How strange is our attempt to write about the visual, and color is perhaps the most challenging visual quality to describe, even to name.  Art historians have devoted books upon books to perspective and to drawing, but color is too often unspoken (or randomly mentioned). This seminar will focus on case studies across the history of art that allow us to interrogate the history and elusive yet powerful impact of color, and we will continually try to test how we can write about its effects.  How strange is our attempt to write about the visual, and color is perhaps the most challenging visual quality to describe, even to name. Art historians have devoted books upon books to perspective and to drawing, but color is too often unspoken (or randomly mentioned). Inspired by my new book project, For Want of Color: Hand-Painted Photographs, this seminar will focus on case studies across the history of art that allow us to interrogate the history and elusive yet powerful impact of color, and we will continually try to test how we can write about its effects. 

Scientific theory (and color wheels!) will not be our emphasis; instead we will focus on color as at a culturally and historically specific signifier, a material substance, and an optical effect. Color has been associated with the low, the irrational, the bodily as well as women, racial others, mass culture, and spirituality. It has been opposed to drawing and rationality; as pigment, it has circulated globally and been fought over (cochineal, indigo, gold), playing a significant role in empire. Art theorists and artists have argued about its relative (un)importance in texts and in art.  Philosophers have often avoided talking about it, but some have struggled with its wordlessness; its utter resistance to language; its ineffability. Writing on color as “the irreducible component of representation that escapes the hegemony of language,” Jacqueline Lichtenstein has argued that “philosophical thought has always burned itself on the fire of color.”  

This course fulfills the following Major requirements: Geographical area (A) and Chronological period (II) or (III), based on the topic of the final research paper or project.