This document provides an in-depth summary and analysis of the key ideas from the book. It discusses how the book argues that Western culture has engaged in "chromophobia" - a fear and marginalization of color. Color has often been associated with notions of the feminine, primitive, and inferior. Meanwhile, white and the absence of color have been elevated as representations of purity, order, rationality and culture. The document analyzes how these dichotomies have influenced art and philosophy over centuries. It concludes that the book mounts a thorough critique of this binary view of color vs. the absence of color and the prejudices it has justified in Western society.

2. This book is surprising from the title onward, both forward and backward. No matter how you
take it you are going to be both excited like hell and disappointed like standing in front of the gate
of the Messianic Jerusalem. There is so little to see there. But I read it from cover to cover and I
guess I am going to make a few remarks. For me “color” and “colors” are not to be debated. I have
known Daltonian people who were entirely colorblind and for them, the world was nothing but a
palette of grey or greys all huddled around between white light and black night. I could not even
imagine it. And color is for me everywhere. In my latest dream, last night, bright green leaves were
falling from I don’t know where and those who picked them up could enter some kind of a means of
transportation to go home, but where is home? A long way away, like Tipperary.
No, color is not a philosophical concept despite the color revolutions that lead nowhere. Color
is a physical phenomenon. “Color may be a continuum, but the continuum is continuously broken,
the indivisible endlessly divided.” (page 86) Yes of course, and this continuum can be exploded by
simple refraction. To negate color/colors and reject it/them is as absurd as to reject light.
Colorblindness is a handicap, just like plain blindness. To reveal color and colors, you just need to
refract a beam of light in a refracting prism of glass, and you can then see the continuum and the
various stripes, which have no clear limits, of what we consider different colors. And I will start from
there. Light is a vast band of wavelengths that vary by so little a difference from one wavelength to
the next that you cannot really say you have shifted from one color to the next, at best, from one
hue to another. Is one nanometer the possible change? Why should it be since this nanometer is a
measurement invented by man and not naturally available in nature?

3. Note the limit between ultraviolet and violet is fuzzy, the same way as it is between infrared
and red. This is due to the human eye. Officially ultraviolet and infrared are invisible, but they vary
with various individuals. This is typical of the vision of colors. What is blue for some is green for
others and in many languages and cultures blue and green are one color, like for the Mayas who
have only one word for “blue,” “green,” “blue-green,” and “first,” and the word is “YAX.”
YAX (yax) (T16) 1> adjective "green" 2> adjective "blue"
3> adjective "blue-green" 4> adjective "first."
It corresponds to the color of jade, a sacred color because it is the rock from which sacrificial
knives are made. The same color can be found with other Indians in America, and it is turquoise for
us. Strangely enough, these stones, or these minerals are sacred and as such cannot be fooled
around with. We can clearly see that this non-distinction between blue and green is then connected
with cultural elements, some being religious. To shed blood, including one’s own blood, was seen,
by these Indians as a religious act, feeding the Gods with the blood they gave us to create our
species. Such examples are neglected or minored by the author, like the two basic colors in
Vietnamese, wet and dry. Colors are a natural phenomenon vastly studied in the physics of light
but the distinction or separation between two colors is vastly cultural and thus variable. But, once
again, to reject color and colors is nothing but a psychiatric or psychological handicap because our
eyes are naturally able to capture the wave variations in light. How big a variation is the real
question, and we probably are not all equal?
“Star,” the glyph “ek’” in Maya, and the main “star” is Venus
EK' (ek'/Ek') (T510) 1> noun "star" 2> noun "Venus"? <> (John Montgomery) The complete "star"
glyph. <> colors added
In the various professions that deal with color and colors, the wavelength of the standard hue
of each color is clearly defined. If we consider what I have just said, it is clear that white is not
really a color since the wavelengths of all the colors, of the entire spectrum are necessary to
produce white. In other words, and in a way, white is a play on words and wavelengths. In the
same way, black is not a color since it is the absence of light, hence it does not have a wavelength.
