Color: A Natural History of the Palette (19 page)

It took 100 tons of lime to allow the world’s most famous white-colored house to breathe, and it covered it in style. By 1800, when the new President’s House was opened, it was the talk of the newly named city of Washington. It was the grandest home in America, and workmen were constantly being diverted by members of the public wandering in to watch the place being finished. It was to be a classical building, the freemason founders of America had decided—and should therefore be white like the ancient Greek buildings they so admired.
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At that time nobody had any idea that Greek temples had not been white at all, but covered with incredibly bright colors. It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that scholars would begin to realize there were probably no white surfaces at all on classical Greek buildings. Doric columns were striped red and blue; the Ionic capitals sported gold as well. The findings were not generally welcomed. There is a story of the sculptor Auguste Rodin once famously beating his chest: “I feel
here
that they were never colored,” he proclaimed passionately. Color historian Faber Birren
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recounted an anecdote in which two archaeologists went into a Greek temple. One climbed to the cornice and the other yelled: “Do you find any traces of color?” When he heard an affirmative answer he howled: “Come down instantly!”

The intention among the new Americans was for their “White House” to be the neoclassical equivalent of anything in Europe. Sometimes they were a little overenthusiastic. When George Washington (by then in retirement) first visited the site in 1797 he saw the white Ionic capitals, with great cabbage roses bursting fruitfully from their tops. Hold back on the stone carving, he wrote with some urgency to the commissioners. “I believe it is not so much the taste now as formerly.”
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Inside the house it took two tons of white lead to paint the woodwork, and in the fashion of the time some of it was tinted with yellow ochre, Prussian blue and red lead. If the newly elected John Adams was impressed during his first tour of the building in June 1801 he didn’t show it. He complained there was no wallpaper, no bells in the house, the mantelpiece decorations were hideous, and what was more there was no vegetable garden.

PERFECT WHITES

Whistler’s painting—which now hangs in the National Gallery in Washington—shows a woman dressed in a white gown. She is standing in front of a white curtain, and is holding a lily. Her face is quite dark: she probably did not use the fashionable Bloom of Youth, which was lucky for her. Her hair is long and red, in a shade beloved by Whistler’s Pre-Raphaelite contemporaries. The effect of all the white is dazzling, but as you fix your eyes on the painting, the snow blindness begins to have a curious effect. Two patches of color begin to emerge from the canvas, almost as if they are two separate concepts framed in a foggy dream. There is the woman’s face, of course, but then rather improbably at her feet there is a wolf’s or bear’s head that seems to be part of an animal-skin rug. Why would Whistler have chosen to place it there?

The painting was first shown in London in 1862. At first it was called
The Woman in White
, but the writer Wilkie Collins had just published a ghost novel with that title—which confused everyone. The artist pretended to despise the confusion, but it was in retrospect a canny marketing move: in the two years since it had appeared, the novel had already precipitated an extraordinary fashion for white dresses, white handbags, white lilies and even what were called “white” waltzes. This painting, then, was sure to find a buyer.

A decade later, after the first title had caused a storm of complaints from people claiming the model did not remotely resemble Collins’s heroine, Whistler decided to rename it
Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl
. But the painting was jinxed, and he merely attracted more peppery comments from the London art world. The critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton complained that it was not precisely a symphony in white, since anyone could see that it also included yellow, brown, blue, red and green. “Does he then,” asked Whistler, “believe that a Symphony in F contains no other note, but shall be a continued repetition of F, F, F . . . ? Fool.”
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In Whistler’s day and for centuries before, it was unusual— almost outrageous—for an artist to paint a white background, especially when the subject was also so light. White lead was mainly for “priming” or preparing the canvas to make it more luminous,
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for mixing later with other pigments to lighten them and then for the final highlighting and the dotting of the eyes. It wasn’t used so much for backgrounds. Backgrounds were mainly made up of darkness and shadows, or they were landscapes or interior scenes intended to create a context for the main subject. They weren’t usually supposed to be light. But in the Hindu arts of Indonesia it was a convention for artists to emphasize the main characters in a story by painting them on a pale background. Lead white and chalks were available to these artists, but many felt they were not subtle enough. They preferred to make their own whites, as I discovered, from stones.

