Miscellaneous: Thinking about Prussian Blue

Words and phrases, when overused, can be annoying. I have to say that I’m tired of hearing people call things “iconic” for one. I’m also tired of hearing about people “going down a rabbit hole,” especially when going down a rabbit hole is described as a chore in tones of feigned exasperation, but diving deep into a subject out of curiosity is a joy. I spend half my waking hours down rabbit holes and, thanks to the Internet, exploring underground tunnels is much easier than it once was. There’s no longer much of an excuse for not knowing anything you might want to know. The best one can do, it seems, is to point to the number of hours in a day when making excuses for ignorance. 

I’m down a rabbit hole as I write this. Or perhaps I should say this post is the partial record of a rabbit hole expedition. You've been forewarned.

I’ve read that more than half the people in the United States never read a book after leaving high school (poking my head briefly underground into the opening of a new burrow, I found estimates ranging from 33% to 68% with the most credible-sounding estimate I could find – from The National Endowment for the Arts – being 58.5%). Thus, I’m in the roughly 40% of the population that does continue to read. At present, I’m in the middle of The Age of the Horse (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016), by Susanna Forrest, a book that traces the history of the equine species and their interactions with human beings through history. On page 230, in a section of the book discussing equiphagy and how horse carcasses have otherwise been consumed, I came across a line that, yes, sent me down a rabbit hole – the rabbit hole I am in at present. The line “The hoofs themselves were boiled for glue, combs, toys, or Prussian Blue” stopped me in my tracks. Horse’s hoofs and Prussian Blue?

I started searching for a connection between horse hoofs and Prussian Blue. Being a dabbler in the arts, I thought myself quite familiar with Prussian Blue. I had no recollection of any connection with horse’s hoofs and it seemed to me that a horse’s hoof is probably mostly keratin (the stuff our fingernails are made of), which seemed to me unlikely as a source of Prussian Blue. And so, I began digging. 

First, I looked into hoofs. I confirmed that a horse’s hoof is, in fact, mostly keratin. Setting that aside for the moment (keratin seemed rather inert), I dug into the history of Prussian Blue. If you’re not immediately familiar with the color, it’s what Crayola began calling “Midnight Blue” in its big crayon boxes in 1958 (because they thought most children by that time no longer understood a reference to Prussia). It is the blue of cyanotypes, blueprints, and the blue of Picasso’s Blue Period.

It was discovered by accident in Berlin in 1704 (some sources say 1706, apparently in error) when pigment and dye supplier Johan Jacob Diesbach, attempting to make Florentine Lake, ran out of the potash used in the Florentine Lake process. He called on another Johan, Johan Conrad Dippel, who topped up his potash supply. Dippel sold him potash contaminated with animal blood (apparently, that was accidental; Dippel used potash in the production of “Dippel’s Oil,” which involved boiling animal parts). When Diesbach went back to making Florentine Lake, he was surprised when the end result was not the reddish pigment he was trying to make but a deep blue, slightly greenish pigment – what came to be known as Prussian Blue or Berlin Blue – in chemical terms an oxidized ferrous ferrocyanide salt (Fe 4[Fe(CN) 6]) or simply iron ferrocyanide. In the Color Index Generic Name Code System (more about that later), Prussian Blue is PB27.

At this juncture, where to turn? What did Diesbach and Dippel do when it became clear that the contaminated potash caused the reaction resulting in Prussian Blue? Why did the animal contamination cause the unexpected reaction? What exactly is Florentine Lake? What is a lake? Although I already knew something about several of these topics, I wanted to know more.

Being a painter, I had some idea of what a lake is – essentially, a lake is a pigment made from a dye. So, what’s the difference between a dye and a pigment? The color in a dye is dissolved in the medium that carries it, while a pigment is a very finely powdered solid. Pigments are made into paints by suspending their particles in a medium but the particles are not dissolved in the medium. A lake is made by binding the dissolved color in a dye with a mordant. A mordant combines with the dye chemically to create a stable, colored substance that, unlike a dye, will not wash away easily – a pigment. Dyes, particularly dyes derived from organic sources, are often fugitive (that is, they are not colorfast; they fade badly). Most traditional lakes have been replaced by more permanent synthetic pigments that are chemically different but mimic their historical antecedents. 