But it is not that simple. In nature, any object or item, alive or mineral, absorbs the wavelength
corresponding to its or their color/colors and reflects these radiations and we catch them and that’s
how an object, or an animal, or anything is that particular color. Black absorbs no radiation at all,

4. and white absorbs them all. Black does not reverberate a wavelength that does not exist and white
reverberates them all.
There are some variations in basic colors. In painting three colors are basic: red, blue, and
yellow, but black and white are seen as colors. In Video and cinema or TV art, the three basic
colors are red, blue, and green. And in these industries, they may have surprises. In the film
Batman Returns (1992) Batman and the Penguin could not be on the set together. So, they filmed
Batman first and the Penguin second. The lights had been set for Batman who is dressed in Black.
When the Penguin finally arrived on the set underground, instead of appearing in white, his
costume appeared to be orange. All the lights had to be reset for the camera to capture the white
costume of the Penguin as being white. The chief light engineer explained in a professional
magazine what he had to do. What we are speaking of here is pure physics. But before, we were
speaking culture, and to speak of the basic colors in various arts and artistic practices is first of all
cultural. We can even wonder why we only state three colors. For the Mayas, there were three,
four, and five basic colors, all connected together as the five cardinal points.
From sunrise to sunrise, the cardinal points are
1- East (lak’in LAK-K'IN-ni (lak'in) (T183:544.116) > noun "east"; cardinal direction) Red
(chak CHAK (chak) (T109) 1> adjective "red" 2> adjective "great."
CHAK (chak) (T590v) 1> adjective "red" 2> adjective "great" <> (John Montgomery)
Represents a human mandible. (Jacques Coulardeau) It can only allude to one blood-shedding
action within a human sacrifice, i.e., ripping off the lower mandible of the sacrificee.) The sun is rising
red.
2- South (? Unknown) Yellow (k’an K'AN (k'an) (T281) 1> adjective "yellow" 2> adjective
"precious" <> (John Montgomery) The "K’an Cross" glyph. K'AN (K'an) (T506) > noun day
sign; fourth day of the Maya Tzolk'in calendar <> (John Montgomery) Probably represents a grain of
maize within a cartouche. (Jacques Coulardeau) Some research has to be done to connect the two
glyphs that are homophonous.) In Yucatan Maya today, they use the word “nobol” for South, but it
is not attested in the codices. This absence is an obvious cultural choice.
3- West (chik’in chi-[K'IN]-li (chik'inil) (T671[544]:82) > prepositional phrase "in the west";
cardinal direction <> (John Montgomery) Alternatively [K'IN]-chi-li or k'inichil "the sun-face of".
OCH K'IN / ochk’in (och k'in) (T361:544) > noun "west"; cardinal direction.) Black (ek’

5. EK' (ek') (T89) > adjective "black") The sun is setting and disappears for the night
in Xibalba underground, the realm of the Death Lords, where everything is black.
4- North (nal NAL (nal) (T84) 1> noun "maize," "maize curl" 2> noun part of the proper
name of the Maize God [Jun Nal Ye] 3> locative determinative suffix meaning "place."
NAL (nal) (T86) 1> noun "maize," "maize curl" 2> noun part of the proper name of the Maize God 3>
locative determinative suffix meaning "place." NAL(?) (nal) (T1008) > noun "north"; cardinal
direction.) White (sak SAK (sak) (T58) 1 > adjective "white" 2> adjective "resplendent" 3>
adjective "pure." SAK (Sak) (T58:528.142) > noun month sign; the eleventh month of the
Maya Ja'ab' calendar. (Peter Mathews) SAK (Sak) (T58:528.142) > noun month sign; the eleventh
month of the Maya Haab' calendar.) (Jacques Coulardeau) When the dead emerge from Xibalba if
they have been able to defeat the Death Lords, they return to light, hence to white.
