How colour came to rule the world

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The Color Revolution

By Regina Blaszczyk

If you thought Georgia O'Keefe was the ultimate iconoclast, reading The Color Revolution may change your mind about her and the melding of the art and advertising worlds, which according to cultural historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk, began as early as 1926. O'Keefe was a fiercely independent artist who, when commissioned by Dole Food Company, marketers of pineapple products, to travel to Hawaii and paint a series of landscapes inspired by the islands, failed to produce even one painting with a pineapple. Even so, she did accept a rent-free Manhattan studio in 1926 from Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Co. in exchange for painting a series of six 16ins x 20ins flower paintings using Cheney's autumn colour palette.  While it wouldn't be difficult to imagine a Warhol or Koons doing this, this was nearly a 100 years ago. The deal was negotiated by Alfred Steiglitz, O'Keefe's paramour and Edward Bernays, Cheney's public relations consultant and this reviewer's mentor.

It's this anecdote and a host of others that Blaszczyk so adroitly weaves that make this well-researched and lushly illustrated text so compelling. With 38 pages of notes combined with a 31-page index, The Color Revolution is not just a scholarly text but an entertaining one as well. You might have already known about ‘planned obsolescence’ thanks to Vance Packard, but were you aware of ‘mood conditioning’? The origins of the Munsell Color System? Or what ‘middle colours’ are? The Color Revolution succeeds as a go-to resource.

Elegant design and typography  are used to enhance this account of what happened in US history just 15 years after Henry Ford told consumers they could get his Model T in any colour 'as long as it was black'. In 1929 Nation's Business declared colour a 'monkey wrench' in the manufacturing world. But it was before that, after Cheney Brothers hired Paris-based Henry Creange as its first art director in 1918 and Bernays in 1923 for public relations, that the courtship of avant-garde and design practice began. Also recorded is the history of the link between colour and the US military, and every major retailer from Saks Fifth Avenue to Sears Roebuck. 

It is interesting to note in this detailed volume on the relationship between colour and manufacturing that in popular culture, the last line of the series of NBC’s 30 Rock a few months ago echoed the last line of Citizen Kane when the NBC executive played by Alec Baldwin announced his epiphany for the next great consumer trend ‘clear dishwashers’. After colour has been put under the consumer product microscope so thoroughly, the only logical next step is transparency!

The Color Revolution by Regina Blaszczyk is published by MIT Press 2012. 298 pp., fully illustrated in colour. ISBN 978-0-262-01777-0