I wasn’t familiar with Florentine Lake. I learned that it is a transparent reddish pigment with bluish undertones and that it was made from a dye derived from kermes insects (a group of scale insects, in this case mainly Kermes vermilio), dried and crushed. Kermes vermilio is a parasite that lives on the Kermes Oak (Quercus coccifera) and the Palestine Oak (Quercus calliprinos), both native to the Mediterranean area. This is the source of a crimson dye that has been used since antiquity. “Kermes,” I learned, is the ultimate source of our word “crimson” in English. Florentine Lake then is a red pigment made from this crimson dye. (Genuine Florentine Lake is still available from at least one source, The Alchemical Arts, in Australia.)

The story of a scale insect producing a red dye is very familiar. I’ve written here about cochineal on a number of occasions, most recently regarding an extraordinary red garment dyed with cochineal that is housed in the Murakami Kaizoku Museum on the island of Oshima in Japan’s Inland Sea. Cochineal (Dactylopius coccus), like Kermes, is a parasitic scale insect but it lives on cacti in the genus Opuntia, which comprises plants native to the Southwest United States and Central and South America. Cochineal insects are the source of carminic acid from which the dye carmine is made, and, yes, there was a traditional Carmine Lake pigment, now in most applications superseded by synthetic equivalents (although cochineal is still used as a food coloring). 

So, Prussian Blue was a mistake. Dippel knew immediately when he heard about the new blue pigment that his potash must have been the cause. According to my Internet sleuthing, nitrogen from blood in the potash Dippel supplied formed cyanide compounds such as potassium cyanide when heated. Mixed with the iron sulfate Diesbach used in making his Florentine Lake, the potassium cyanide participated in a reaction leading to formation of potassium ferrocyanide, which, in the presence of iron sulfate, creates iron ferrocyanide, or Prussian Blue. Apparently Diesbach and Dippel had a monopoly on the new pigment until others figured out how to replicate it. The formula was first published in 1724 (although Prussian Blue had already been replicated by others somewhat earlier) so Diesbach and Dippel controlled the Prussian Blue market for about a decade and a half after the pigment’s discovery. Prussian Blue is often cited as the first modern synthetic pigment.

Something I read noted that genuine Prussian Blue, or pure iron ferrocyanide, is not entirely stable, mainly because it tends to degrade in alkaline environments and with exposure to light (more about the latter below). This led me to material on pigments published on line by Jackson’s Art. It seems that genuine Prussian Blue is acceptably stable when used in making watercolors or oil paints. Acrylic media, however, are alkaline, so true Prussian Blue acrylic paints are rare (Australian paint maker Derivan is about the only paint maker that sells a true Prussian Blue acrylic paint, noting that it is not stable). Acrylics sold as Prussian Blue are almost always labeled “Prussian Blue Hue” and made by mixing other pigments, often Pthalo Blue, Dioxazine Violet, and Carbon Black. That is, to the eye, the hue is replicated but the pigments responsible for the hue are a substitute. True Prussian Blue in acrylic media has mostly been replaced by more stable equivalents – superseded like the Florentine Lake that Prussian Blue stemmed from. 

At this point, I thought I had my answer. To say that boiled horse’s hoofs were a source of Prussian Blue seemed inaccurate. Rather than hoofs, per se, it seemed likely that blood in tissues connected to hoofs removed from horse carcasses provided the nitrogen for the Prussian Blue reaction rather than keratin itself. Unless…keratin is a good source of nitrogen. Apparently, it is. I suspect that both blood and keratin were used as a nitrogen source in making traditional Prussian Blue and it probably came from multiple animal sources.

I could have stopped there, but there was more on my mind. Again, as an artist, I’m quite familiar with Color Index Generic Name Codes (usually referred to simply as pigment codes). I knew that pigments used in artist’s colors can be reliably identified by their pigment codes, which operate much like Latin names in biology. They are standardized and recognized globally, eliminating confusion caused by overlapping common names, alternate names, traditional names no longer used, and language differences. According to Jackson’s Art, the Colour Index International is a database of pigments and dyes published by the Society of Dyers and Colourists and the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists. The Index was created just over 100 years ago, in 1924. 

