to rate pictures of dogs, colored black or white but otherwise identical, in terms of their perceived personality attributes. The white dog was rated less friendly and more dominant. Several other animal welfare researchers have confirmed that for dogs, coat color is less important to human perceptions of canine temperament than breed or other physical features such as size, ear conformation, facial features, and tail length.

Black cats, on the other hand, are a different story. They’ve been the focus of less empirical study, but research that controls for factors such as sex or age has found that black cats do in fact take longer to adopt from animal shelters than their lighter or multi-colored peers. Despite the fact that black coat color seems to be genetically linked to friendlier disposition and better health in cats, black cats are thought to be more energetic, aloof, and bold than multi-colored or lighter colored felines. And the additional time spent incarcerated contributes to a vicious cycle. The longer cats spend in shelters, the more their health and emotional well-being declines, which makes them even less desirable.

Whether it’s real or not in a technical sense, black dog syndrome still sometimes may have real effects. The simple belief that the phenomenon exists may be leading to something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: People might hesitate to adopt black dogs because of information they barely remember, or information from a less-than-credible source (a common cognitive heuristic called “source monitoring error”). As a result, fewer may be adopted, and the false beliefs may be perpetuated. And the consequences can be deadly. When shelter workers make assumptions about adoptability based on coat color, euthanasia may be disproportionately used to reduce the numbers of shelter animals that are alleged to be unadoptable.

Thankfully, there’s a growing push for us to recognize our misguided assumptions. Last year, one Utah animal shelter embraced what we know about the importance of appearance in product marketing by hiring a photographer to depict its black animals in a series of glamour shots. The aim was to allow the dogs’ personalities shine through their shadowy exteriors. And it worked; potential adoptive families lined up to meet them.

Ozzie, like all my pets, was a rescue animal. He was taken from a foreclosed house where he lived in a rabbit cage for his first three months. At first, Oz was an unsavory-looking companion, scrawny and timid, and my partner and I wavered before committing to adoption. But my love of black labs won, and now he brings our home so much joy. Like the dogs in the Utah animal shelter’s photographs, he is a reminder that first appearances can be deceptive. With pets, like anything else, color is not always an indicator of what lies beneath.

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Panelists at a lively Zócalo/Getty “Open Art” event at the Getty Museum explored the hue’s often contradictory and controversial associations, exploding the idea that black is merely the absence of color. Among the many connotations the panelists discussed were the signals black sends out about luxury, death, sin, style, and race.

With a color that is so hard to nail down, moderator Peter Tokofsky, an education specialist at the Getty and adjunct member of the German faculty at UCLA, kicked off the afternoon by asking Katrin Trautwein, the founder of the paint manufacturer kt.COLOR, “What is black?”

Trautwein said she hadn’t thought much about producing black paints until a Dutch designer asked her to produce 24 shades of black so she could use them as backgrounds to set off white and colored objects. Then, she said, she was confronted with a conundrum: “The question is, where does black begin and where does black end?”

As a chemist, she came up with a very literal answer: Any color that has more than 50 percent black pigment is black. Trautwein was able to come up with a very dark shade of black called ivory black—which was made from charred animal bones and reflected a mere 2.3 percent of light back. But the 15 other colors she ended up producing were not as dark—they were mixed with other colors, including burnt umber and ultramarine blue.

Why didn’t she come up with a palette of 24 blacks? “We think there are certain colors that have greater material depth and greater sensuality and others fall flat,” Trautwein explained. “You can create an infinite number [of shades of black], but they won’t be equal.”

Harvard art historian Sarah E. Lewis saw Trautwein’s discussion of shades of black in another light. The varieties of black that Trautwein showed made her think “we were having a meta-conversation about miscegenation and race—who is black, ultimately,” she said. Talking about what made a color black reminded her of the historical “one-drop rule” in America where one drop of black blood was enough to for someone to be considered a member of the black race.

As a result, it’s hard to extricate discussion of the color black from the history of race, especially in America, Lewis argued. And visual representations—paintings, photography, theater, and other art—are one of the key reasons they can’t be separated.

The 17th century was a particularly pivotal moment, Lewis said, when the color black started to draw more negative connotations. She described a performance of The Masque of Blackness at the court of King James I of England, where the queen and her attendants were painted black as the 12 “daughters of Niger” and came into the palace talking about how black used to be considered beautiful. In a subsequent performance known as The Masque of Beauty, the women in black paint were cleansed of the dark pigment on their skin as part of achieving a greater form of magnificence.

The masques took place as Britain was drawn deeper into the slave trade and into colonizing America—so they can be seen “as the birth of the New World,” she explained. “This is the moment where you see the propaganda at work for supporting the idea of black slavery.”

Lewis also showed black-and-white figures that 19th-century “scientists” used to distinguish among the races; those who were depicted the darkest were often shown as the closest to chimpanzees—sub-human. It was images such as these that prompted Frederick Douglass to consider pictures and photography critical to returning full humanity to black people. Douglass took on the role of art historian and was the first person in America to talk about the role of race and photography.

“The entire project of racial classification can’t be seen as separate from image-making,” Lewis said.

John Harvey, a life fellow of Cambridge University and author of The Story of Black, pointed out other pivotal moments in the history of blackness.

The rise of Christianity brought with it the association between blackness and sin, which then strengthened black’s association with death, he explained. The 19th century, Harvey noted, was also obsessed with the color black. Black clothing became ubiquitous for men; there was a renewed interest in the paintings of Rembrandt, which tended to use very dark tones; and dark woods were de rigeur for furniture.

Why did this happen? It wasn’t just because black could hide the soot and dirt associated with the rapid industrialization of the time, Harvey explained. There were also a lot of industrialists from puritanical, Calvinist backgrounds who favored black and came to dominate English life. And in response, many English men who were considered “dandies” also decided to wear “smart, black clothes.”

“What the dandies did was to sort of beat [that puritanical trend] by producing a kind of smart black style that got one jump ahead of them,” Harvey said.

Lewis added that the 19th century in America was a particularly fraught time for decoding the color black. Not all black people were slaves anymore and there was an increased burden on the general population to figure out who was black and who was not, she said.

She pointed to the story of a fair-skinned woman from Georgia named Ellen Craft who escaped slavery by posing as a white male plantation owner traveling with a darker-skinned personal servant. (The “servant” was actually her husband, William Craft.) Their case caused an uproar, of course. And the Fugitive Slave Act, which required slaves to be returned to their masters, was partly passed in response to “this sense of severe alarm that you could no longer perceive what blackness was in front of you,” Lewis said.

In the question-and-answer session that followed, a member of the audience asked whether it was true that many Asian cultures associated white with death, rather than black.

Harvey responded that, yes, it is indeed true that mourning clothes in places like China and Japan are often white. But he noted that white also has associations with death in the West—ghosts, for instance, are white because of the color of the winding sheets that were often wrapped around dead bodies. And white skeletons have long been associated with death in the West, too.

Death seems to have a particularly strong relationship with these two colors, he noted, but these color associations aren’t fixed in time. For instance, it used to be that wearing a white sari to an Indian wedding was “offensive and disastrous” because white saris were mourning attire, Harvey said.

But “Bollywood has changed that,” he said. When Bollywood depicts love scenes in the rain, what color does the sari tend to be? White—that color does a much better job of conveying sensuality as it becomes translucent and sticks to the body.

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