5- Center, the Ceiba tree, world axis, Blue-Green (Yax, YAX (yax) (T16)
1> adjective "green" 2> adjective "blue" 3> adjective "blue-green" 4> adjective "first."). The Ceiba
tree (Ceiba pentandra also known as the kapok or silk-cotton tree) is a tropical tree native to North
and South America and Africa. In Central America, the ceiba had great symbolic importance to the
ancient Maya, and its name in the Mayan language is Yax Che / Yax te (“Green Tree” or “First Tree.”
te'/TE' (che'/CHE') (te'/che') (T350) 1> phonetic sign 2> noun "tree" 3> noun "wood."
(Peter Mathews) te/TE'/CHE' (te/te'/che') te'/TE' (che'/CHE') (te'/che') (T513) 1> phonetic
sign 2> noun "tree" 3> noun "wood." (Peter Mathews) te/TE'/CHE' (te/te'/che')
te'/TE' (che'/CHE') (te'/che') (T514 and 514v) 1> phonetic sign 2> noun "tree" 3> noun
"wood." (Peter Mathews) te/TE'/CHE' (te/te'/che') te'/TE' (che'/CHE') (te'/che') (T580[646])
1> phonetic sign 2> noun "tree" 3> noun "wood." (Peter Mathews) te/TE'/CHE' (te/te'/che')
te'/TE' (che'/CHE' (te'/che') (T78:514v) 1> phonetic sign 2> noun "tree" 3> noun "wood." (Peter
Mathews) te/TE'/CHE' (te/te'/che') te'/TE' (che'/CHE') (te'/che') (T87) 1> phonetic sign 2> noun

6. "tree" 3> noun "wood." (Peter Mathews) te/TE'/CHE' (te/te'/che') te'/TE' (che'/CHE')
(te'/che') (T87hv) 1> phonetic sign 2> noun "tree" 3> noun "wood" <> (John Montgomery)
Represents the "Pax" god (god of the month of Pax). (Peter Mathews) te/TE'/CHE' (te/te'/che'))
But the reference to “five” in the biological name of this tree (pentandra) comes from the structure
of the flower. Flowers :
i- Flowers tufted at the ends of branches or axillary, white or rose-colored.
ii- Calyx cup-shaped, 5-cleft, leathery, petals 5, oblong, thick, whitish, imbricate, wooly
outside.
iii- Stamens in 5 bundles, opposite the petals, connate at the base, each bearing 3 sinuous
anthers.
iv- Ovary 5-celled, many ovuled; style cylindric, dilated; stigma 5-lobed.).
This sacred tree is of course blue-green, and this color is thus sacred too, a second time. This
sacredness comes from the quincunx that can be found in this pentacle or pentadic pattern or Gestalt.
This emphasizes the main course of Batchelor’s dinner. The rejection of color and colors, and
the concept of supreme or pure white is an ideological choice constructed in the West over at the
very least twenty centuries. Starting from Plato to modern times, hence the whole expanse of
Western culture through several millennia, Batchelor shows how white is stated as purity, order,
perfection, good, and color or colors on the other hand is or are stated as chaos, disorder, etc. But
Batchelor’s research and exposition is a real beating up to death for a normal reasonable and
sensical mind.
“Color has been the object of extreme prejudice in Western culture… In the West, since
Antiquity, color has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished, and
degraded… This loathing of color, this fear of corruption through color, needs a name:
chromophobia… This purging of color is usually accomplished in one or two ways. In the
first, color is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body – usually the feminine, the
oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer, or the pathological. In the
second, color is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the
inessential, or the cosmetic… Color is routinely excluded from the higher concepts of the
Mind. It is other to the higher values of Western culture. Or perhaps culture is other to the
higher values of color. Or color is the corruption of culture…” (pages 22-23)
So, you may fall into color if you are not careful. But this exclusively black-and-white vision is
founded on an absolutely and solely binary vision of the world. And this is the basis of the
conformism the Western culture is supposed to guarantee for its own sustainable progress.
“Conform, subordinate, control: we are back with Adam and Eve, back in a universe
populated entirely by unequal opposites: male and female, mind and heart, reason and
emotion, order and disorder, absolute and relative, structure and appearance, depth and
surface, high and low, occident and orient, line and color… ‘The predominance of color at

7. the expense of drawing is a usurpation of the relative over the absolute, of fleeting
appearance over permanent form, of physical impression over the empire of the soul.’”
