Colour in daily life
“This is also the thesis, or part of the thesis, of “Chromophobia.” David Batchelor’s gleeful little rant, from 2000, is a perfect example of what Janet Malcolm called a bee-in-your-bonnet book, in which the author has a broad, slightly wacky idea but then makes the case with such panache that one can’t help but be impressed. Batchelor thinks that
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Before publishing his Atlas in 1915, painter and art teacher Albert Henry Munsell (1858–1918) had spent decades seeking to compress the totality of human color experience into a simple and elegant three-dimensional graphical model. In 1879, after reading physicist Ogden Rood’s Modern Chromatics, he devised a pair of twirling triangular color pyramids joined at the base. In 1898, he painted a child’s globe in subtly shifting shades, only to find that the globe’s perfect symmetry could not sufficiently map the differences in strength — which he called “chroma” — between colors or “hues”. By 1905, in his A Color Notation, Munsell had moved to a tree as model, since its unequal length branches could accommodate different hues, chroma, and “value”, the third axis of his…
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