Prussian Blue has the code PB27. It would be natural to assume that “PB” here stands for “Prussian Blue,” but it doesn’t. It’s a misleading coincidence. The color codes for pigments (as opposed to dyes) all begin with the letter “P.” Blue pigments are all coded “PB” for “pigment blue”.  Yellow pigment codes, by the same logic, are all “PY” followed by a number. Red pigments are all coded “PR” followed by a number, etc. The number indicates the order in which each pigment was added to the official database. If Prussian Blue was the first modern synthetic pigment, you might expect it to be “PB1,” but, because iron ferrocyanide was the 27th blue pigment added to the database, its code is PB27. While the numbers tell us little more than how recently a pigment was recognized in this particular coding system, the codes have the virtue of telling artists precisely what compounds are in their paints. A tube of acrylic Prussian Blue marked PB27 is likely to be unstable. A tube marked PB15, PV23, PBk7 is the stable Prussian Blue mimic described above made from Pthalo Blue, Dioxazine Violet, and Carbon Black. Most artists want their work to last, so, that’s a good thing to know. On another tangent altogether, I’ve noticed independently that mixing paints labeled “Ultramarine” and “Viridian” produces a hue very close to what we call Prussian Blue. I will refrain from going into the history of the colors Ultramarine and Viridian here – although I’m tempted to.

Having said all of the above, I hadn’t realized that, because the pigments identified using these codes are sometimes natural pigments (derived directly from earth or clay, for example), they are not always the same hue. A case in point is PBr7 (brown pigment number seven). As it’s a manganese-containing, naturally occurring iron oxide, the hues it produces in paints can vary somewhat. In addition, processing can change the hues expressed by a single pigment dramatically. PBr7 identifies the iron oxide pigment that is expressed as both Raw Umber and Burnt Umber – two obviously different hues. So, while the codes always identify the pigment, they don’t necessarily always exactly identify the hue we see – although they pretty much do in the case of synthetic pigments, which are pretty much uniform.

Then, not wanting to spread misinformation, I started wondering if I remembered correctly that the blue we call Prussian Blue is the same blue formed in the cyanotype process and in traditional blueprints. Upon more research online, I was relieved to confirm that these processes do create iron ferrocyanide, or Prussian Blue. 

One odd fact about the cyanotype process is that cyanotypes are known to fade over time with exposure to light. That’s not unusual. Fading is a common phenomenon. What’s weird about cyanotypes is that the depth of color in a faded cyanotype recovers in darkness. That I knew, but why? And is the same phenomenon observed in, for example, oil paintings that use genuine Prussian Blue, or in the Japanese print style known as aizuri-e in which the image is produced almost entirely in shades of Prussian Blue? Prussian Blue when newly available in Japan became known as ベロ藍 (bero-ai) with “bero” derived from “Berlin” and “ai,” meaning indigo (although today you’re more likely to hear it called プルシアンブルー (purushian burū) in Japanese, directly from the English), reflecting its first synthesis in Berlin. The plant-derived pigment we call indigo, however, is not the same as Prussian Blue. Several different plant species have been used as the source of natural indigo over the centuries, notably true indigo (Indigofera tinctoria) and other species in the genus Indigofera, but also the unrelated plants woad (Isatis tinctoria) and Japanese Indigo (Polygonum tinctorium). All of these produce natural indigo, which is C₁₆H₁₀N₂O₂, unrelated chemically to iron ferrocyanide. It’s only the similar hue that links indigo to Prussian Blue.

But I was wondering about the recovery of cyanotypes in darkness. What’s going on here? The now-ubiquitous AI bot that answers Google queries tells me that with exposure to visible light, Prussian blue undergoes photochemical reduction – resulting in a fading caused by the gradual conversion of ferric ions in Prussian Blue to ferrous ions, which, apparently appear not blue but white. A reduction reaction is the opposite of an oxidation reaction. In reduction, a molecule loses oxygen. In oxidation, the reverse happens. Happily, in the presence of oxygen in darkness, this reaction is reversible, at least in part, with some ferrous ions oxidizing back to ferric ions, restoring the blue hue. As cyanotypes (and aizuri-e) generally are not given a surface treatment, this restorative reaction likely occurs fairly easily, but I’m guessing that oil paintings using Prussian Blue are less able to undergo the reversal reaction because they are often finished with a varnish that blocks oxygen – but perhaps the varnish also inhibits the fading?  