(page 28) [Charles Blanc, The Grammar of Painting and Engraving, translation Kate
Newell Doggett, New York, 1874]
And this Charles Blanc is not anyone. He was a critic, a color theorist, and sometime Director
of the Arts in the 1848 Socialist government in France, hence a government that had chosen the
revolutionary working class. Despite the many mentions that color is for the peasants, the working
class, the poor, etc., in the wake of Carnival and the Burlesque, if we follow Bakhtin and Rousseau,
the socialist (the meaning of the word is in many ways close to the famous Manifesto of the
Communist Party by Marx and Engels), they had to educate these uneducated people and make
them rise to the purity of white in the necessary rejection of colors, which is in full contradiction with
white being the color of the monarchy in France, and blue and red the colors of the proletarian and
revolutionary Parisian entity. If I quote this reference, it is because it explains why some, like Le
Corbusier who would position himself on the left, are so anti-color and for the purest white color
possible on crude if not raw and unworked-upon concrete.
Let’s conclude this diatribe with the following quotation:
“Since Aristotle’s time, the discrimination against color has taken a number of forms, some
technical, some moral, some racial, some sexual, some social.” (Page 29)
And we should add, some cultural, some political, and some religious, and even so it would
not be complete. But enough is enough, though this last small quotation will drive the nail in
definitely.
“The descent into color described by Blanc. Sensuous, intoxicating, unstable,
impermanent; loss of control, loss of focus, loss of self.” (page 31)
Color in one word is perdition. Let’s save ourselves and turn color-blind. Is there anything in
the book to save us from this tyrannical condemnation and compulsory and mandatory behavior?
We can turn this rejection of all colors in any direction, it remains total, radical, and irreversible.
When Le Corbusier turns to industrialized ornamentation and coloring, it “reeked for him of
confusion, disorder, dishonesty, imbalance, subservience, narcosis and dirt.” (page 46) Le
Corbusier rejects what he calls “the Law of Ripolin.” “White is clean, clear, healthy, moral, rational,
masterful.” (page 46) He then quotes Theo van Doesburg. “WHITE is the spiritual color of our
times… WHITE is the color of modern times… perfection, purity, and certitude. WHITE It includes
everything… WHITE pure white!” (page 46-47, Note 19, quoted in Mark Wigley, White Walls,
Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1995).
It is not so much the qualification of “white” being pure and whatever else. In fact, we could
say this “revolutionary” person is pure red, and this Ukrainian leader is pure orange. Along the
same line, this Georgian leader could be said pure carnation. And so many Americans pretend to
be pure MAGA. What is particularly vicious in this case is that purity considers that it means the
exclusion, expulsion, and elimination of anything else that is not pure white. This is nothing but

8. sectarianism, fundamentalism, absolutism, dictatorship. Some will say it is only mental. True
enough, but it is so easy to turn something mental into something physical. Just send all those who
are not white, pure white, to any kind of concentration camp for elimination. It is a reasoning that
was made more than famous, actually unavoidable, unescapable, an absolute reference in the 19th
century with the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat that implied and stated the elimination
of the second component of capitalism, the bourgeoisie. This is the result of a binary and neurotic
vision of society cut into two sections, two components and only two, all others rejected into non-
existence, and between these two we have a war to the death, and yet the destruction of the
bourgeoisie, the owners of industrial means of production, does not solve the problem because
then the proletariat becomes the owners of the means of production, hence they become the new
bourgeoisie, and since it is difficult to manage such big numbers of owners of means of production,
an élite appears who is the new bourgeoisie. Note the concept of color revolutions used in this 21st
century goes exactly this way: the elimination of those who have the political and economic means
of production in their hands in a society that is supposed to become a society that works for the
profit of the people at large, and within just a few years it starts again to work for the political and
economic profit of only an elite, elected or not is not even the real question, or a real question. The
rejection of color and colors and the supremacy of pure white has so little – and yet so much – to
do with the Spirit of Gettysburg.
