The “Color Fever” Chroma Survey 1973

Abstract

Fifty years have passed since the author, observing a series of developments related to the evolution of color culture in the early 1970s, realized that major historical events often coincided with epochal changes capable of giving rise to new global color languages. In those years the selection of a color was based not so much on the subjective choice of hues, as on the objective vivacity of the color’s saturation (chroma). Each color was thus selected at its maximum intensity, further accentuated by the monochromatic scheme inherited from the historical trend of the 1960s. That decade had been characterized by increasingly saturated primary colors, which precisely in 1973 led to a chromatic outburst whose maximum peak was reached in a sort of “color fever”. As we know, a fever is not itself an illness, but a symptom that reveals the presence of a pathology. In this case the peak of saturation, already detected in the field in 1973 and then measured and depicted in 1979 with the tracing of a new diagram: the “Color Fever” Chroma Survey (Figure 1). The peak registered the symptom of a crisis in the by-then obsolete quantitative dynamics that still regulated the choice of colors in use according to a rigid linear progression, lacking in other possible evolutions. These dynamics were no longer sustainable on a qualistic plane, and above all they proved to be unsuitable to grasp the signs of the appearance of a new “sentiment of color.”