Color Studies

The Color Studies Working Group is built on the temporal and geographic ubiquity of its central subject. Color is a material, visual, philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural concern that has significance to research nodes in the arts, humanities, sciences, technology, and practice. Color studies researchers explore cultural encounters, local knowledge, communication, practice, and other topics to understand the nature of color and its effects in global environments. Its combination of universality and specificity makes color uniquely situated to explore ideas of change and continuity in multidisciplinary settings.

This group brings together scholars are engaged in color-inclusive research and those who want to explore color studies to benefit their work. We want to enhance your knowledge about color and help you build alliances among those who study color. At our meetings, you’ll have opportunities to workshop a paper or presentation, lead or contribute to discussions of formative works, and work together on Zoom-based hands-on projects. We will learn from each other about new (and old!) approaches to research about color. Diverse approaches welcome.

Please set your timezone at https://www.chstm.org/user

Consortium Respectful Behavior Policy

Participants at Consortium activities will treat each other with respect and consideration to create a collegial, inclusive, and professional environment that is free from any form of discrimination, harassment, or retaliation.

Participants will avoid any inappropriate actions or statements based on individual characteristics such as age, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, nationality, political affiliation, ability status, educational background, or any other characteristic protected by law. Disruptive or harassing behavior of any kind will not be tolerated. Harassment includes but is not limited to inappropriate or intimidating behavior and language, unwelcome jokes or comments, unwanted touching or attention, offensive images, photography without permission, and stalking.

Participants may send reports or concerns about violations of this policy to conduct@chstm.org.

Upcoming Meetings

  • Wednesday, October 9, 2024 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm EDT

     
    Margaret Morgan Grasselli (formerly National Gallery of Art) and Elizabeth Savage (School of Advanced Study, University of London) on Printing Colour 1700-1830: Discoveries, Rediscoveries and Innovations in the Long Eighteenth Century. It can be pre-ordered at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/printing-colour-1700-1830-9780197267530?lang=en&cc=gb .
     
    28 October is the official publication date for Printing  Colour 1700 - 1830: Histories, Techniques, Functions, and Receptions. (Oxford University Press 2024, 978-0-19-726753-0).  Join editors Elizabeth Savage and Meg Grasselli, plus selected authors, as we celebrate this landmark work. We'll hear about current research into histories of printing in color and discuss the issues raised when printing books in color about books in color.
     
    About the book:
    Printing Colour 1700-1830 . . . examines the rich period of invention, experimentation and creativity surrounding colour printing in Europe between two critically important developments, four-colour separation printing around 1710, and chromolithography around 1830. Its 28 essays expand the corpus beyond rare fine art impressions to include many millions of colour-printed images and objects. The chapters unveil the explosive growth in the production and marketing of colour prints at this pivotal They address the numerous scientific and technological advances that fed the burgeoning popularity for such diverse colour-printed consumer goods as clothing, textiles, wallpapers, and ceramics. They recontextualise the rise in colour-printed paper currencies, book endpapers and typography, and ephemera, including lottery tickets and advertisements. This landmark volume launches colour printing of the long 18th century as an interdisciplinary field of study, opening new avenues for research across historical and scientific fields.
     
    Elizabeth Savage is a historian of art and print. She specializes in pre-industrial western printing techniques, especially for printing color in late medieval and early modern Europe.
    Margaret Morgan (Meg) Grasselli recently retired as Curator of Old Master Drawing at the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC).
     
    Organizer: Elizabeth Savage
     
     


  • Wednesday, November 13, 2024 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm EST

    Paul Smith (University of Warwick) on Cezanne and autistic color perception
    Organizer: Giulia Simonini


  • Wednesday, December 11, 2024 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm EST

    Amy Woolf and Sarah Corbyn Woolf  (Woolf Color and Design) on color palettes and creating and color schemes
    Organizer: Sarah Lowengard


  • Wednesday, January 8, 2025 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm EST

    Deadly Colour: A Roundtable
    Tony Travis (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) on 'Dangerous Dyes: A Different History of the Synthetic Dye Industry'and Chiara Palandri (National Library of Norway) on 'A Voyage pittoresque in Norway through Colour Prints, 1789–c.1815'

    Organizer: Elizabeth Savage
     


  • Wednesday, February 12, 2025 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm EST

    Tanne Bloks
    Sowerby's Chromatometer of 1809
    Learn how to use a paper tool devised by James Sowerby. (1757-1822). He published the chromaometert in A New Elucidation of Colours, Original, Prismatic, and Material (1809) to show how to visualise spectral colors and, in particular, the inverted spectrum (notoriously) discussed by Goethe in his Farbenlehre (1810)
     
    Organizer: Giulia Simonini


  • Wednesday, March 12, 2025 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm EDT