But it is important to state here that this binary and neurotic way of thinking so pregnant in the
19th
century had been just as present and pregnant with death in other periods when things are
reduced to two opposed camps. In politics, it very often leads to dictatorship, authoritarianism, and
impotence even. Any reasonable thinking is replaced by conspiracy and all sorts of theories
derived from this very conspirational concept. This approach is not only an intellectual
shortcoming. Of course, it is obvious in any field that reducing everything to a binary opposition, a
binary choice, and a binary architecture is absurd. Nothing is ever reduced or reducible to two
oxymoronic elements. This leads to concepts of heresy and infidelity that have been used in history
too often and are still used abundantly. It was so much easier to think of space within a flat surface,
a two-dimensional flat surface. Unluckily reality came back to us in the 19th
century too when we
finally realized that a two-dimensional universe is just a figment of our narrow understanding of
what the cosmos is. Either convex or concave, the universe is never flat but always curved. A line
is never straight, but always curved to one side or the other, up or down, and there are as many
sides as we can imagine, for instance, 360 in all directions since the cosmos is an enormous
sphere. Rolling along just in front of the gaping mouth of a big circular black hole.
Now we understand the rejection of colors is pure ideology. White is nothing but purity since
white is a visual effect caused by the mixing of all color wavelengths of all the various colors we
can imagine. White is a potpourri of myriads of colors brought together, a Spanish inn where
everyone brings their own food and drinks. Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-
webster.com/thesaurus/potpourri, gives eighty-four synonyms for “potpourri,” and they don’t even
mention “cluster” that has become so popular with the pandemic.

9. David Batchelor indicates how Baudelaire accused peasants and savages of denigrating
colors. He is the only one who believes color is a sign of the nobility of the human soul. I believe
there is a translation problem here. Since French has no real equivalent for the English “mind,”
when the French want to speak of the “mind” they use the word “âme” and this word translated into
English is “soul.” Here Baudelaire must mean the “human mind” because the soul does not need to
be qualified as noble. It is positive and divine by definition, not by the colors it may like. All others
say exactly the reverse. Joris-Karl Huysmans is the archetype of color-oriented social
discrimination. At the top, the aristocracy is for white and pale colors. The utilitarian bourgeois are
for good old industrial colors, clear-cut, separate, clean, and pure, each one of them. At the
bottom, the common herd is for flashy colors, which is emphasized by Bakhtin and his theory of the
colorful and popular anarchistic and chaotic Carnival.
That leads the West and Western culture to neurotically absurd extremes.
“Des Esseintes [Huysmans’ character] begins his careful selection by classifying flowers
in terms of social class. He identifies the ‘poor, vulgar slum-flowers,’ a middle-class of
‘pretentious, conventional, stupid flowers,’ and lastly, ‘flowers of charm and tremendous
delicacy … princesses of the vegetable kingdom, living aloof and apart, having nothing
whatever in common with the popular plants and the bourgeois blooms.’ Then the
neurosis becomes delirious and Des Esseintes, from rare and aristocratic plants from
distant lands, moves to … “an interest in flowers that are literally artificial.…” And then “he
turns his attention to another kind of flora: ‘tired of artificial flowers aping real ones, he
wanted some natural flowers that would look like fakes.’ And from dream to nightmare,
from delirium to neurosis, “the nightmare confirms what he [Des Esseintes] already knows
from the flowers: it all comes down to syphilis in the end. Within days, most of the flowers
are dying or dead.” (page 58-59)
This is when Batchelor meets with Andy Warhol, and I should add here, with the concept of
simulacrum. He starts from a starting point that could be discussed – at least discussed – and his
first “opinion” on Warhol is:

10. “As Mandy Merch has noted, ‘the transvestite has often been named as the central figure
of Warhol’s work,’ there is perhaps no one for whom
make-up is more important than the drag queen.
[Note 9. Mandy Merck, ‘Figuring out Warhol,’ in Pop
Out: Queer Warhol, ed. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan
Flatley and José Esteban Munoz (Durham, NC,
1996) pp. 224-37, here p.232.] The figure of the
drag-queen is marked, like the figure of rhetoric was
for Plato, as a simulacrum, a copy without an
original, something entirely artificial and uncertain.
