Green: The History of a Color

Of all the colours Pastoureau has written about, green may be the most contradictory. It has signified life, luck, and hope — and disorder, greed, poison, and the devil. It was the colour of love and childhood, of the fleeting and the changeable. It was connected to the Roman emperor Nero. It became the colour of Islam. Goethe believed it was the colour of the middle class. Some nineteenth-century scholars speculated that the ancient Greeks could not see it at all.

Part of the reason for this instability is chemical. Green pigments were for centuries difficult to produce and even harder to fix — they faded, shifted, corrupted other colours they touched. The unreliability of the material shaped the cultural meaning: green became associated with everything transient. Only in the Romantic period did it settle into something more stable, becoming definitively the colour of nature. From there, the path to environmentalism and the green movement of the twentieth century is direct.

Pastoureau also shows why the Bauhaus and Kandinsky actively denigrated green, and how its rehabilitation in contemporary culture is almost entirely tied to ecological symbolism — a dramatic reversal from centuries of ambivalence.

Like the rest of the series, the book argues that colours do not carry fixed meanings: their histories are histories of reversals, accidents, and social decisions. Green makes that case most strikingly of all.

Part of Pastoureau's colour history series, alongside Blue, Red, and volumes on black and yellow.

Published by Princeton University Press, 2014.