David Batchelor
‘Colour is devoid of parts.’1
Plotinus, c.260
‘Colour is single...’2
Walter Benjamin, 1913
‘Colour is the shattering of unity.’3
Julia Kristeva, 1982
‘Colour exists in itself.’4
Henri Matisse, 1908
‘Colour cannot stand alone.’5
Wassily Kandinsky, 1911
‘Colour… is new each time.’6
Roland Barthes, 1975
‘Colour is the most relative medium in art.’7
Joseph Albers, 1963
‘Colour is the experience of a ratio.’8
William Gass, 1976
‘Colour is a poor imitator.’9 Bernard Berenson, 1950
‘Colour deceives continually.’10 Joseph Albers, 1963
‘Colour is an illusion, but not an unfounded illusion.’11
CL Harding, 1988
‘Colour is like a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell.’12
Roland Barthes, 1975
‘Colour must be seen.’13
Walter Benjamin, 1913
‘Colour is the idealised optical surface of objects; an exterior and superficial impression of them.’14
Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner, 1921
‘Colour… is the peculiar characteristic of the lower forms of nature.’15
Charles Blanc, 1867
‘Colour is suited to simple races, peasants and savages.’16
Le Corbusier, 1925
‘Colour is indulged in by communities where brain was subordinated to muscle.’17
Bernard Berenson, 1950
‘Colour is an animal.’18
Michael Taussig, 2009
‘Colour is too noisy.’19
Jane Bown, nd
‘Colour is accidental and it has nothing in common with the innermost essence of the thing.’20
Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner, 1920
‘Colour has always been seen as belonging to the ontologically deficient categories of the ephemeral and the random.’21
Jacqueline Lichtenstein, 1989
‘Colour can appear an unthinkable scandal.’22
Stephen Melville, 1996
‘Colour seems to have a Queer bent!’23
Derek Jarman, 1994
‘Colour is the concrete expression of a maximum difference within identity.’24
Adrian Stokes, 1937
‘Colour... emphasises the outward and simultaneous otherness of space.’25
Adrian Stokes, 1937
‘Colour to continue had to occur in space.’26
Donald Judd, 1994
‘Colour becomes significant only when it is used as an attribute of form.’27
Clive Bell, 1914
‘Colour is an autonomous event that does not require form.’28
Carlos Cruz-Diez, nd
‘Colour, above all, and perhaps even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.’29
Henri Matisse, 1908
‘Colour is enslaved by line that becomes writing.’30
Yves Klein, 1959
‘Colour is a pleasure that exceeds discursiveness.’31
Jacqueline Lichtenstein, 1989
‘Colour precedes words and antedates civilisation…’32
Leonard Shalin, 1991
‘Colour has not yet been named.’33
Jacques Derrida, 1971
‘Colour must be thought, imagined, dreamed...’34
Gustav Moreau, 1893
‘Colour is knowledge.’35
Donald Judd, 1994
‘Colour... is a kind of bliss.’36
Roland Barthes, 1975
‘Colour is the first revelation of the world.’37
elio Oiticica, 1960
‘Colour is the sign of the existence of life.’38
Etel Adnan, nd
‘Colour is a human need like water and fire.’39
Fernand Léger, 1946
‘Colour is not an easy matter.’40
Umberto Eco, 1985
1 Plotinus, in Gage, J, Colour and Culture, p 21
2 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913-26, p 50
3 Kristeva, ‘Giotto’s Joy’, Desire in Language, p 37
4 Matisse, Matisse on Art, p 116
5 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p 28
6 Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, p 166
7 Albers, Interaction of Color, p 8
8 Gass, On Being Blue, p 67
9 Berenson, Aesthetics and History, p 78
10 Albers, Interaction of Color, p 1
11 Hardin, Unweaving the Rainbow, p 159
12 Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, p 166
13 Benjamin, Notes, p 50
14 Gabo and Pevsner ‘The Realistic Manifesto’, Art in Theory, p 298
15 Blanc, Grammar of Painting and Engraving, p 4
16 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today; p 135
17 Berenson, Aesthetics and History, p 76
18 Taussig, What Color is the Sacred?, p 97
19 Bown, The Guardian
20 Gabo and Pevsner, op cit; p 298
21 Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Colour, p 63
22 Melville, ‘Colour has not yet been named’, p 141
23 Jarman, Chroma, p 58
24 Stokes, Colour and Form, p 27
25 Stokes, Colour and Form, p 19
26 Judd, ‘Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular’,Artforum, Summer 1994, p 113
27 Bell, Art, p 12
28 Cruz-Diez, Reflections on Color, Madrid,2009, np
29 Matisse, Matisse on Art, p 100
30 Klein, in Sadra Stitch, Yves Klein, p 50
31 Lichtenstein, op cit, p 154
32 Shalin, quoted in Riley, Color Codes, p 6
33 Derrida, Truth in Painting, p 169
34 Moreau, quoted in Matisse, ‘Notes of a Painter’, p 29
35 Judd, ‘Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular’, Artforum, Summer 1994, p 113
36 Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, p 166
37 Helio Oiticica, The Body of Color, Tate, 2007 p 202
38 Adnan, Serpentine Gallery wall text, p 2016
39 Léger, ‘Modern Architecture and Color’, Functions of Painting [NY: Viking, 1973], p 149
40 Eco, ‘How Culture Conditions the Colours We See’, p 157
41Helio Oiticica ‘Color is a religious necessity’, The Body of Color, 1961 p 244