In this sense, it is much like cosmetic color: it aims
to confuse and seduce, to fake and cover-up.” (page
62-63)
The word simulacrum was trendy when this book
was published, but it does not fit this situation. Jean
Baudrillard made it famous when he compared
money and then later on a credit card to the real
value of the goods that are being sold or bought
with this money (gold, silver, etc. at first and then paper money) or thanks to the credit card that is
like a mechanical go-between. The value of the drag queen has nothing to do with the value of a
woman that the drag queen would be trying to sell or buy. The drag queen is something else
completely. It is an imitation that is intended to be captured and appreciated as at best an illusion,
but always untrue, or rather true in its untruth, true in its not being true. It is quite obvious money,
or a credit card, is not fake value, but is a simple simulacrum enabling the transfer of value and the
transfer of goods or services. If anyone believed a drag queen was a real woman, that person
would need some counseling or even psychiatric treatment. Warhol, in his hyper-realism (Campbell
Soup painting), or his repetition of one picture into a whole wall with the same picture painted
twelve or twenty times, or with a sheet of paper printed with six or eight times the same picture. No
one is going to fall into the trap of believing the Campbell Soup cans are real canned soup. No one
is going to fall into the trap of believing the twelve or more pictures of Marylin Monroe are the real
Marylin Monroe. But if you consider Warhol as a photographer or a film producer you enter the field
of hyperrealism again but this time with real people, real actions, real bodies, if possible, vastly
undressed and naked, often in some state of excitement. All that is a simulacrum of the real people
in the photograph or the film, because they are only pictures and you cannot even touch their
bodies, see them, or hear them talk but that’s all. This is a simulacrum that is supposed to give you
“pleasure” or some other “emotion.” It is all a question of level or how many levels there are
between a real person and a drag queen on a stage. The real person is a man and the drag queen
on the stage is an illusion of a woman there to lure you into enjoying the illusion, the disguise that
created the illusion from something that is not at all what the drag queen looks like. Joe
Dalessandro in Flesh or Trash is Joe Dalessandro and his sexual performance, visible or not on
the screen is a real sexual performance if it is visible, or a fake sexual performance if it is not seen,
not shown, but it is a sexual performance and Joe Dalessandro is Joe Dalessandro in skin, flesh,
bone, blood and sperm. Joe Dalessandro in these films is a simulacrum because you cannot touch
him, but this simulacrum is supposed to give you an emotion, some pleasure of the type you
choose since you are alone in front of the screen. In a simple statement, I would say it would be
strange for a straight man playing drag queen to watch gay porn if he is exclusively in straight sex
in his own life. It would reveal that the drag queen is in his mind, he is the drag queen in a way
since he would be performing the role of a gay top when having sex with a woman. That’s perverse
in many ways. A straight man who could only have sex with a woman when he is himself dressed
and made up as a drag queen. I knew a young man, a long time ago, who definitely refused the
idea of being gay, and yet he could only perform sexually with a woman if the woman was a
prostitute. How many tiers of simulacrum are there in such cases? Certainly more than one or two,
probably three or even four.
I am afraid David Batchelor did not capture Andy Warhol at all. But so far, we have kept within
the limits of some intellectual or mental neurosis, at most psychosis. But with Edwin Abbott’s

11. science fiction from the end of the 19th
century, David Batchelor leads us directly into
schizophrenia. All mentions of color or colors are evacuated and the whole world is
“ [In a] two-dimensional world inhabited entirely by lines and
flat [MY addendum], geometric shapes, everything is order,
hierarchy, and regularity. This is a deterministic universe in
which a fixed social and biological order prevails. On the
lowest rung of the evolutionary ladder are straight lines
(women); we ascend slowly through the male scale of
isosceles triangles (workers and soldiers), equilateral triangles
(tradesmen), and squares and pentagons (professionals) and
arrive at a polygonal nobility and circular priestly order. The
world is flat, linear, monochrome, and more or less stable.
