In the concluding chapter of Chromophobia, David Batchelor’s slim study of colour, first published in 2000, comes this admission: ‘I was expecting to write a book about art, if only because most other things I have written have been about art, and one would think there is a lot to say about art in a book about colour. It just hasn’t turned out that way. The more I have written, the more art has got pushed further and further back’.1 What pushed art aside was Batchelor’s detailing of the way colour gets in the way, the way it obtrudes in cultural sources from Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness, Walter Pater, J.J. Winckelmann, academic painting theory, late nineteenth century symbolist and science fiction, modernist architecture, the aspirational underpinnings of all-white interiors, and the Wizard of Oz. ‘Colour’, he concludes a little breathlessly, ‘is bound up with the fate of Western culture.’2
In this relationship, colour has been the object of an extreme prejudice, ‘systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished and degraded’.3 This prejudice, the fear and loathing of the book’s title, masks a fear of contamination and shows itself in attempts to remove colour from culture. As Batchelor tracks this purgative impulse and the resulting cult of whiteness, chromophobia begins to sound like another dirty secret of dead European men. When colour is deemed the ‘property of some “foreign” body—usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological’, whiteness comes to equal purity, judgment and mastery. On the other hand, when colour is relegated ‘to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic’, it is... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline