Seeing red | 18 August 2016

Early on in his excellent and protean biography of a colour, Spike Bucklow quotes Goethe, writing in 1809:

Every rope in the English Navy has a red thread running through it, which cannot be extracted without unravelling the whole, so that even the smallest length of rope can be recognised as belonging to the crown.

Bucklow’s book follows a red thread through human history, whose twin strands are material extraction — the animal, vegetable and mineral lives of red — and the extraction of meanings from redness itself.

All colour is cultural. We have our private definitions — the unshareable conviction as to what is and is not red — but it is societies that ‘make’ colours and their associations. Colour has always been used to code and classify, to divide and demarcate. In the case of red, the borders are especially porous: ‘red line’ and ‘red carpet’ belong to different worlds, as do red lips and red-eye. Many of red’s meanings are monitory — red alert, red peril, red rag — but there is also a ‘red’ sea which is itself a red herring, or there is red-handedness. Red runs to excess — it always says too much.

It is a colour which has always dreamt of putting order into chaos. Not for nothing does ‘cosmetic’ derive from Greek cosmos (‘to order’), just as rouge helped structure the social cosmos of the court at Versailles, where ‘the brighter reds were more aristocratic’. Red contains the most colour sensations, the richest play of nuances, the greatest contradictions, and it goes further back than any other colour. Until Roman times, to dye a material meant almost invariably to change its appearance to red (which included ochres and pinks and purples).