Until that is, color is discovered.” (page 64)
It’s starting with sexism, and it’s by definition racist since
we are exclusively in black and white, without any color at all.
If a person had that kind of ideology, that person should be
guided to the closest psychiatric hospital for treatment. But let
me be clear. It looks like an antique store in a small city in
some province far away from big towns, an antique store
where the modern heirs of some local commercial or
bureaucratic families have dumped all the paraphernalia their
two, three, or four generations behind them have accumulated
in their homes since 1851 or so and the Second Empire. The
first best item you will find there is in Clermont Ferrand, the
Vercingetorix statue Place Jaude where Vercingetorix is on a
horse that is flying over the earth (no feet touching the ground.
The second best is in Clermont Ferrand again, Musée
d'Art Roger-Quilliot, the statue showing Jeanne d’Arc and
Vercingetorix meeting and both celebrating France. The
sculptor was Chatrousse Émile François (1829-1896). The
sculpture was bought in 1872 by the Fonds national d'art contemporain, hence the French state,
and it was entrusted on November 18, 1878, to the municipal art museum of Clermont Ferrand that
became the Musée des Beaux-Arts after the reconstruction of an ancient convent in 1990-1992
and was finally renamed Musée d’Art Roger Quillot after Roger Quillot died in 1998.
If a nation like France can rewrite history to the point of making Vercingetorix meet Jeanne
d’Arc to respect the chronology (though the name of the sculpture is “Jeanne d’Arc et
Vercingetorix”) we can widen our vision of the West and Europe as a white paradise civilizing the
barbaric world of various colors into Christianity and pure white morals and politics, all that we
know as colonialization and is vastly accompanied by slavery.
What is surprising is the “objective” tone of David Batchelor who is telling an enormous crime
against humanity that went on with genocide and systematic exploitation of more than 80% of the
world as if it were a simple story about how the West was chosen by the highest authorities in the
cosmos to conquer and dominate the whole humanity. And he does not hesitate to push his fishing
corks and hooks up to the year 2000. And it is the same story with Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor
Adorno, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Salman Rushdie, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. And he dares
conclude on this very segregational theme of his with a quotation from Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe:
“… it is also worthy of remark, that savage nations, uneducated people, and children have
a great predilection for vivid [My emphasis] colors; that animals are excited to rage by
certain colors; that people of refinement avoid vivid [My emphasis] colors in their dress
and the objects that are about them and seem inclined to banish them altogether from

12. their presence.” [Note 13: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of colors, trans. C.L.
Eastlake (Cambridge, MA and London, 1970), p.55] (page 112)
Charles Lock Eastlake committed this translation in 1840, and that makes it slightly
questionable 180 years later since we do not speak the same language any more. The original by
Goethe himself in Zur Farbenlehre, 1810, is the concluding section 135 of the first part of the book,
“Erste Abteilung - Physiologische Farben.”
135. Endlich ist noch bemerkenswert, dass wilde Nationen, ungebildete Menschen, Kinder
eine große Vorliebe für lebhafte [Meine Betonung] Farben empfinden, dass Tiere bei
gewissen Farben in Zorn geraten, dass gebildete Menschen in Kleidung und sonstiger
Umgebung die lebhaften [Meine Betonung] Farben vermeiden und sie durchgängig von
sich zu entfernen suchen.
I will not question the equivalence
between “wild” and “savage” though “savage”
carries a derogatory meaning in its Latin root.
I will question the couple “uneducated – of
refinement” for the German couple
“ungebildete Menschen – gebildete
Menschen.” The concept of “refinement”
carries a positive meaning that rejects
“uneducated” into some derogatory meaning.