    Leib Celnik (Johns Hopkins). Revisiting "Polemics" and "History" sections of Goethe's Farbenlehre.
    Organizer: Sarah Lowengard


  • Wednesday, April 9, 2025 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm EDT

    Ian Dooley (School of Advanced Study, University of London) on 'A Pigment Paradigm Shift: How British Printing Ink Industrialization Revolutionized Color Printing in the Late Nineteenth Century'
     
    Organizer: Elizabeth Savage


  • Wednesday, May 14, 2025 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm EDT

    Joyce Dixon, title TBD
    Organizer: Giulia Siimonini


  • Wednesday, June 11, 2025 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm EDT

    What is it about Prussian blue? [tentative]
    Prussian blue has a winding history that includes a myth-like origin story, rapid international success, a range of adapted uses in art, industry & trade, medical uses, and contested efforts to understand its formation and structure.
    I'm beginning to think about a meeting to discuss the multivalent nature of colors using Prussian blue as a reference point.
    At present, I am toying with the idea of several of us--separately or in groups--take on the aspects of Prussian blue as an object in history, chemistry, culture, or some combination. We'd each work on something different, and at our session share what we've learned. The session would not be limited to those of us who are contributing.
    Please let me know if this idea appeals to you, and if you'd like to participate.
    SL
     
    Organizer: Sarah Lowengard



Past Meetings

  • September 11, 2024

    We will discuss
     
    Georges Roque: « Éléments de méthode d’analyse de la signification des couleurs : expression et contenu » /  “Expression and content: A methodological tool to analyze color meaning”
     
    Abstract:
    This paper is a chapter from a forthcoming book, Significations des couleurs dans la peinture (17e - 20e siècles). It provides a methodological tool, based on general semiotics, to analyze color meaning, mainly in painting. The method is widely used by semioticians, but not yet (as far as I know) in the field of color. Its starting point is Louis Hjelmslev’s distinction between the expression plane and the content plane, which corresponds roughly to Ferdinand de Saussure's significant (expression) and signifier (content). As each plane is composed of several oppositions the process to create meaning consists of correlating oppositions of the expression plane to oppositions of the content plane. To give just a few examples, the opposition light/dark can be related to day/night, life/death; the opposition between saturated and desaturated can be related to happiness/sadness. In this paper I briefly examine the main oppositions used for the expression plane of color and their possible links to semantic oppositions. I am aware that such links are often too general and cannot replace the context-dependent analysis of a given artwork. However, I argue that this tool can prove useful when we try to understand color meaning in works of art.
     
    A philosopher and an art historian, Georges Roque is honorary senior researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris. On color he organized four international symposia whose proceedings have been published and curated three exhibitions. Main books:  La Stratégie de Bonnard. Couleur, lumière, regard, Paris, Gallimard, 2006; Art et science de la couleur. Chevreul et les peintres, de Delacroix à l’abstraction, second revised ed., Paris, Gallimard, 2009; Quand la lumière devient couleur, Paris, Gallimard, 2018; La cochenille, de la teinture à la peinture. Une histoire matérielle de la couleur, Paris, Gallimard, 2021. His latest papers published in English are: “Philosophy and Science”, in A Cultural History of Color In the Age of Industry, vol. 5, (éd. A. Loske), London & New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, p. 33-52 ; “Colour Theory: Definition, fields and interrelations”, AIC Journal of the International Colour Association, vol. 32, 2023, n° special Colour Theory, p. 4-16;
     
    Please note that the text proposed for this discussion was written for publication in French. We are including along with the original an English translation made using Google’s AI translator and slightly revised.
     


Group Conveners

  • Lowengard's picture

    Sarah Lowengard

    I am a historian of technologies and sciences. First a dyer and pigment maker, then a dix-huitièmiste, I am currently involved in a multi-format, multi-dimensional effort to trace the movements of a color and its production processes around the world over approximately eight centuries. I have taken this on as a way to explore how the enlaced significances of a color affect people, production, products, and the ideas about color.
     

     

  • elizabethsavage's picture

    Elizabeth Savage

    Elizabeth Savage (School of Advanced Study, University of London) is a historian of art and print. She specializes in pre-industrial western printing techniques, especially for printing color in late medieval and early modern Europe.

     

  • GiuliaSimonini's picture

    Giulia Simonini

    Giulia Simonini is a science and art historian, and a graduate conservator. Currently, she works as a postdoc in the research group “Dimensions of techne in the Fine Arts” (Technische Universität Berlin) led by Magdalena Bushart. Her research focuses on color history, color science, botanical and zoological illustrations between the seventeenth and the early nineteenth century. Recently, she authored “Calau’s Punic Wax, Lambert’s Farbenpyramide (1772), and Prefabricated Watercolour Cakes” (2023).
     

     

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