White: Art History’s Dirty Little Secret
Inspired by ‘A History of the World in Three Colours:
Blue’ BBC4 documentary by Dr James Fox
White is usually associated with innocence, but behind the perfect
façade hides a dark history of corruption and control.
Dr James Fox begins his exploration of white with an act of vandalism
that took place at the British Museum in 1938. The Elgin Marbles, an extremely important survivor of the ancient world
were being cleaned. Not just cleaned, but stripped of their colour, and without
the authorisation of the museum’s board of directors. An influential art
dealer, Joseph Devine, had recently funded a new exhibition space for the
marbles. He admired them greatly, except for the fact that they displayed
residues of colour, and he thought they should be white. So he bribed the staff
preparing the marbles for display to strip them bare. Fortunately they were
caught before they could vandalise them all, but their efforts can still be
seen to this day. So why was Devine so adamant that these sculptures should be
white? That responsibility lies with J.J. Winkleman.
Born in 18th Century rural Germany, J.J. Winkleman was the
son of a cobbler. But he had bigger dreams and at the age of 30 headed off to
start a new life in Dresden. One day he stumbled across a store room full of
ancient white statues; he fell instantly in love, and spent years searching for
more statues and writing essays in praise of them. In 1755 whilst employed as the
‘Keeper of Antiquities’ at the Vatican he found the most perfect example of
ancient sculpture: Apollo Belvedere (300BCE).
In his eyes this statue was the embodiment of perfection, and it was pure
white. For Winkleman white represented beauty, health, simplicity and reason,
and he believed that if society could take on these ideas it would be more
successful. The impassioned writings of Winkleman led to the veneration of
antiquity that continues today. Look around your city centre and you will see
buildings built in the classical style, with pillars and porticos, and largely
they are white. Of course what Winkleman didn’t know and we now do is that
Roman sculpture and buildings used to be painted in bright colours; most had just
faded by the time he got round to seeing them. Our respect of white antiquity
is based on a myth dreamt up by one man – quite a legacy.
An avid disciple of JJ Winkleman was Josiah Wedgewood – the ultimate
enlightenment man. Wedgewood had a dream too – every person could have a piece of antiquity in their home by owning a
piece of his classical style white coloured pottery. English pottery in the 18th
century was coarse and cumbersome in earthy colours - bad taste thought Wedgewood.
He wanted to push his idea of good taste into the public consciousness until
they agreed. But he had one problem – only the Chinese could create a white
glaze. It took Wedgewood a staggering 5000 attempts to get the perfect white
glaze, but in 1761 he succeeded and his Queen’s
Ware with its neo-classical styling was the first white pottery in Europe.
During the enlightenment period white had been used to unify people,
offering a shared culture and taste. In the 19th Century that idea
was turned on its head by one man, a rich American artist called Whistler. Upon
his arrival in England in 1851, Whistler was horrified by the Victorians’ love
of fantasy and mythology: a theme that was prevalent in the paintings of the
Pre-Raphaelites. Whistler wanted to set himself apart from this sentimentalism
and he used the colour white to achieve this. A popular novel of the time, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins,
was the catalyst for his exhibition of paintings presenting women in white
dresses. The Victorians gamely visited the show expecting to see their realised
image of their fantasy woman in white, but what they found confused them. Each
painting was entitled Symphony in White,
they weren’t about a woman, the subject was white itself. Whistler had used
white to mock the public: only his close circle of friends understood the
meaning of the paintings; white became the colour of elitism. In 1883 Whistler took
his white obsession further: his white paintings of Venice were displayed in a
white room, in white frames, and he even made the gallery attendant wear white.
Some argue that Whistler pioneered the ‘white cube’ gallery space. The
exhibition was entitled A Masterpiece of
Mischief, but what Whistler had created wasn’t fun at all; it was cold,
sterile and unwelcoming.
This fashion for impenetrable art was continued into the 20th
Century, championed by Marcel Duchamp and his infamous Fountain of 1917. In this documentary Dr James Fox comments that
when most art critics assess Fountain,
they always seem to miss one key aspect of the piece: its whiteness. The fact
that the upside down urinal is white is central to understanding Duchamp’s
motives. It is supposed to remind us of the marble busts of antiquity, of
Wedgewood’s porcelain, and it reminds us to mock them. Marcel Duchamp wanted us
to question our concept of ‘good taste’ that has been imposed upon us for
centuries. What Duchamp didn’t know was how fighting imposed ideology would be
vital in the years to come.
Le Corbusier was a Swiss-born architect; in 1925 he wrote the purist
manifesto Towards a New Architecture.
The manifesto contained within it the blueprints for a new world and central to
Corbusier’s plan was the whitewashing of architecture. He called it the ‘Law of Ripolin’: "Every citizen is
required to replace his hangings, his damasks, his wall-papers, his stencils,
with a plain coat of white Ripolin. His home is made clean". Le Corbusier
believed that by eradicating all forms of decoration and reminders of the past
the citizens would achieve "inner cleanness". Many of Le Corbusier’s
designs were carried out, mainly apartment blocks and civic buildings. It came
as no surprise that in 1934 Mussolini invited Le Corbusier to Rome to talk
about this ‘new architecture’. Mussolini wanted to create a new Roman empire,
to rip down the ancient monuments and start afresh; he took Le Corbusier’s
ideas, but never employed him, wanted to take the credit for himself. Mussolini
didn’t rip down the ancient monuments, but he did create a new city, filled
with imposing white stone buildings called Esposizione Universale Roma (EUR).
In the spirit of his predecessors, Mussolini also had a ginormous white marble obelisk
erected. It was made form a single block of pure Carrera marble – the best in
the world – and was transported the old-fashioned way: pulled by hundreds of
donkeys on rolling logs. The power trip continued as Mussolini constructed ‘The
Stadium of the Marbles’, a sporting arena surrounded by marble statues of
athletes, each one representing an Italian town, each one white. Hitler may
have pioneered the obsession with the perfect Aryan race, but Mussolini was
quick on the uptake; his marble statues represented an Italy united in
perfection, united in fascism, united in racism, with no room for the individual.
Once the colour white represented the quest to enlighten, inspire and
improve, but the modern world converted it into a tool to divide, exclude and
control. Dr Fox concludes that: “we still think of white as a clean, blank
canvas, but it is forever tainted by our impurities.” We have all been
complicit in the whitewashing of art history.
The Elgin Marbles: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/articles/w/what_are_the_elgin_marbles.aspx
Apollo Belvedere:
Symphony in White no. 3 by Whistler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Whistler_James_Symphony_in_White_No_3_1866.jpg
Fountain by Marcel Duchamp: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573
Le Corbusier: http://www.postmedia.net/08/papadimitriou.htm
