2023-08-18 22:16:54
When Lawrence Herbert created the multinational dedicated to specifying colors, there was still “forest violet”, “cadmium red”, “silent green”, “soul blue”, “divine salmon”, “valor brown” or “beautiful yellow”. ”. The colors were prey to kitsch, in an attempt to do science with poetry to define the world we see. Herbert, the king of color, is the founder of Pantone and has been creating color swatches since 1956, when he entered a small printing company that made them and ended up buying it six years later thanks to the investment of a woman he did not know about. knows his identity. “Making colors has traditionally been an imprecise though often highly symbolic activity,” Victoria Finlay writes in her history, travel and adventure book: Color (published in Spain by Captain Swing and translated by Eva Acosta). “Color equals precision”, adds the author, who goes through the stories that have given shape to what does not have it.
Chemistry explains the beauty of art
Further
For Finlay, opening a box of paints is something like opening a book and finding the stories inside. “They are stories of sacredness and blasphemy, of nostalgia and innovation, of secrecy and myth, of luxury and texture, of profit and loss, of cruelty and greed,” says the British author. On her journey around the world, she searched for an explanation of the historical beginnings of colors and for a clarification: why they are called that way. Finlay recalls that the Inuits of Canada distinguish between dozens of shades of snow, that in Mongolia there are more than 300 words to define the color of horses.
Herbert recalled that he had to develop cards that identified the fat content of a liver by color before a transplant. But the strangest job he ever got, Herbert acknowledged to Finlay, was as a goldfish breeder. The assignment consisted of calibrating the tones of the colors of the koi carp: “About twenty fish arrived in bags, I put them all in an aquarium and moved them until I had them ordered in terms of color.”
Ciphers and letters
But when he met Lawrence Herbert, the person who names colors today, 20 years ago, he was surprised with a little drama: poetry in nomenclature had its days numbered. The “moss tone” or “sulfur spring” were doomed to disappear from the famous fan-shaped catalogue. The definition of the colors was going to be reduced to a numbering. The library of colors that he created in 1963 had reached more than 700 references.
“We are not going to give more names. In the next issue we are going to remove them,” Herbert told Finlay, a few years before selling the company for $180 million to X-Rite Incorporated (which sold it in 2012 to the Danaher Corporation). At the moment, it has reached a record of 15,000 colors. The owner of Pantone explained to the journalist that to talk about science and measurement, names and poetry were not adequate: “We live in a digital world and computers do not need names, but numbers. People talk about ‘barn red’, but you haven’t seen a Scandinavian barn in your life. And anyway, what does “red lipstick” mean? The entrepreneur’s obsession was to measure color with science, not art. Only in this way could he achieve accuracy.
Finlay replied that the color names were history, that he couldn’t get rid of them. As her world collapsed, she thought of “mummy brown, ultramarine, Scheele green, Turner yellow…and so many other color names that contain whole stories of deceit, adventure, and experimentation in their syllables.” ”. The journalist feared that by losing her words, the colors would lose her stories. “And I loved taking my palette tours when I could still explore the worlds of approximation and poetry, before colors began to lose their words,” Victoria Finlay wrote.
history is eternal
One of those most interesting journeys is the one he began to discover the origins of the “carmine” on the palette of the English painter, JMW Turner (1775-1851). He felt attracted by the intensity of that red made of blood that, for centuries, was the treasure of the Incas and the Aztecs, before the Spanish appropriated it and kept its composition a secret. Carmine or cochineal is one of the reddest dyes produced by the natural world. “Those armed men found gold and silver in the New Continent, but they also found red. Within a few years they had wrested control of the cochineal industry from the locals. Like the Romans many centuries before, the Spanish took taxes seriously and soon established one of the largest colored export businesses the world had ever seen. In Mexico they left their collection in the hands of the Indians”, says Finlay.
The author tells of Color that in 1575 some 80 metric tons of red arrived in Spain “in the form of dry brown balls”. Several trillion insect bodies each year. Fashion made color a desire and so did cosmetics. In Europe in the 16th century, no one knew where that “red of Spain” came from. Until, at the end of the 18th century, the French biologist and spy, Thiéry de Menonville, found the main cochineal production center in present-day Oaxaca. The treasure he was looking for was found in the daughters of a cactus.
“But my surprise was real when he brought it to me, because instead of the red insect that I was expecting, a plant covered in white powder appeared,” De Menonville explained of his encounter with a farmer. So he squashed one on a piece of paper and discovered the shade of purple. “Drunk with joy and admiration, I hastened to abandon my Indian, leaving him two coins for his effort, and galloped at full speed,” he noted. He left with an animal as light as it was vulnerable. France was impatient to get the color that Spain had appropriated and was about to lose its monopoly on.
So the day Pantone included the reference number system, it seemed like it would be the end of poetry. But since the year 2000, the company started an advertising campaign and the words came back with force. Since then, they celebrate each year with a color. In 2023 touches “Viva Magenta” Pantone 18-750. According to the company, “Viva Magenta 18-750 vibrates with energy and vigour”. “It is a shade rooted in nature that descends from the red family and expresses a new sign of strength. Viva Magenta is brave and daring, a pulsating color whose exuberance promotes a joyful and optimistic celebration, writing a narrative”, adds the multinational to confirm that color can do without lyrics. Marketing, no.
#day #colors #lost #words