When I first read the title of this book, I immediately thought of Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Gravity Rainbow (1973), which tells the story of the Nazis’ secret development and deployment of rockets at the end of World War II. rainbow gravity is, of course, a very different book which is, as it stands, about colour, materiality and British modernity. The rainbow in question is the colorful arc of the documentary It’s the color (1942, directed by Jack Ellitt) which was made to demonstrate the potential of Technicolor film. Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, a lecturer in film and media at University College London, explains early on the reasoning behind her title: “To say that the rainbow has gravity is… not just imply that color has literal weight. It is also to invoke metaphorically the seriousness of color, its gravity, as a political phenomenon as much as an aesthetic one. The period she chose also makes sense, marked by the invention of synthetic dyes in 1856 and the start of color broadcasting on the BBC in 1968.
Dootson’s arguments are well made through in-depth analyzes of carefully chosen case studies that allow him to explain complex ideas on topics ranging from chromatic imperialism to race and the BBC. In the first of five in-depth chapters, the author shows how new techniques for making artist’s colors in the mid-nineteenth century elicited artistic responses that criticized both the quality of the paint itself and its effect on artistic work. William Holman Hunt was concerned about paint fading and expressed his displeasure in terms of objectionable racial otherness, using skin color as a benchmark for chromatic fidelity. There were also disagreements over the material substance of the paints, and while George Frederic Watts worked to achieve a drier and stiffer paint surface, James Abbott McNeill Whistler preferred greater liquidity, which John Ruskin considered degrading the art of painting.
The new color printing technology of chromolithography is the subject of Dootson’s second chapter. The use of the mottled “dotted” technique
Appearance in contemporary advertising for A&F Pears shows how central the visualization and exploitation of racial difference became in Victorian advertising, as a black baby’s body is bleached by a white child wielding a bar of soap.
Another new technology, the British Vivex process for color photography, is the subject of Dootson’s third chapter with the striking work of Madame Yevonde, whose 1932 portrait of actress Joan Maude graces the book jacket. Vivex brought color strength that hadn’t been seen before. In interwar Britain, women’s appearance (including clothing and cosmetics) became a measure of modernity. At the same time, the intensity of color photography by female photographers such as Yevonde thwarted the male-dominated field of black-and-white photography of the time, and color soon became associated with the feminine.
In the following chapter, the Technicolor film laboratory in London is examined as a typical example of chromatic imperialism in post-war color cinema, particularly after Indian independence in 1947. Taking the example of Jhansi Ki Rani (1953, directed by Sohrab Modi), a drama set against the 1857 Indian Mutiny and filmed in India but processed in London, Dootson examines the drivers of economic and commercial imperialism to reveal the links between imperial ideology and Technicolor , and further details the toxic processes and dangerous lab work required to bring such impressive color films to the screen.
Detail of Chila Kumari Singh Burman’s Remembering a better new world (2020) at Tate Britain, London
© Chila Kumari Singh Burman/Photo © Tate (Joe Humphrys)
The BBC’s ‘colour problem’, as Dootson calls it, follows in a final chapter which sets out how the switch from monochrome to color television in the 1960s infiltrated debates on Commonwealth migration and the racial identity in Britain. It was the days of the BBC Black and White Minstrel Showstarted in 1958, and Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968. Dark skin on television was presented as a technological challenge.
As a coda, Dootson leaves to his reader the example of a contemporary work, the neon extravaganza of Chila Kumari Singh Burman Remembering a better new world (2020), which was installed on the facade of Tate Britain and acted to disrupt conventional narratives of British history. Burman’s work neatly encapsulates Dootson’s explorations of imperialism and colonialism, the foregrounding of women’s creative work and their use of color, the linguistic shift, as Dootson calls it, between racial designation and optical tint, and the entrenchment, again, of such ideas in British culture. The point, of course, is that the coda of rainbow gravity is not a conclusion on our contemporary culture, but an opening.
• Beth Williamson is an art historian and writer
• Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, The Gravity of the Rainbow: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity, Paul Mellon Centre/Yale University Press, 232pp, 120 color and b/w illustrations, £45 (hb), published May 2
