Eva Hesse and Color

Abstract

John Ruskin recalled in his autobiography how on trip Italy he painted scale of cobalt blues to measure the blue of the sky with. Ever keen measure and calibrate, he called his handmade scale cyanometer1 as if color would be systematically gauged according its gradation of tones. For all the elaborate theories that have been developed systematize color, I know of no more concise example of the historical drive control its effects than this brief image of Ruskin, planning his painting trip the Swiss mountains, mixing his own colors correspond with the exact blue on his strip of blues, which he matched against the intense blues of an alpine sky. Yet it is an image with double edge, which both illustrates positivistic belief in the possibility of measuring color and hints at what is really at stake in the desire calculate it. Ultimately what is most interesting about Ruskin's would-be purely technical instrument is precisely that which escapes the system of external and verifiable equivalence that he ostensibly wishes fix in place, the sheer pleasure that overwhelms the measure. Revealed in the process is Ruskin's own agitated, almost nervous, hypersensitivity color. In Modern Painters (1843), he would devote long sections the painting of the sky, which however pure and blue, he writes, is never flat and dead but trembling transparency and a deep, quivering, transparent body of penetrable air.2 What trembles but the optical sensation of perception? An instrument intended measure the color of the sky is instead an instrument calibrate levels of affect and sensation. That is say, rather than system of objective measurement, this scale of gradated color reflects back on the subject betray body, like color swatch gauging sensual encounter of rising and falling intensities. Even though Ruskin's pictorial sensibility is admittedly as far removed from Eva Hesse's world and, more generally, the American art world of the 1960s as is possible imagine, the anecdote provides useful image think ivith: graded color sample. Imagine an array of color swatches, for instance, little pieces of fabric