Maybe that’s enough for one day. I started writing at about 10:00AM. It’s now going on 4:00PM. I need food. Time to climb back into the open air.

Then, unable to resist, I asked Google if faded aizuri-e prints can be restored in darkness. The bot says no – which leaves me puzzled. I don’t understand why Prussian Blue in a cyanotype would behave one way while the same pigment in an aizuri-e would behave differently. Maybe the bot is wrong. In any case, I need to eat something.

Except that, asked the same question about Prussian Blue in oil paintings, the bot suggests that the pigment in oil paintings can, in fact, undergo the reversion reaction (although the reaction and the initial fading in Prussian Blue oil paint, if any, can be affected by admixtures of other pigments). So why not in the case of aizuri-e? And what about the blues in blue and white Japanese and other ceramics? Is that Prussian Blue?  

I’m going now. Really.

[Edit: It occurred to me shortly after posting this that blue and white ceramics in Japan – for example, the famous ceramics from Imari in southern Japan – predate Prussian Blue. Imari became a center of ceramics production in the early 1600s. Prussian Blue was first synthesized about 100 years later and it didn't become widely used in Japan for another 100 years. The heyday of aizuri-e was the 1820s to 1840s. Traditional blue and white ceramics in Japan used (and still use) cobalt-based blue underglazes, as in China. Cobalt blue ceramics first appeared in China during the Tang dynasty (618-907).]

[Additional info: Two days later, still poking around, I came across this interesting tidbit: The term "lake" that I discussed here has the same root ("lac") as the "lac" in "lacquer" and "shellac." This "lac" refers to yet another scale insect, in this case Kerria lacca (formerly known as Laccifer lacca, Coccus lacca, or Tachardia lacca – aparently reclassified a number of times or split). I had known that "lacquer" and "shellac" were related to insect secretions but I hadn't made the connection with "lake" meaning a dye-derived pigment. Kerria lacca, like the cochineal insect and Kermes vermilio, has historically been the source of a red dye. That dye, according to some articles I've read was the first or one of the first to be precipitated as a pigment, or lake, and, eventually, the term "lake" came to be used for any such pigment.] 

Books I'm reading: 2024

Looking back on 2024 from the perspective of the reading I got done, it's a bit depressing to see that I finished only nine titles – ten if you count the book I'm finishing now, in January 2025, that I started in December (see below). It's tempting to congratulate oneself for reading anything at all these days, knowing that many Americans read their last book in high school or college. Rather than taking comfort in that sad statistic, however, I take some instead from the fact that nearly all the reading I did was substantial. With the exception of a collection of popular essays on engineering-related subjects by Henry Petroski that I took along on my March–April trip to Japan, I read about art history in 2024, and mostly academic writing rather than writing aimed at a broader audience. A lot of it, while worth it, was challenging and slow going. I have several more volumes along the same lines waiting on my bookshelves for 2025. 

That last book was Sea and Sardinia, by D. H. Lawrence (I read the older Penguin paperback edition shown). I had thrown it into my bag on the morning of my departure for Los Angeles for a short trip in early December. I chose it simply because it was small and light. In the end, I read most of it at home, after my return, although, with the two-hour delay to our departure because of fog in LA, I was glad to have had something to make a start on. I have no idea where it came from. I don't remember buying it. It may have been something my father left behind. It's an odd little volume. A travelog, it recounts a short trip from Palermo to Sardinia and back over the course of a few days. The trip is by ferry to Cagliari and from there north up the spine of Sardinia by train and motor coach (brand new in 1921) eventually to the port at Olbia. From Olbia they travel by ferry to the Italian mainland (landing north of Rome). Following a train trip south to Naples, they cross by ferry again from back to Sicily. 

There is much description of the landscape; the dreary, impoverished towns they stay in with filthy inns, indifferent innkeepers, and scarce, unpalatable food; of the peasants, with a great deal of attention paid to the subtle differences in their costumes from region to region; and of the various other characters Lawrence and his companion (whom he refers to as the Queen Bee, or the q-b, for short) encounter along the way. Lawrence and the q-b don't seem to be enjoying themselves very much and one wonders what prompted the trip in the middle of winter. Vague wanderlust is the excuse given. That said, Sea and Sardinia is interesting for the glimpse it gives of Sardinia 100 years ago, not long after the end of the First World War. 