The town of Ubud on the Indonesian island of Bali is full of art studios. Everyone is an artist, it seems, in a place where every tourist seems to want to buy a painted souvenir of paradise. Most use acrylic paints and copy each other shamelessly—and even some of the so-called “classical” paintings are done with new paints and burnished to look old. But in one less-visited corner of the island, in a small town called Kamasan, a handful of artists still hold out against the onslaught of acrylics. I went there to find an artist and grandmother who is in one way the Balinese art scene’s greatest traditionalist, and in another one of its iconoclasts. But this wasn’t the reason for my journey. I went because I had heard that Ni Made Suciarmi had her own secret source of white paint, and I hoped that she might show me.

Her studio was in her home, and it was traditional. In the middle of the rush matting floor she had neatly set out the tools of her trade. There were little colored stones carefully placed in boxes; yellow and red powders were set in bowls that were already brightly stained. There was a small bundle of charcoal—homemade from twigs and wound around with cotton—and a couple of cowrie shells. The only nods to modernity were a couple of HB pencils, which she explained made marks that were easier to erase than the charcoal. I couldn’t see any white.

Behind the array of pigments were some of her paintings—of demon kings and dancing gods. She pointed out one showing the famous legend of the Ramayana where the demon king Ravana kidnaps the beautiful Sita—and her husband Rama and the monkey king come zooming to her rescue. Good wins against evil, light prevails against darkness, and many demons are killed on the way. The black paint against the white was a representation of that duality. Suciarmi’s paintings—where every pattern is dictated by tradition, and every color has its fixed symbolism—were in a style that India, which developed it, forgot two centuries ago: a white background and the stories painted over the top like dramatic cartoons—or more accurately like the
wayan kulit
shadow puppet shows that, despite the arrival of television, are still popular entertainment throughout Indonesia. Over in India you can only find this kind of work in museums. On Bali it is still part of the living tradition.

I stood up to look at the work more closely, and she stood up as well, to point out the details. The canvases are made of cotton, she explained, “and we have a very particular way of preparing them.” With the white paint? I wondered. “No,” she said firmly. “Not with the white paint. With rice powder, dried in the sun.” And I could see that, in the best storytelling tradition, I was going to have to wait. I was going to have to see another white paint first. She summoned her sister, who was seventy, and two years older than Suciarmi. The sister took me across the central courtyard and into a dark room that she called the “artist’s kitchen.” She showed me how she used the cowrie shells to rub rice powder into a canvas until the rice had become absorbed into the grain and the surface was completely smooth. White-priming Bali style is not easy. Apparently it takes hours of this cowrie-rubbing to get the surface perfectly ready for the paint.

We returned to Suciarmi, who was sitting on the ground, pounding a little nugget of red in her bowl. Preparing pigments was one of the first artistic skills she learned as a child, and she does it well. She had to: when she was a little girl she didn’t just have to prove her own ability as an artist, she had to prove the ability of her whole gender. Painting was not girls’ territory; no women were artists or even thought of being artists. And when Suciarmi wanted to be one her father—who was one of the artists employed to paint the ceiling in the Palace of Justice at Klung-Klung under the Dutch in 1938—said no. Firmly. But fortunately his daughter did not listen. “I painted in silence in my room. And when I was nine, I was ready.” The first painting she did was an Arjuna meditation, the second was of eight monks, “and I showed them to my teacher and he liked them.”

There were big rows at home, she told me. Why couldn’t she weave or dance like the other girls? “But I didn’t like weaving, I liked sketching,” she said. “I only liked the men’s jobs. I was like a boy, always fighting.” And she was obviously rather good at the fighting, and eventually wore down resistance to her ambition to paint. Her only brother had died, leaving Suciarmi and her three sisters; “I was supposed to be a boy, and eventually they accepted I could do boys’ things as well, and learn the secrets of how to paint and do puppets.”

