Could a green light signal stop? Could a red light signal continue naturally? Perhaps, but the colors used for traffic lights seem to have deeper psychological significance than merely a social convention.[1]
From early mass market prints to modern display devices, the details of coloring do not greatly affect the strong human preference for colored images. Moreover, humans’ electroencephalographic responses to emotionally differentiated pictorial stimuli don’t vary with formal pictorial properties such as color.[2] Such evidence suggests that color contributes mainly to sensory efficiency, not sensory semantics.[3]
The U.S. National Gallery of Art’s exhibition, Edvard Munch: Master Prints, shows an artist acutely concerned with the emotional significance of color variations. The exhibition places side-by-side Munch’s multiple variations on a single composition. Many of these variations involve changes in coloring. An image in black and white that might be seen as a woman consoling a broken man becomes with some red and yellow coloring a woman biting a man’s neck and sucking out his life (Vampire II, 1895/1896-1902). The acuteness of a sick child’s suffering seems to vary with the intensity and contrast in red across the composition. A dramatic change in the coloring shifts a naked woman from repulsive to alluring. Both images are appropriately entitled Sin and were made in the same year (1902). An important part of Munch’s art seems to be creating images that not only powerfully express emotion, but also have considerable emotional complexity. Munch’s iconic Scream isn’t a good representative of his emotional art.
Mundane life is complex only to those who aren’t experiencing it. Color variations can occur from no more than changes in lighting. They typically have little significance. Edvard Munch’s art, in contrast, is far from the ordinary. See Edvard Munch: Master Prints, now at the National Gallery of Art.
Edvard Munch: Master Prints is at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, from July 31 through October 31, 2010.
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Notes:
[1] I was told that in a certain country, everyone runs red lights. So drivers stop at green lights to make sure than no one is coming through the red.
[2] See Junghöfer, M., Bradley, M. M., Elbert, T. R. and Lang, P. J. (2001), Fleeting images: A new look at early emotion discrimination. Psychophysiology, 38: 175–178. doi: 10.1111/1469-8986.3820175
[3] Being color-blind affects how one interacts with the world much less than does being blind.
Image credits:
Edvard Munch; Sin, 1902; lithograph in black on heavy polished white wove paper; The Epstein Family Collection; © Copyright Munch Museum/Munch Ellingsen Group/ARS, NY 2009
Edvard Munch; Sin, 1902; color lithograph, from two stones in red and beige with blue applied à la poupée on very thin Japanese tissue; The Epstein Family Collection; © Copyright Munch Museum/Munch Ellingsen Group/ARS, NY 2009
When we artists work with lithography we always start in Black. Afterwards comes the playing and tests of possibility with colours. One can colour areas in the drawing on the stone with different colours and do not need to print several stones each with their colours on top of each other. This way each print becomes a Monotyphi and each print is a bit different from the others. The differences partly lies in what colours one choose . Sometimes an area of colour is stronger than the Artist had in mind and he will change it or darken it. But also in the amount of colour that one leaves on each place on the stone has an influence on the finished print. Bigger colour amounts tend to spread and erase details. It is rather difficault to produce exactly identical prints.
There is no psychological back thought behind it, if red and green catch the eye better than black! I don’t believe there were traffic lights back then and the choice of red and green did not have any Psychological theory behind it for Munch . It simply that Tulla, Munch’s model had red hair and green eyes.
He did not give her blue hair and yellow eyes which would have cough the eyes even more! The black version is simply the first print done after he finished the drawing on the Lithographic stone.
Another aspect is that Red was the colour of Temptation and Sexuality. I am not sure they back then had any other possibility to colour their hair except for using Henna. Perhaps the fashion was brought back with Orientalists who discovered the Arabs use of Henna for removing white hair and age.
I can imagine that the profession of being a courtesan had some problems when the white hairs arrived and this group of women gladly would use the opportunity to stay young in the hair roots. So perhaps this group of women more often were colouring their hair with Henna.And Orange became the colour of sinful women?
Pia Ranslet Danish Artist