It Is Not Easy Being Green

Green Piece by Jed Perl

Green should be a primary color. Maybe the primary color. Nature, after all, cannot do without it. And yet, what we all learned as kids, taking art in kindergarten or first grade, was that green was not essential. Green, so we were told, was a "secondary color." We had to have the primaries; red, yellow, and blue could not be mixed. Green, however, could. And after we swirled together yellow and blue poster paint and saw green paint emerge, most of us were probably left with the suspicion that green was a secondary citizen, an idea that flies in the face of the experience that we all have on an ordinary summer day--which is that green rules.

Of course color systems are human inventions, and the primary and secondary colors as we encountered them in school do not represent an unchangeable idea about the nature of seeing, but rather a concept that, to some extent, grew out of the working methods of artists. The ancients sometimes argued that black and white were the primary colors, which makes sense when you consider that seeing depends on contrasts of light and dark. And Pliny described four basic colors--black, red, white, and something else, apparently untranslatable, which may or may not have been a sort of green. Color theory is a crazy subject, a favorite of crackpots and dreamers. (The German Romantic painter Philipp Otto Runge believed that the primaries equaled the trinity: Blue was the Father, red the Son, and yellow the Holy Ghost.) So I don't feel many scruples about going right ahead and fielding my own little theory, which is that a lot of people, at least in modern times, have had some sort of problem with green. My guess is that idealists and absolutists are bothered by the natural dominance of green. They want to put it in its place. Let us not forget that, a century ago, red was the color of protest. And what are we to make of the fact that, where once radicals called themselves Reds, now many on the left are proud to be Greens? There must be a color theorist who can supply us with an explanation, with some sociological gloss on the radically complementary nature of red and green.

Artists who knew Mondrian during his years in Paris and New York told stories about his refusing to be seated at a location in a restaurant where he found himself looking out a window at the green of a tree. He had painted trees, magnificent trees, earlier in his career, using greens that had been darkened until they suggested ash and lead, but the ecstatically pure emotion of his later work necessitated banishing any trace of this most naturalistic hue. Kandinsky, that other founding father of abstract art, although he did use green throughout his career, had doubts about it, too. "This pure green," Kandinsky wrote, "is to the realm of color what the so-called bourgeoisie is to human society: it is an immobile, complacent element, limited in every respect. This green is like a fat, extremely healthy cow, lying motionless, fit only for chewing the cud, regarding the world with stupid, lackluster eyes." For some twentieth-century artists green was banality incarnate--the color of boredom. (I once knew a painter, a younger contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists, who made a joke of the anti-green sentiment, naming one of his abstractions something like Green, Green, I Love You Green.)

The nineteenth century was very much a green century, at least in the arts, which helps to explain why the twentieth-century avant-garde got fed up. But how could those nineteenth-century artists, all those realists and empiricists, not have adored green? The Impressionists, who carried their easels out into the sunshine, embraced an all-green-all-the-time approach, at least when they weren't painting the shadows purple. They understood that there is something magnificently out of control about green. It's the most unself-conscious of colors, but also the most promiscuous. The Art Nouveau masters, all the fin-de-siècle designers of posters and wallpaper and pottery and jewelry, tapped green's kinkier side, colors ranging from mossy grays to acidic limes, which suggested melancholy and extravagance, decadence and decay--the green of envy, the green of putrefaction, even death. And those are still the aspects of green that the pop culture people are thinking about when they want to gross us out. Remember the Hollywood cult classic tagline: "They'll do anything to get what they need. And they need Soylent Green."

If going green means accepting the power of the natural world, then painters have often been in the vanguard, from Giorgione in early sixteenth-century Venice, plunging his lovers into an emerald dream, to de Kooning in the 1950s, after he'd more or less abandoned the mean streets of Manhattan for Long Island, playing with all sorts of luscious-yet- febrile tints. It's probably the architects, however, who can teach us the most about living with green. I have wanted to visit Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, the house cantilevered over a creek in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh, since I was a kid, but only finally got there a few weeks ago, and it was an astonishing experience--it trumped even my wildest hopes. Over the years, I've thought so much about Wright's megalomania that I had begun to wonder if he could ever completely respond to the natural world, which was of course what he always said he wanted to do. The revelation of Fallingwater is that Wright's almost superhuman powers of invention are a perfect match for the green-on-green opulence of western Pennsylvania in its August glory. Fallingwater is a fearlessly extravagant building, all rhyming balconies and echoing angles and multiplying vantage points. This great house, with its surfaces of industrial concrete and native stone, suggests the bravado of a soloist's thunderous performance in a Romantic concerto, only the orchestra that Wright challenges is nature itself. And Wright, perhaps remembering the kindergarten lesson about red and green being complementaries, has inserted, at the very heart of Fallingwater, a vertical strip of windows, all painted red. That deep, strong red is a signature touch, an idealistic gesture emblazoned across a realist's dappled green world. There is some ecological lesson to be drawn from Fallingwater, something about perfervid idealism discovering its truest self only after grappling with nature's power. And this, come to think of it, is not a bad definition of the American sublime.

The New Republic New York Diarist Issue date 09.24.07