Let it be red

Red is the first colour of the rainbow, a prime colour, which means that it cannot be created from other colours. If you mix red with yellow you get orange, with blue you get violet, which are secondary colours. When using graphics programs, you get the perfect red colour under the hexadecimal number #FF0000 or by giving the RGB value 255, 0, 0. But what kind of connotations do people associate to this colour?

Skoflek István diaképei (kardinális pinty) - Kuny Domokos Múzeum, CC BY It is almost impossible to list what a certain colour that is formed at a given wavelength of light can represent. Aristotle matched red with fire from the four elements of the world. Hippocrates paired it with the sanguine human type. Red is a warm colour; one associates it with intensity, energy, action, attention, speed, dynamics and riot, thus it is often the colour of revolution. Red also means warning; you can find it in nature on some poisonous plants and animals – for example the fly-agaric is a frequent illustration in children’s books, but some poison dart frogs also use this colour in order to deter its enemies. Humans also use red if they want to call attention to danger or prohibition, for example on traffic lights: ‘red means stop’.

In blazonry, red means valiancy. The red colour in our national flag represents the power. Red is also the colour of love, affection, passion, the heart, eroticism, desire and sexuality – that is the reason why an area with brothels is often called a ‘red-light’ district. If you see the words ‘red’ and ‘flower’ written side by side, most people think of a red rose immediately. Curiously, bees cannot see the red colour, thus the pollination of red flowers does not depend on them.

Royal Szálló, Budapest, 1970-es évek eleje - Magyar Kereskedelmi és Vendéglátóipari Múzeum, CC BY-NC-ND The red colour appears in many adverts, on leaflets, posters and labels as well. It is not just a coincidence, because red is stimulating, has an encouraging, urging effect, it attracts attention and makes you act. That is why it is used in trade at discounts and sales, or in the food industry to increase consumers’ appetite. Just think of all the products in your fridge with red logos on them.

In visual art, the symbology of colours has been used from the beginning, but film art can use it only since the invention of the coloured film. You can find a lot of clips on the internet, which deal with the colour schemes that certain directors use on purpose during film-making. Jean-Pierre Jeunet used green-gold-red colours predominantly in Amélie. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was black and white basically, except for two scenes, where only the red colour appears. In the composition you can watch Stanley Kubrick’s reds if you are old enough, because Kubrick paints horror, tension and violence red.

Translated by Zita Aknai

Recommendation

Blue hour

One of the best occasions for taking city photos is when the sun is disappearing on the horizon or when it hasn’t appeared yet. The sky is blazing in the most beautiful shades of blue, the orange lights of the city have just been lit or they are still on. Plenty of this kind of photos can be found on the internet. Almost every second findings of the search word ‘Budapest’ were made during the ‘blue hour’. The blue colour of the sky is caused by the atmospheric light dissemination; without the atmosphere the sky would be black.

“The yellow is the finest.

…Reams and reams of letters could I write in yellow ink to her, the little schoolgirl of my dreams. I'd scrawl something that looks like Japanese, then try a bird, most intricately scrolled.” – Dezső Kosztolányi wrote this in the poem I dream of coloured inks. If you look up to the sky, you see the sun yellow, but its colour is white actually, which means it contains all the colours. Colour depends on the wavelength of light: humans perceive the light yellow between 565 and 590 nanometres wavelength.

Ferenc Martyn, master of abstract surrealism

At the dawn of the 20th century, three young artists spread their wings from the vicinity of József Rippl-Rónai: among them Sándor Galimberti, the pioneer of Hungarian cubism; Aurél Bernáth, who was a cubo-expressionist and later post-impressionist painter in his early period; and Ferenc Martyn (1899-1986), one of the most important representatives of abstract surrealism in Hungary. In our latest article, we take a look at his art.

Values or frills?

Complaints often emerge against artistic works, like “it is nice and good, but could not its cost be spent on something else, something more useful?”. The question arose also in the second half of the 19th century, related to memorial medallions that represent rather high artistic values and rarity, among the Hungarian Doctors and Nature Scientists’ Society. This time, our virtual exhibition will introduce the memorial medals of roaming assemblies and a reward medal – issued by the Society – that you can find in the collection of the Piarist Museum.

Photography bloopers and manipulations

We have compiled a bizarre photo-historical assortment for this week, with old portrait-, tableau- and genre photos that went wrong somehow, either technically or due to a careless motion or blink. As they had the chance for only one click that time, the failure of the process resulted that these photos show unlaboured moments to the curious eyes of the future.

Portraits drawn on stone – Miklós Barabás’ lithographs in the graphic collection of the Piarist Museum

Before the conquest of photography, during the 1840s and 1850s, lithographs became the most wide-spread technique of portrait making, due to its more refined, freer and more realistic rendering than engravings and owing to its affordability. One of the most significant lithographers of Hungary was Miklós Barabás (1810-1898), whose 31 lithograph portraits are guarded in the Graphic Collection of the Piarist Museum.

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