The Colours of Our Memories

Michel Pastoureau

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509533954
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia social

What remains of the colours of our childhood? What are our memories of a blue rabbit, a red dress, a yellow bike – and were they really those colours? What colours do we associate with our student years, our first loves, our adult lives? How does colour leave its mark on memory?

In an attempt to answer these and other questions, Michel Pastoureau presents us with a journal about colours that covers half a century. Drawing on personal recollections, he retraces the recent history of colours through an exploration of fashion and clothing, everyday objects and practices, emblems and flags, sport, literature, museums and art.

This text – playful, poetic, nostalgic – records the life of both the author and his contemporaries. We live in a world increasingly bursting with colour, in which colour remains a focus for memory, a source of delight and, most of all, an invitation to dream.

1
CLOTHING

IN THE BEGINNING WAS YELLOW

Is this my oldest memory? Perhaps not. But it is certainly the oldest one in colour. When my father Henri Pastoureau definitively broke off relations with André Breton, I was barely five years old. They had met in 1932 and for nearly twenty years, despite their differences in age and celebrity, they remained linked by an intellectual friendship that fluctuated but remained solid. In the post-war years, Breton would telephone our home several times a week and would quite often climb up to visit us, right at the top of the hill of Montmartre, to chat with my father about some Surrealist project or publication. From time to time he would come to dinner, bringing me coloured crayons and paper that was by no means ordinary, for it was never white, always thick and rough and cut in irregular shapes, possibly salvaged from some printer’s equipment or from packaging. For a child, this unusual paper was, I must admit, somewhat disappointing, even if Breton would sometimes amuse himself by ‘painting’ on it, using a potato cut in half. A little ink or water-colour paint spread on to the potato made a kind of coloured pad that could be applied to the paper to create strange shapes. Breton liked to give these a form that more or less suggested a fish and he was particularly fond of using the colour green. I have preserved several of these ‘potato prints’ that delighted me in my early Surrealist childhood. At that time I was unaware of the fact that in many countries of the world, potatoes served as inking pads in the fabrication of false official documents.

For my mother, those dinners with Breton constituted a daunting culinary test. He was fussy about his eating and imposed a number of rules banning certain foods. Carrots, sardines and veal liver could not be served to him at table. Peas, though, were welcome – almost obligatory. As for beer, it was ‘vile’ (my own opinion entirely).

Although I have no more than a vague memory of all the pictures that Breton produced as I looked on, the image of his person that I have preserved remains extremely clear. There were three distinctive features to it. It was that of a man older than my father, with a huge head and sporting a yellow waistcoat. The sound of his affected voice was disturbing to a child, but it was above all his head that scared me: it seemed out of proportion to the rest of his body and was surrounded by hair that was unusually thick and long. My friend Christian, who lived opposite and whose grandmother acted as the caretaker for our block of apartments, said that he had the face of ‘an Indian sorcerer’. To us, indeed, he did seem to be wearing a mask. I am surprised that Breton’s biographers hardly ever mentioned that unusual head of his, the size and features of which were so striking and which conveyed an undeniable impression of nobility and authority, even as it terrified the little children of Montmartre. Perhaps it accounted for Breton’s taste for masks …

However, what remained most strongly anchored in my visual memory was not that face so often painted and photographed, but the colour of that immutable yellow waistcoat of a matt, warm, almost sugary hue which I could, even today, pick out from a colour chart. It is unlikely that Breton ever removed his jacket at dinner-time, in my presence, for he very seldom did so. But what was it, in the early fifties, about the waistcoat that so forcefully struck the little boy that I was? What, in reality, was its fabric and colour? Leather, suede, buck-skin? Was it just a beige, felt or woollen waistcoat that my memory transformed into a honey-coloured garment? Or was it some eccentric piece of clothing such as Breton did sometimes wear and that truly was a warm, bright yellow? (His eccentricity was borne out by the fact that, on the bridge of a ship bound for America, Claude Lévi-Strauss and others had noticed him wandering about in a strange, ‘sky-blue towelling raincoat’.) I shall probably never know, for the only photographs that survive from those days are all black-and-white, quite different from the ever-coloured image in my memory. What chromatic mutation has it imposed upon a no doubt very ordinary garment? And why? To preserve the memory of an extraordinary figure who, in many ways was quite alarming? Or to reflect later images more in keeping with the Breton mythology? Between ourselves and our memories other memories are interwoven, both our own and those recounted to us.

But, after all, it doesn’t really matter. In my memories, André Breton will forever remain associated with a particular shade of yellow, as will, along with him, the whole Surrealist movement. For me, Surrealism will always be yellow, a fine, mysterious, luminous yellow.

