#xanthopsia

In this first instalment of a mini-series looking into the subject of ‘Vision and Art’ I would like to talk about the ‘yellow vision’ of Vincent van Gogh.

      Source: The Winston Dictionary - College Edition, 1945

© Erroneous Histories 2014

Since the New Yorker posted this poem at the beginning of July, I have read it aloud with a friend, to myself, to others so many times I cannot begin to count it. The color yellow has been used as an aesthetic in films (cf. Wes Anderson's oeuvre, Amélie, etc.), but especially in Van Gogh's paintings. During my first weeks in Paris, I went with a friend to the Musée D'Orsay, and I remember him telling me how the colors of the paintings our cultures have come to love (e.g., Starry Night) have endured decades of chemical changes—subtle erosions that deepen or fade or alter hues that we have decided represent the best artwork of the West. But we don't really know, do we. And when we pair that erosion with the variability of human vision (cf. xanthopsia: 'when objects appear / more yellow than they really are'; color blindness), the authenticity of artwork refracts even further across individual prisms and spectra. But even despite that variability, our shared use of words to describe what we see ties together cultures across the chemical reactions that record time and the individual conditions that ascribe personhood—and so '[a]s yellow as they are, they are'.