Maestro di Color

My mood bobs and dips. The Greek is getting easier; Arizona is not. I tend, at least, to derive a vague intellectual pleasure from the books that swim past my eyes, some leaving a permanent trace, others vanishing into the aether. Not a pleasure in the reading, mind, but a pleasure after the fact. Now and then I am troubled by brief bursts of irrational anger, and moments of envy, as when I chance upon the works of the great erudites. Last week it was Leofranc Holford-Strevens—what a marvelously aristocratic name!—whose book on Aulus Gellius does not hesitate to cite untransliterated mediaeval Arabic. Even Frances Yates drew the line at Arabic! My friend J tells me that Holford-Strevens, a senior editor at OUP, 'has the (well-deserved) reputation of being far more learned than the scholars he edits, no matter what the field'. Reading this sort of stuff plays havoc with my competitive streak.

It doesn't help that I sleep from 8am to 5pm, thus missing the light of day, as if in Norway. I have my worries, too—I grow anxious for the glabrity of my pate, and for the porcinity of my belly—neither are serious yet, still, the one is inevitable, and the other shows few signs of abating in this land of cars and fatty food.

Neither does it help—though it is fun—to learn what my moods look like. This improbable service has been rendered me by the Theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater, courtesy of their terrific 1901 book Thought-Forms. The paintings in this book, by 'Mr. John Varley [1850-99, grandson of John Varley], Mr. Prince and Miss Macfarlane', represent the two authors' clairvoyant impressions of emotional states in other men and women.


I was disappointed that vague intellectual pleasure, above, is the dullest-looking of all emotions. I mean really, it's indefensibly boring, isn't it? Worth noting, however, that our theosophists' view of intellectual pleasure anticipates Eliot's arguments about poetic creation:

Such pure intellectual gratification shows itself in a yellow cloud; and the same effect may be produced by delight in musical ingenuity, or the subtleties of argument. A cloud of this nature betokens the entire absence of any personal emotion, for if that were present it would inevitably tinge the yellow with its own appropriate colour.

Luckily, anger and jealousy are a bit more interesting; here they are together. I like the snot-green literalism of jealousy in particular. 'It may be noted that here the jealousy is merely a vague cloud, though interspersed with very definite flashes of anger ready to strike at those by whom it fancies itself to be injured.' Besant and Leadbeater write with a rather amusing moral smugness, and with the stiff propriety that one expects from literature of this period. Our authors also show us the effects of a shipwreck on men of disparate sensibility:


The right-hand shapes demonstrate 'an eruption of the livid grey of fear, rising out of a basis of utter selfishness', a soul 'possessed with blind, frantic terror, and that the overpowering sense of personal danger', although the lower man is somewhat calmed by his 'religious feeling'. The left-hand shape, on the other hand, shows 'splendid strength and decision', 'a powerful, clear-cut and definite thought, obviously full of force and resolution'. The full text is online, although the pictures have been badly scanned, so I reproduce them here from the original book.

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Now, we know that Kandinsky was into a bit of Theosophy. His 1912 book On the Spiritual in Art, to which I reacted here, shows the influence clearly. Like Besant and Leadbeater—and indeed like most of the mediaeval West—Kandinsky prizes blue as the colour of heaven. However, he associates yellow not with the intellect, but with superficiality and madness. Also, where Besant separates form and colour, Kandinsky associates the two: thus yellow is suited to triangles. There is an ample treatment of Kandinsky's work in John Gage's recent history of colour, Colour and Culture, which is a must-read. Gage also examines Besant's appreciation of musical synaesthesia, comparing her visual representations of Wagner and Gounod to the use by Kandinsky and Scriabin of light-effects in musical numbers.

But something else occurred to me. Kandinsky's abstract works really begin around 1909 or 1910; this book is almost a decade earlier. Are the paintings of Varley etc. the first completely abstract images in the West?

Were we to suggest this, we would have to discount pure ornament, with its long Western history, and also such works as Whistler's Nocturne or Turner's Light and Colour. Despite their obvious abstraction, the latter two pieces are depictions of the material world, and elements of reality can be glimpsed through the complex layers of paint. The images of Varley et al., on the other hand, have no reference whatsoever to the physical world. They lack, for the most part, the schematism of diagrams. And so in a real sense—in the sense of Rothko, or Barnett Newman—these crude daubs are the first fully abstract paintings in the Western tradition. Sixten Ringbom ('Art in 'The Epoch of the Great Spiritual': Occult Elements in the Early Theory of Abstract Painting', 1966) agrees: 'these colour illustrations can be regarded as the first non-objective representations'.

So there you have it. Like I said, though, it doesn't make me feel any better.

Update: Bibliodyssey saw this first. I should have guessed.