TURBULENT STRIPES

At the age of about 40, I became interested in stripes, in their history and their symbolism in European societies. They were the subject of several of my seminars at the École pratique des hautes études, which produced a book that was published by Seuil in 1991 and then translated into thirty or more different languages. It was entitled L’Étoffe du Diable. Une histoire des rayures et des tissus rayés (The Stuff of the Devil. A History of Stripes and Striped Fabrics). Finding a publisher for such a work was no easy matter: to the authorities at the Seuil publishing house, the subject seemed so trivial yet at the same time possibly dangerous. Eventually the book only saw the light of day thanks to the tenacity of the historian Maurice Olender, who was the editor of the ‘La librairie du XXIe siècle’ series. The cautiousness of the head of this great publishing house in itself constituted historical evidence that echoed the subject of the book itself. I had tried to show that in the West, stripes had long been considered negative or even diabolical surfaces, and that striped garments had been reserved for the excluded and the outcast. Not until the eighteenth century did ‘good’ stripes appear, signalling freedom, youth and support for new ideas. In the following century, these ‘good’ stripes, which nevertheless certainly did not supplant the ‘bad’ ones, adorned the clothing of children, elegant women and entertainers, eventually invading seaside beaches, sports grounds and holiday resorts.

I for my part suffered a painful experience of ‘bad stripes’ at a very early age, when I was no more than five years old, in the Jardin de Luxembourg. Accompanied by my grandmother, I went there every Thursday afternoon. Shy, lacking confidence and agoraphobic as I was, I would venture barely 20 metres from her chair, especially as she usually seated herself not far from the central pond, a place that I considered to be particularly perilous. In truth, I was afraid of everything and everyone: the man who rented out boats and the fierce chair attendants (in those days, use of the Luxembourg chairs – which were of a yellow ochre colour – was subject to a fee); the noisy Republican Guardsmen who, without fail, on Thursdays at 6 p.m., gave a performance of the Marseillaise on the band-stand; and above all the park-keepers, whose dark green uniforms reminded the child that I was of that of policemen, always hostile figures.

One Thursday, in April or May, one of these park-keepers accosted me, accusing me of having walked on a prohibited lawn, on the other side of the pond, more than 50 metres from where I was. Of course, he was mistaken: I would never have dared to stray so far or to set foot on a banned lawn. I was much too cowardly and law-abiding. The fact was that he had confused me with another little boy, also dressed in a white cotton shirt with navy-blue stripes. There were probably at least fifty children in the garden, all wearing such a garment, a bastardized version of the sailor-suits of 1900. From a distance it was not easy to distinguish one from another. But the park-keeper dug his heels in, claimed he had very good eye-sight and persisted in his accusations. When my grandmother came to my defence, he pronounced the following assured and petrifying words: ‘I shall put you in prison, both you and your grandmother.’ I burst into tears, clung to her skirts and began to shriek. I was absolutely terrified of this red-faced man with his Gallic moustache and over-large cap. We made off, almost running, while he waved his whistle about and shouted ‘Off to prison, off to prison!’ My grandmother was far too well brought-up to berate him, but, as far as I remember, a number of other people did so.

In that little drama, stripes had revealed all their ambivalence or even ambiguity and had drawn attention to a number of their traditional functions, ones which, much later on, I tried, as a historian, to study in the long term: stripes are certainly young, joyful, playful, recreational and identificatory, but they can also be misleading, dangerous, humiliating and evocative of prisons. On that day, the badness of stripes had certainly prevailed over their goodness and my pretty blue-and-white striped shirt, like the ones worn by sailors, had not brought me luck. I did not want to wear it or one like it ever again. Actually, that was just as well for, later, as the age of puberty approached, I put on weight, became a plump child and the horizontal stripes of such a shirt would probably have further thickened my all too chubby youthful figure.

As for the Jardin de Luxembourg, we were forced to avoid it for the next few months and replace it by the Parc Montsouris, which was further away and duller and gloomier. My grandmother was deprived of her usual garden companions and I could no longer watch the grey and reddish donkeys circling and defecating all afternoon, around the great lawn. That accursed park-keeper!

THE NAVY-BLUE BLAZER

I do not recall wearing a jacket before the age of thirteen. That freedom came to an end in the spring of 1960 when I, along with my parents, was invited to the wedding of my mother’s former pharmaceutical assistant, a young woman who had often taken care of me when I was small, providing me with a view of the world and society that was different from my mother’s. It was decided that, for this occasion, I would be bought a pair of grey trousers and a navy-blue blazer. I was already wearing long trousers, but possessed no jacket or blazer. The purchase was made in the biggest menswear shop in the southern suburbs where we then lived. I can still hear the obsequious voice of the shop assistant as he ironically remarked that ‘the young man is rather rotund’. What he meant was that my thighs were thick for my age. The purchase of the trousers nevertheless proceeded without any problem.

That was not the case with the blazer; and it was my fault. I would have preferred a double-breasted blazer which, I thought, had something of the look of an admiral or even a pilot, but the odious shop-assistant convinced my mother that I was too chubby for such a garment. So it was to be a single-breasted blazer; and I was not pleased about it. The trouble was not so much its shape as its colour. I had noticed that in this shop, despite it being well stocked, the single-breasted blazers for adolescents were of a navy-blue that was less navy than the double-breasted ones. Not much, to be sure, but I was already sensitive to colours and their different shades, and I vaguely felt that a navy-blue that was not very dark was not a true navy-blue. Several of my friends from more bourgeois families than mine were already wearing blazers and I knew that their blue was different from that which was proposed for me: it was darker, denser, less purplish – in a word, less ‘vulgar’.

Adolescents have their own ideas about vulgarity. In many cases they would be hard put to it to explain them or to share them with adults, but there is something about vulgarity – their version of vulgarity – that is absolutely unacceptable. Such was the case of this ‘almost navy-blue’. In my eyes, it was unwearable, hideous and would probably make me look even fatter! It was tried on, rejected, discussed, compared, tried on again. Another shop-assistant expressed his opinion, and then the head of the department did so. He was a figure of some importance and, to my great surprise, he supported my point of view. But it was all to no avail. I could not win. A dash to the door, to get a better view in the daylight, convinced my mother that this single-breasted blazer was an eminently acceptable and a perfectly classical blue and that my whims about colours were – not for the first time – totally unfounded. The shop-assistant was smirking. The head of department was less pleased, for the double-breasted blazers were more expensive than the single-breasted ones. So I had to wear this wretched garment on the day of the wedding; and I felt a shame such as I have rarely experienced. None of my friends were present, few people knew me and it was obvious that nobody noticed that the navy-blue was not quite navy. But I felt it and knew it and that tiny difference of shade deeply upset me. I imagined that all eyes were fixed on this odious and despicable blazer.

This episode had no immediate repercussions, but it was around this time, when I was about thirteen, that I became truly conscious of my chromatic hypersensitivity. Was it a handicap or a privilege? Probably both. This hypersensitivity has placed me in absurd, sometimes painful situations, but, thanks to it, I always pay attention to colours, as I do to the settings in which they are displayed and the infinite fields of observation and reflection that they procure, thereby generating much of my work as a historian.

The story of navy-blue, to which I later devoted a number of studies, is but one example among others. Without the ‘blazer affair’, I might never have noticed this particular colour nuance, a shade that was for a long time difficult to obtain with the use of dyes. It was seldom to be found in European clothing prior to the eighteenth century. At this point the massive importation of indigo from the New World and the (accidental) discovery of Prussian blue gradually began to introduce a new shade that became fashionable in the second half of the century. However, it was not until much later, at the end of the nineteenth century, that, in the field of dark colours, navy-blue really began to compete with black, as became increasingly noticeable after World War I, particularly in urban life. Within just a few decades, many masculine garments which, for various reasons, were black tended to become navy-blue. Uniforms, for a start. Between the late nineteenth century and the mid twentieth, according to modalities and rhythms that varied from one country to another, various uniform-wearers, one by one, abandoned black for navy-blue: sailors, rural policemen, the police generally, fire-fighters, customs-officials, postmen, some of the military, most college and boarding-school students, cubs and scouts, top sportsmen and, a few years later, even a number of clerics. To be sure, the uniforms of all those figures did not systematically switch to navy-blue; there were many exceptions. But, between 1880 and 1960, navy-blue, instead of black, became the dominant colour for all those in Europe and the United States who, for one reason or another, wore uniforms. As early as 1920, but above all after 1950, many men abandoned their traditional black suits, jackets and trousers and switched to navy-blue garments, particularly for light-weight clothing. The blazer was the most obvious sign of this revolution that was definitively to remain one of the biggest events for twentieth-century clothing and colours.

SUBVERSIVE TROUSERS

January, 1961: a cold, even glacial winter. The heavy snow that had fallen soon after the Christmas festivities did not melt and the streets and pavements were particularly slippery. I was a third-year pupil at the Lycée Michelet in Vanves, in a mixed class, which was a rare phenomenon in such secondary schools, where girls were definitely less numerous than boys and were only accepted in the bottom four classes. In public establishments, mixed classes in the last two years of education were considered to be dangerous. As a general rule, the girls were not allowed to come to school wearing trousers. Only tracksuit bottoms were tolerated, for physical education classes. For the rest of the time skirts or dresses were compulsory. However, one exception could be made: on extremely cold days, trousers were allowed, so long as they were not blue jeans, a garment that was considered to be unsuitable or even subversive.

Despite that tolerance, on one Tuesday morning two sisters, one a pupil in my class, the other in the second-year class, were denied access to the school. They had arrived in trousers and, although these were not jeans, the door-keeper watchdogs decided that their apparel was ‘disgraceful’ (!) and sent them packing. The next day, the affair turned bitter, children’s parents became involved, petitions began to circ...