by ERIC BANKS
Like empires, colors have their own history, their own ineluctable moments of glory and reversals of fortune. Who might have anticipated that the 2000s would be—so far at least—the green century? Few could deny that green is the current king of colors, communicating cleanliness, progressive healthfulness, and eco-friendliness, with a dash of antimaterialist flair that paradoxically makes it catnip for marketeers. For the moment, green—like red in the middle part of the last century—has transcended its status as a mere color (and a “secondary” one at that!).
As Michel Pastoureau notes in his sprightly history, green “is no longer so much a color as an ideology.” Its ascendance is a remarkable transformation in color ideology, one that is particularly astonishing given the relative marginality of the color within political and aesthetic movements during the bulk of the 20th century and before. As he remarks, green occurred only rarely in the color schemes favored by the mass producers of consumer goods, and, at least in theory, the artists of the heroic era of early modernist abstraction abjured it as well. Mondrian called it a “useless color.” Kandinsky described it as tiresome and compared it to “a fat cow, full of good health, lying down, rooted, capable only of ruminating and contemplating the world through its stupid, inexpressive eyes.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education for more