Books I'm Reading: The Imagery of Surrealism

In the past year, my reading has been focused on art history. My interest in art history is nothing new, but this spate of reading was set off by a show at Modern Art West, in the town of Sonoma, back in September of 2022 focused on female Abstract Expressionist painters working on the West Coast in the 1950s and 1960s. Reading about these women (I recommend Ninth St. Women, in particular) led me to reading specifically about Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler. Reading about Frankenthaler led me to reading about Motherwell, which led me to reading the anthology of Dadaist writing he edited and that led me to The Imagery of Surrealism (first edition, Syracuse University Press, 1977) by J. H. Matthews, a dense, difficult read that required concentration and perseverance to get through.  

I suspect that many people think primarily of painting or collage when they think of surrealism, but, as this book makes clear, like dada, surrealism was as much a literary movement as a movement in the visual arts, and, again like dada, true surrealists looked at surrealist imagery (whether verbal or pictorial) as secondary to action, in this case the act of creating while separating the mind from the constraints of convention to tap into what was variously termed "inner need," "the inner model," or sometimes just "desire." Kandinsky, though not a surrealist, called it "inner necessity." Surrealists believed that rational thought was the enemy of the creative impulse and that some means was necessary to bypass rational thought to access the inner model (as a side note, I find it frustrating that it's hard to find practical suggestions as to what that means exactly was or should be). 

As the jacket blurb notes, Matthews "asks why and with what consequences surrealism denies values on which our education in art and literature have taught us to rely." The author points out that because words are our means of articulating our understanding of reality, literary images that defy common sense are particularly confounding and they are at danger of being dismissed as simply nonsensical, while painted or drawn images can be easier to accept if we allow ourselves to hold at bay our instinctive reaction, which is to analyze and attempt to find a rational explanation for what we are seeing based on our everyday experience of the real world. On the other hand, he points out that in painting and drawing, it is easy to fall into hackneyed symbolism, and he accuses Dalí of having done just that. He has high praise for Magritte, Tanguy, and Miró among better known surrealist artists, but the book is remarkable for the wealth of examples it presents by a wide range of lesser known artists, which (again according to the jacket) are mostly from the collection of the author and from other private collections and published in this book for the first time. A challenging read, but worth it if you want to deepen your understanding of surrealist thinking throughout its history, from the 1920s well into the 1960s or 1970s. 

Books I'm Reading: The Dada Painters and Poets

As one with an interest in art and art history, I have, of course, long been aware of Dada. I had seen photos of the fur-lined teacup and the clothes iron with spikes, and of Duchamp's everyday objects presented as art. I was aware of the Dada celebration of the absurd, but, reading The Dada Painters and Poets (edited by Robert Motherwell; I read the second edition, in paperback by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, published sometime after 1979. The original publication was in 1951), I have gained a much richer understanding of just what Dada was.

I knew that Dada had its start in Zurich around 1916, but I see from reading this compilation of primary source material (apparently still the most complete collection of such material available in English), that while Dada spread quickly to Berlin, Cologne, Paris, other European cities, and eventually New York, Dada was short-lived, having mostly petered out by the early 1920s (one writer here sees Breton's 1924 Surrealist Manifesto as the end of Dada). 

What I didn't understand was how subversive Dada was. It tends to be seen as playful – and certainly there was an undercurrent of humor in Dada with bourgeois aspirations often the butt of the joke; the Dadaists loved to confuse and confound with nonsense, but that aspect of the movement appears to me to have been less central than it's been made to appear. The early Dadaists were hell-bent on creating chaos, happiest when their demonstrations led to riots and when riots and the indignation their antics caused were reported in the papers. Dada was meant to be disruptive. It was anti-art. It was not fundamentally intended to make art out of the ordinary, despite Duchamp's "ready mades". True Dada condemned art, literature, philosophy, and the "high priests" of those pursuits. 

