Wittgenstein Remarks On Color Quotes

Color is not a trivial subject but one that has compelled, for hundreds of years, a passionate curiosity in the greatest artists, philosophers, and natural scientists. The young Spinoza wrote his first treatise on the rainbow; the young Newton’s most joyous discovery was the composition of white light; Goethe’s great color work, like Newton’s, started with a prism; Schopenhauer, Young, Helmholtz, and Maxwell, in the last century, were all tantalized by the problem of color; and Wittgenstein’s last work was his Remarks on Colour. And yet most of us, most of the time, overlook its great mystery.

Cézanne, too, had had enough of psychology. He attended, instead, to color. "If I paint all the little blues and all the little browns, I capture and convey his glance," he said of painting a man's face. This may be but a colorized restatement of Wittgenstein's remark, "if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lots. But the unutterable will be-- unutterably-- contained in what has been uttered!" Perhaps this is why I take the blues of Cézanne so seriously.