It was perhaps the word “secrets” that reminded her of why I was there. She suddenly stood up and said: “I expect you would like to see the white?” I would, I said, and she led me back out into the courtyard, and over to a wooden shed. There was a rattling of keys, and the wooden door opened clunkily. There, in rough wooden boxes, were dozens of what looked like slightly dirty cream-colored stones. Some were in chunks bigger than a fist, others much smaller. “This is my most precious color,” she said, and—as we squatted down in front of them, testing the texture of one fragment that was so rich it was almost oily—she told me about where the paint stones came from.

They were the remnants, she explained, of rocks that were carried over the sea many years ago, long before she was born. The sailors came from the Celebes, now called Sulawesi. Some say they were fishermen, and some say they were pirates. But whatever their mission, they used the white stones as ballast. When they got to Serangan Island, on the south coast of Bali, their journey—whether it had involved the bloodshed of fish or of men—was over, and they dumped the stones over the side, to be exchanged for new cargoes.

“The sailors just threw them away,” Suciarmi said. “But for me they are the most valuable things that I own. They feel good to use.” She did not know who in her family first learned about the stones, but even when she was a small girl she used to go with her father to Serangan, borrowing kayaks to find the stones, and looking out for the rare turtles that used to live there. Then in the mid-1980s the authorities built a causeway to the temple on Serangan and these soft stones—as well as the turtle breeding grounds— were lost in the construction. She told me how she powdered the stone, mixed it with calcium, and then added a glue that she said—rather incredibly—is made with flaked yak skin brought down from the Himalayas to Jakarta. Then she paused, as if she had already told me enough, and adopted a mischievous expression. “I told you a lot today,” she said. “But there are some things I didn’t tell you: I kept some secrets for myself.”

As we walked back to the studio she pointed to a bit of ground, underneath an old tree. “I used to bury them in the garden so that people couldn’t steal them. But then I couldn’t remember where I’d left them, so I had to move them to the shed.” What I had seen was her entire supply of her special white. “This is all I have left: I just pray I have enough to last the rest of my life,” she said. “Because I don’t want to paint with anything else.”

And perhaps this was the clue I had been searching for about why artists insisted on using lead white despite everything. Whistler could have used zinc, and saved his malaise. But he didn’t. If he had been asked, he would probably have dismissed the other paints as not being quite opaque enough, or given some other logical explanation. But perhaps the truth of the matter was simpler than that—it was just that it didn’t feel right. That it wasn’t buttery enough, or had the wrong consistency.

When we see a finished painting we tend to assess it for such things as composition, emotion, color and perspective. But what the artist experiences moment by moment in his or her turpentine-smelling studio is the scrape or smear or splatter or stir of one substance against another. Does the artist think of butter, tiramisu or of diesel as the paint is applied? Or does the laying down of paint happen without mental images at all? It depends, of course, entirely on the individual. But either way, painting is sometimes an entirely tactile act where time is forgotten, and it is sometimes a paint’s ability to drip—or not to drip—and the colors it goes with rather than its propensity to poison which has been the deciding factor in whether it is welcomed on the palette. As James Elkins writes in
What Painting Is
, where he explores the parallels between art and alchemy: “A painter knows what to do by the tug of the brush as it pulls through a mixture of oils, and by the look of colored slurries on the palette.”
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THE WOMAN IN WHITE:
A POSTSCRIPT

At first sight the
Symphony in White
seems to be a study in innocence. But on closer inspection it turns out to be a study in anything but. In the painting, the model—Joanna Heffernan—looks demure, even ethereal. But the artist called her “fiery Jo,” and at the time he was painting the woman in white (at a friend’s studio in Paris, where they spent the winter of 1861) they had been having a tempestuous affair for several months already, despite the best efforts of Whistler’s mother and other members of his family back in America to prevent it. While the twenty-eight-year-old artist was feeling faint among the lead dust, he was also flirting with his Irish girlfriend. And that fierce creature below her feet could well be a raucous joke between lovers—Beauty and the Beast-Who-Bites, perhaps—and a chance, I imagine, for Whistler to say to the viewer: “You might think this is innocent, but look again. We have had fun on this carpet.”