I think it is often forgotten that Dada originally wasn't conceived as an art movement at all. Real Dada, pure Dada, was understood to be an attitude, a state of mind, a perspective for interacting with the world. The art we associate with Dada, both the visual art and the literature of Dada, were seen as incidental. Yet, Dada was nothing if not self-contradictory. While these productions were incidental, the art and literature of Dada were essential to Dada because they were the media through which the Dada sprit was presented to the world. This core contradiction within Dada ultimately led to its, perhaps inevitable, self-destruction from within. 

Years later, Pop Art and the Conceptual Art movements looked back to Dada for inspiration but neither were characterized by the same kind of darkness, it seems to me. 

Books I'm Reading: How to Paint

I imagine it's rare to finish a book feeling that you've retained nothing at all from reading it, but that's how artist Jerry Zeniuk's book How to Paint (Sieveking Verlag, 2017) left me. Having finished it recently, I'm struggling to recall anything useful in it.

I picked this book up while traveling in Germany, in June, at the museum store in Pinakothek der Moderne, in Munich. I admit that I was attracted to it in part because of its cloth cover and because of the promise of its title—however unrealistic: how nice it would be if you really could just read a how-to book and suddenly know how to paint better. I didn't expect that, but I suppose I was hoping to glean something useful from its pages. I suspect this is a book that needs to be mined during several readings. Happily, it's a short book of 37 chapters of only one or two pages each at most. Some of the chapters are less than a page long. I may come back to it some day. For the moment, judgment reserved. This is a bilingual German/English edition.

Books I'm Reading: The Girl With The Gallery

I had never heard of Edith Gregor Halpert before reading Lindsay Pollock's biography, The Girl with the Gallery (Public Affairs, 2006). Halpert appears to have played an important role in creating the market for modern American art at a time when collector and museum money in the US was focused squarely on European art. She was instrumental in supporting the early careers of several important artists, including Stuart Davis, Ben Shahn, Arthur Dove, and Charles Sheeler. She played a key role in bringing American folk art to the attention of collectors and museums. She was the only dealer the notoriously difficult Alfred Stieglitz trusted to act as his agent in selling the work of such artists as John Marin and Georgia O'Keefe. She was the trusted advisor of wealthy patrons such as Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, whose private collections later augmented important museum collections. She championed black artists long before it was fashionable. She also chose to open her gallery in Greenwich Village at a time when virtually no galleries existed there (1926).  Halpert should be better known (and perhaps she is better known because of this book, now ten years old).

There is much here about the day-to-day business of selling art. Halpert appears to have been an obsessive record-keeper. Mining the material Halpert left behind, Pollock has drawn a very detailed picture of Halpert's dealings with the artists she supported, with the collectors she cultivated, and with rival dealers. The picture of Halpert that emerges is of a determined and effective saleswoman and a crack organizer. Although there is probably more detail here than the average reader will care to read through, anyone with a particular interest in 20th century American art is likely to find The Girl with the Gallery well worth the time.

Books I'm Reading: Arguing About Art

Arguing About Art, subtitled Contemporary Philosophical Debates (edited by Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley, Routledge, Second Edition, 2002), appears to be intended as a textbook, although I didn't know that when I acquired it. How and when this book found a place on my bookshelf now escapes me, but I liked the title. It's a series of paired essays of opposing viewpoints, each preceded by a summary that neatly captures the issues raised. Re-reading these introductory texts after reading the related essays helps retain the main points of each argument.

The subjects range widely. The first pair of essays attempts to decide whether food is art. The last section examines questions related to public art, specifically the installation and later removal of Richard Serra's sculpture Tilted Arc, in Washington D.C. (this section differs from the others in that it comprises four sub-sections rather than two—a transcript of hearings about the sculpture, the two main essays, and an essay that looks at the Serra sculpture alongside Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans' Memorial). In between, writers discuss authentic musical performance; fakes and forgeries; rock music and musical culture (this pair seems dated now); appreciation, understanding, and nature; photography and representation; feelings and fictions (about why we empathize with characters we know to be fictional); the seeming paradox of enjoying horror; sentimentality; art and morality; and feminism and aesthetics. I thought the essays on fakes and forgeries, on photography, on enjoying horror, on sentimentality, and on public art most interesting, but generally worth a read as an introduction to some basic questions in aesthetics.

