NEW YORK (AP) — “If you walk by a purple in a field somewhere and you don’t notice it, you think you’re going to piss God off,” says Shug in Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.” I told Celie.
In nature, purple has important meaning in history and culture, among clergy and royalty, as a symbol of independence, pride, and magic. Walker’s second film, based on his 1982 book, was released on Christmas Day and, following the historic popularity of “Barbie” and pink in general, purple dominated the box office. Masu.
Think of it as the multi-layered cultural equivalent of its bubbly cousin.
Power, ambition, luxury. Purple reflects all of that. It also represents creativity, independence, pride, peace, mystery, and magic.
In modern history and fiction, it often represents something desperately needed. In the early 20th century, purple clothing and signs symbolized loyalty and dignity among suffragists. In Walker’s novel, the main character, Celie, wants purple shoes, but she can’t afford them, so she settles for blue.
Oprah Winfrey, who played Sophia in the 1985 film version of The Color Purple, frequently wears purple to promote the new musical she produced. And she wore a purple taffeta dress by Christian Siriano in a recently published portrait for the National Portrait Gallery.
For Oprah, purple is an “exciting color.” For others, it’s a transformer, says Laurie Pressman, deputy director of the Pantone Color Institute, a color analysis and consulting firm, including those who created this year’s “The Color Purple.” , he said.
“There are so many possible contexts,” Pressman said. “It’s a color that makes a statement and stands out as unique in the world.”
Here are some ways to think about purple, a color that falls between blue and red.
purple, dye
The Romans conquered the Greeks in the second century B.C. and returned with vast quantities of pigments and dyes, writes Victoria Finlay in “The Glorious History of Color in Art.” The most admired was the “purpura”, which became a fashion genius, made from the secretions of certain mollusks. The liquid turned purple when exposed to sunlight.
When Julius Caesar traveled to Egypt in 48 BC and met Queen Cleopatra, he recognized her love of purple and adopted it himself. It is a love that was later taken up by the Byzantine emperors. But in front of them, Caesar decreed that only Caesar would be allowed to wear a toga completely dyed purple.
It took a huge number of molluscs to create purpura, and purpura was sometimes not the color we know today. Finley wrote that half an ounce of dye requires at least 250,000 pieces. The ancient Tyrian purple, named after the town of Tire in present-day southern Lebanon, was also rose-red, bluish-red, or velvety black, she writes.
Purple was reserved for royalty, the clergy, and the nobility at different times and in different places throughout history.
By the 14th century, the secrets of Tyrian purple had been lost, according to the University of Chicago Library’s 2007 exhibition “The Origins of Color.” But everyone welcomes the Tyrian purple! In 2001, after much trial and error, the recipe resurfaced. Long before that, synthetic dyes containing purple were available.
Purple, according to the song
Prince’s “Purple Rain”. “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix. Juice Wrld’s “Purple Devil”. Deep Purple by the Rockers. The Grammy Award-winning song “Deep Purple” is a Billboard No. 1 single released by April Stevens and her brother, Nino Her Tempo, in 1963.
Purple has been sprinkled in songs for decades, but no music artist aligns more closely with the color than Prince. He became The Purple One after he and his band The Revolution released Purple Rain in 1984, for which he won a Grammy and an Oscar for his score for its companion film. Awarded.
The song peaked at No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1984, forever associating Prince with his colors. And he leans out with a purple costume, a purple guitar, a purple piano. After his death in 2016, his estate worked with Pantone to come up with an official Prince His Purple called “Love Symbol #2.”
Prince once explained the meaning and title of this song: “When there’s blood in the sky…red and blue equal purple. Purple rain means the end of the world, being with your loved ones, and your faith/God guiding you through the purple rain.” It has something to do with that.”
Prince’s Paisley Park mansion outside Minneapolis continues to glow purple at night.
Nate Sloan, an expert on the history of popular music and jazz, says that when it comes to creating sonic worlds, “purple doesn’t have as clear a meaning as other colors, like the sadness of blue or the anger of red.” . at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music.
For music artists, he says, it’s freedom.
“That ambiguity means you can explore more emotions and concepts that aren’t clear and established,” Sloan says.
purple, prose
According to Charles Harrington Elster’s 2005 book “What in the Word?”, the term “purple prose” dates back to Horace’s “Collected Poems” around 18 BC.
The Latin phrase “purpureus pannus” used by Horatius indicated an irrelevant and overly decorative text. Literally, it’s a purple garment or garment (think fancy). Horace’s 476-line poem is a kind of manual on how to write poetry, warning against “the mediocrity of poets who accept neither men nor gods nor booksellers.”
Generally speaking, purple prose has come to mean writing full of flowery descriptive passages and oppressive structures that provide no real benefit to the reader. please think about it. Many writers in the 19th century were paid by the number of words they used or the number of pages they produced.
“Purple prose became fully derogatory in the 20th century, when the precipitous decline in the vocabulary and reading comprehension of college-educated Americans caused panic in educational institutions and the newspaper industry. ,” Elster wrote.
A blog post on the publishing site Reedsy provides an example of this hoax. “The mahogany-haired adolescent girl stared for a moment at her muscular lover. There was a crystalline glint in her eyes as she gazed into his face and gazed at her enchantedly. ”
purple, canvas
Monet, Chagall, Derain, Rothko, Matisse, Klimt. Everyone was a purple fan.
The color is said to have first appeared in artwork during the Neolithic period, writes Hannah Foskett of the Arts & Collections site. The English Pre-Raphaelites especially loved the color purple.
Monet is distinguished by the use of violets in his paintings “Lilies”, “Haystack”, “Snow” and “Rouen Cathedral” series.
Another interpretation of purple is that it is tiring to the eyes, and Foskett writes that it “often symbolizes desire or sadness in major works of art.”
Color in the visual arts was helped by American portrait painter John Goff Rand. Finlay says that in the 1840s, he invented collapsible tin tubes to hold paint, rather than the pig bladders he and his colleagues had struggled with for years. With the invention of paint tubes, dozens of new pigments suddenly appeared, including manganese violet.
“This was the first opaque, pure, affordable mauve pigment,” Finley wrote. “And it was considered a wonder.”