Grandorge: Fade to grey

This photograph was taken on 20 May 2023. It depicts the surface of a small sheet of 12mm-thick medium density fibreboard (200mm wide x 150mm high) evenly sprayed with a matt mid-grey paint (RAL number 7030).

Grey is a colour that is sometimes defined as a non-colour. It is darker than white and lighter than black. It has many gradations that are arranged, according to the amount of light they reflect, in an achromatic grey scale, that was first conceived of by the Baltic German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald just before the First World War.

Ostwald’s scale had only eight gradations, yet the receptors in the human eye are able to differentiate between 500 different grey tones. The graphic systems of computers, and most other small computational devices used by humans at this moment in time, have 24-bit colour depth that enables the display of 256 grey tones.

Grey is neutral, pure background. It is not sensuous. As noted by Wassily Kandinsky, it is ‘void of resonance’. It is indifferent. It will not compete for your attention. It is modest.

In 1915, just before Ostwald conceived of the grey scale, Kazimir Malevich exhibited the painting Black Square at the 0.10 exhibition in Saint Petersburg. Up until this point, the use of colour had been fundamental to the production of art. Malevich’s painting erased not only any reference to colour, but also to all prevailing linguistic and aesthetic conditions.

‘More than any other colour, it is perfect for the illustration of nothing’

His insistence on a monochromatic palette would be echoed (half a century later) in the work of Jasper Johns, who rendered the American flag in grey paint and Joseph Beuys who would wrap many things in grey felt. But the artist who has employed the colour grey with most frequency and the greatest intentionality is, undoubtedly, Gerhard Richter.

About a third of Richter’s oeuvre consists of paintings that can be described as monochrome or without colour. In a letter written to Edy de Wilde in 1975, he remarked: ‘Grey. It really has no message, it doesn’t stimulate feelings or associations and is actually neither visible nor invisible. Being so inconspicuous makes it so suitable for transmitting, for illustrating – in an almost illusionist way, similar to that of a photograph. And, more than any other colour, it is perfect for the illustration of “nothing”.’

Grey is the colour of fog, of mist, of clouds (lighter or darker according to their depth) and of dust, all favourite subjects of photography. Grey is the colour of aluminium, zinc and lead, of cement and concrete, of many types of stone and of timber as it ages. It is also the colour of tarmac.

At the end of the chapter, ‘Grey Matter’ in his final book Chroma, Derek Jarman wrote:

‘Grey is the sad world
Into which the colours fall
Like inspiration
Sparkle and are overwhelmed
Grey is the tomb, a fortress
From which none return.’

David Grandorge is a photographer and senior lecturer in architecture at London Met. His fee for this column has been donated to support the publication of new and diverse voices in the AJ