Books I'm Reading: Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance

I purchased Lynne Munson's Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance (Ivan R. Dee, 2000) several years ago. I read it this week. I wish I had pulled it down from my book shelf sooner. It clarifies a great deal about trends in late 20th century art. It crystallizes in a very useful way lot of what I and many others have sensed about the "art world." Munson looks at the art world using two case studies--the evolution of arts funding through the National Endowment for the Arts (the NEA) and faculty politics in Harvard's art history department. Both cases are instructive, but it's enough here to look at the example of the NEA.

President Johnson signed the NEA into law on September 29, 1965 following a congressional act of August 1964 that had created the National Council on the Arts. The council--an impressive group that included Isaac Stern, David Brinkley, Gregory Peck, David Smith, Leonard Bernstein, and later John Steinbeck, Richard Diebenkorn, and Sidney Poitier, among others--was tasked with creating an outline of the new Endowment's mission. An advisory panel that set priorities for the Endowment's visual arts program recommended that top concerns should include providing "direct assistance to the creative artist" and recognizing "excellence in artistic achievement." The first group of NEA grantees included men and women from all over the country working in a wide range of styles of painting and sculpture. The grants were based on a combination of artistic excellence and need. In other words, the people who created the NEA saw the Endowment's role as a source of direct support for the best working artists in the country, particularly those who were struggling financially. Many of the artists chosen to receive grants had virtually no income from their art, while producing work widely recognized as superior. Gene Davis, Edward Ruscha, Donald Judd, and Mark di Suvero were among the first group of grantees.

With the election of Richard Nixon came a change of leadership at the NEA that immediately and permanently changed its tenor, propelling it in the direction of the controversy perhaps most associated with the entity today, and, ultimately, creating public skepticism about the wisdom of any kind of public arts funding, sabotaging the original intent of those who brought the NEA into existence, people who took it for granted that quality art was essential to the life of a healthy nation. At the same time, Nixon's advisors recommended vastly increasing the NEA's grants--but mostly for political reasons; they believed spending on the arts domestically would go some way toward ameliorating the increasingly negative impact at home of what was going on in Vietnam. The associated bureaucracy grew and efficiency declined. The NEA's budget was less than $10mn in 1969, but well over $60mn already in 1974, when Nixon left office. The NEA awarded $16 in grant money for every administrative dollar spent in 1967 but only $10 per administrative dollar by 1983.

When Nixon appointed Nancy Hanks to the leadership of the Endowment, a shift in emphasis away from artistic excellence and toward pluralism accelerated. Nixon wanted to expand the audience for art. Hanks wanted that and much more. With growing funding at her disposal, she oversaw a sharp shift away from supporting individual artists (which, as Munson notes, became the Endowment's lowest priority). Public outreach and support for art institutions became the priority while the scope of eligible activities was expanded to include photography, printmakers, videographers, performance artists, conceptual artists, and even art critics. Before long, virtually any kind of creative activity or arts-related entity (many highly controversial) became eligible for NEA funding and the NEA began to feed the fringes of an expanding art world rather than support traditional artists in their studios.

As Munson puts it, "This weakened standard for awardees, together with the increases in funding, encouraged a freewheeling approach to grant making. Instead of painstakingly whittling down a list of candidates to only the best and brightest, the visual arts panels were now handing out hundreds of grants." The NEA was fueling the expansion of just about every new trend that came along, creating an illusion of value where often there was none and debasing itself at the same time. Eventually, the NEA came to sponsor the radical and deliberately controversial almost exclusively, effectively censoring most serious artistic activity. To get a grant, it was more important to be different, "interesting," or shocking than to exhibit any kind of technical skill or artistic vision. The NEA came to foster exhibitionism while banishing what many would still today consider more serious art from the pool of those eligible for support. This is the exhibitionism of Munson's title. The intolerance she refers to is the entrenched institutional hostility toward traditional art forms that has come to characterize the contemporary art world. Her book goes a long way toward explaining how we got where we are now.