The German couple is more objective about
one single concept, the first word negative
and the second word positive. I insist it is the
same concept, “unconstructed – constructed”
or “uneducated – educated” or “unelaborate –
elaborate,” the idea that on one side some
process of complexification did not take place and on the other side it did take place. Maybe
education leads to refinement, but refinement is a positive behavioral term whereas educated is
the positive side of the negative side of the same concept, that of education. But the main objection
to this translation comes from “lebhaft.” Though “vivid” is connected to the Latin root for “life,” it is
not directly connected to the standard English concept of “life,” and the German version uses the
word twice and its root is “Leben,” the verb or the noun. The translation uses a word that refers to
the flashy brightness of the colors, not the fact that they are directly connected with life as is
implied in German where the adjectival suffix “-haft” means “endowed with,” in this case “endowed
with life.” Goethe was often using his words with great care. When in the concluding verses of the
Second Faust he says the future of man is woman, he uses for “woman” the old neuter root “das
Weib” instead of the more modern feminine root “die Frau” and in this case again in the form of the
adjective “weiblich,” amplified as the fourth rhyming “-liche” line ending. These four rhymes are the
echo of the final stage of Faust’s soul’s salvation by four women, Mater Gloriosa presiding over
three “Büsserinnen” (penitent women): Magna Peccatrix, Mulier Samaritana, and Maria
Aegyptiaca.
CHORUS MYSTICUS:
Alles Vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulängliche,
Hier wird's Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist's getan;
Das Ewig-Weibliche [Meine Betonung]
Zieht uns hinan.1
1 Both Google’s and A.S. Kline’s translations cannot capture this play on words. Google’s translation:
“CHORUS MYSTICUS: Everything transient / Is just a parable; / The inadequate, / This is where things get

13. I was surprised by the fact that the note attached to section 135 of Zur Farbenlehre is not
given by David Batchelor, though this note from the 19th
-century translator clearly implies Goethe
did not like this conclusion and at the time, developments, in science particularly, were more
circumspect.
Goethe’s book contains various illustrations on colors and how to obtain them from light by
refraction with a circular approach to the set of basic colors like in the two following images at least
inspired by Goethe. We can note how the three basic colors in painting and video art build a
David’s star and that cannot be a coincidence (though the way it works is not pre-determined, from
David to color or from color to David?).
But read the note and you’ll see that even then it was not that clear white was the supreme
dominant color, though, of course, the fact Batchelor demonstrates is true: in the colonial and
imperialistic vision Europe developed in the 19th
century after the Independence of the USA and
when European countries decided to colonize Africa, and Asia, more or less abandoning Latin
America to the USA, provided they did not touch Canada, is absolutely true and dominated by the
supremacy of the white race, hence of everything white.
“NOTE I.— Par. 135. The author more than once admits that this chapter on "Pathological
Colors" is very incomplete and expresses a wish (Par. 734) that some medical
physiologists would investigate the subject further. This was afterward to a great degree
accomplished by Dr. Johannes Müller, in his memoir "Über die Phantastischen
Gesichtserscheinungen." Coblentz, 1826. Similar phenomena have been also investigated
with great labor and success by Purkinje. For a collection of extraordinary facts of the kind
recorded by these writers, the reader may consult Scott's Letters on Demonology and
Witchcraft.[ 1] The instances adduced by Müller and others are, however, intended to
prove the inherent capacity of the organ of vision to produce light and colors. In some
maladies of the eye, the patient, it seems, suffers the constant presence of light without
external light. The exciting principle, in this case, is thus proved to be within, and the
conclusion of the physiologists is that external light is only one of the causes which
produce luminous and colored impressions. That this view was anticipated by Newton
may be gathered from the concluding "query" in the third book of his Optics. [1] See also a
curious passage on the beatific vision of the monks of Mount Athos, in Gibbon, chap. 63.”
(Quoted from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe's Theory of Colors (Kindle Locations
4952-4965). Kindle Edition.)
This note opens up questions that should have been considered by David Batchelor but that
would have forced him to consider the imperialistic and colonialistic approach for what it was, and
still is, a crime against humanity after being a crime against science. The West in its 21st
century
happening; / The indescribable, / Here it is done; The Eternal Feminine /Pulls us forward.” A.S. Kline’s
translation: “The Mystic Choir: All of the transient, / Is parable, only: / The insufficient, / Here, grows to
reality: / The indescribable, / Here, is done: / Woman, eternal, / Beckons us on.”

14. twilight needs more courage to morally evaluate and historically assess its responsibility in the
present political, economic, and environmental crisis.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU