Industrial Color: Chromatic Technologies in Britain, 1856-1969 [electronic resource].

9780438902619

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2018.

1 online resource (428 p.)

Access is available to the Yale community.

This dissertation proposes a new understanding of how color shaped modern visual culture in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain. During this period, new technologies transformed the manufacture of color from an artisanal practice into an industrial process. Colors that were once organically derived, hand-made, and hand-applied, became mass-produced, machine-made and chemically synthesized. These new ways of making color transformed the meaning of color in modern Britain, establishing color as crucial site where the experience of modernity was not simply registered and reflected, but negotiated and contested. Challenging conventional understandings of color as a subjective, unruly phenomenon, which is difficult to regulate or control, this dissertation examines how modern industries, institutions. and technologies were predicated on the standardization of color. Exploring how standardized chromatic experiences were generated through the mass production of paints, inks, and dyes, as well as mass media including color printing, film and television, this dissertation shows that it was not the appearance of industrial colors, but how they were made, that imbued them with meaning. It demonstrates that industrial color helped shape the social and political landscape of modern Britain, from the reorganization of labor demanded by systems of mass production in the late nineteenth century, and the shifting relationship between Britain and its empire from the early twentieth century, to the critical reformulation of British racial identity that gained urgency in the postwar period. Beginning with the invention of synthetic coal-tar dyes in 1856 and ending with the BBC's full conversion to color broadcasting in 1969, the dissertation unfolds over four chapters in chronological order, each examining the mass production of color in a different media: painting, printing, film, and television. The first chapter examines the manufacture of artists' colors, or oil paint, in the second half of the nineteenth century. During the late Victorian era, when paint-making was transformed from a skilled artisanal craft into a mechanized industry, it was not the hue or saturation of colors that changed, but their texture and stability. This chapter considers how the painters George Frederic Watts and William Holman Hunt mobilized the texture of their paints to articulate an anticapitalist, moral aesthetic at a time when mass production made oil colors homogenously buttery and smooth, as well as fugitive and unstable. The second chapter explores chromolithography—the first technology for producing affordable color prints on an industrial scale. Initially focusing on the challenges of mass-producing ink to meet the demands of industrial color printing, the chapter goes on to explore how the separation of colors in late Victorian chromolithographs operated as a visual analogy for the separation of labor required to produce them. Grain is a central concern of this chapter, which examines how industrially made chromolithographs, conventionally considered gaudier than artisanally made color prints, were instead distinguished by the mechanized surface pattern of colors that marked them as the product of deskilled industrial labor. The third chapter considers British Technicolor cinema, which from the 1930s became the dominant mode for mass-producing color films in the United Kingdom. Focusing on the use of the dye-imbibition system at the British Technicolor laboratory, which manufactured color films for distribution all over the world. this chapter contends that because the films were produced by industrial dyeing mechanisms, they revisit the history of Britain's textile industry as a metaphor for the corporation's own imperial ambitions. I consider how British Technicolor therefore became a way to negotiate the dissolution and decline of the British Empire during the twentieth century. The fourth chapter reflects upon the moment when the BBC converted to color broadcasting between 1967 and 1969. It interrogates how the corporation tackled the issue that its first color broadcasts were primarily viewed on black-and-white televisions, which is presented here as both a technological and an ideological problem. Taking The Black and White Minstrel Show as a case study, this chapter places the BBC's conversion to color in dialogue with the so-called color problem of late 1960s Britain, when immigration from the country's former colonies made race a crucial concern for notions of British identity.

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English

August 21, 2019

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2018.

Yale University.