The story of the NEA's evolution nicely illuminates the backdrop of public confusion about the visual arts today and deep public skepticism about art and government agencies associated with the arts. It also suggests why the only people that make a living as artists today seem to be those that feed off the arts bureaucracy--the posers that create "art" for dealer and gallery leaches that foist a great deal of trash on "collectors" who have no taste and have few places to go to look for less-biased guidance. While not everyone will agree with me about the lamentable state of affairs that has resulted from trends in the last 40 years or so, Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance is well written, well argued, and hard to put down.

Books I'm Reading: Black: The History of a Color

I've just finished reading Black: The History of a Color, by Michel Pastoureau (Princeton University Press, 2009), an English translation of a book published in French in 2008. I've had some experience reading French art criticism. It's sometimes been more mystifying than enlightening. Bad translation may have had something to do with it. I suspect, however, that a misguided, egotistical desire to appear erudite on the part of authors is mostly the root cause of problems I've had with French art historical writing in the past. Happily, this book appears to have been translated well--it reads quite naturally as English with one or two very minor exceptions--and it has something worthwhile to say in a style that is informative rather than aimed mostly at enhancing the reputation of the writer among his academic peers.

The book looks at the use and meanings of the color black throughout history from the perspective of religious art, heraldry, later secular art, and textiles and fashion--mostly in the Western world--, beginning with use of black at sites such as Lascaux, and then moving on to its use in ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and in the modern era. Frequently the discussion dwells on whether black was considered a color at all and what its connotations were in different periods of history. The author pays particular attention to questions of whether black had negative associations in different historical contexts. There is much valuable information about the history of dyeing in different periods and the fashionability of the color black among the nobility and upper classes (and later the wealthy merchant class) of Europe.

Sections on the influence of Newton's Principia Mathematica, which effectively divorced both black and white from the class of colors, were useful, and I was pleased to see this author discuss the effect printing must have had on the human consciousness of color (at least in the West) as black and white illustrations became relatively widely available to the public and replaced the costly and scarce hand-colored illustrations that were the norm in earlier periods. It has always struck me that after the diffusion of moveable-type printing processes and before full-color printing, television, and the Internet, most people experienced art not immediately viewable in their vicinity in the form of black and white engravings, etchings, or woodcuts--which had to have had an impact on perceptions. I've long wondered whether Van Gogh's use of sharp, short, repeated strokes in his drawings (and to a lesser extent in the paintings) might not have been influenced by his exposure to engraved reproductions. This book does not address or answer that particular question, but it at least acknowledges that black and white reproductions and illustrations became pervasive and probably profoundly changed the way people thought about color, even if unconsciously.

Nicely printed and attractively illustrated throughout. While I wouldn't call this an easy read, it's likely to appeal to anyone with more than a casual interest in the history of art--the history of colors, in particular. Recommended.

I should also say that I love the painting on the cover. At first I took it to be a Georges de La Tour for the obvious reason--its excellent handling of a night scene lit dramatically by fire or candlelight--, but it turns out to be a painting by Etienne La Tour, son of Georges, a painter I was unaware of. You learn something new every day, as they say. It is The Discovery of the Body of Saint Alexis in the National Gallery of Ireland. It strikes me as wonderful, however, less for the lighting effect than for the expression on the torch bearer's face--its combination of no-nonsense determination and the slightly awestruck. Beautiful.

Having said that, it was chosen, no doubt, for the black clothing of Saint Alexis and its deep black background. Doing a little Internet browsing, I see that many sites attribute this painting to Georges de La Tour. I'll have to look into this and see who is right. The book reviewed here attributes it to Etienne de La Tour. I've sent an enquiry to the gallery. They should know.

Two other things about the painting puzzle me. Is that a young man or a young woman holding the torch? Have I just revealed my deep ignorance of stories about St. Alexis? Most certainly. And what is she doing with that piece of kelp? Hmmm....further research appears to be in order.

[Update: I got a reply from the National Gallery of Ireland. Apparently the painting was originally attributed to Georges de La Tour when it entered the collection in 1968. That attribution was disputed. Subsequently (by the early 1980s) it was attributed to Etienne La Tour but is now described as being "of the school of Georges de La Tour"--in other words, it is not considered to be by either. It is an attractive canvas nevertheless.]

[Further update: I got another reply. The gallery has corrected its earlier comment and said that it appears the official attribution at the moment is, in fact, Etienne La Tour. I'll let you know if that changes.]