Alexandra Loske on the most luminous and divine of colours

In 2019, an artwork by Maurizio Cattelan (famous for his Ducttaped banana), was stolen while on display at Blenheim Palace in England. The sculpture, bearing the title America, was a life-size, fully working toilet, cast in 2016 from 103 kilograms of 18-carat gold. Its bullion value alone was more than four million dollars at the time, and this was probably the reason why it was stolen: not for its artistic, but its material value. While still registered as ‘lost’, the sculpture – with more than a nod to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, his urinal ‘readymade’ from 1917 – has almost certainly been melted down by its thieves.

Similar thefts happen regularly, and this shines a light on the special status of gold in human history: while undoubtedly of very beautiful chromatic appearance, gold is first and foremost a precious metal, one of the ‘noble’ ones, meaning it is extremely stable, resistant to corrosion and nonreactive. It is one of the great treasures of our planet, and is predominantly mined from rocks, but also appears in oil, riverbeds and water, where it is much harder to extract. Its inherent qualities and value, combined with its glowing, pure and lustrous appearance, have made it a material (and by extension a colour) that is unmatched in its symbolic use and meaning. It became the colour and metal of deities as well as money, of divinity and earthly wealth, and consequently a subject or motif of many allegories and stories, especially in Greek mythology. Think, for example, of the legend of the Golden Fleece, King Midas’ golden touch (was there perhaps a nod to Midas in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel Goldfinger?), or Zeus impregnating Danae in the guise of a golden (meteor) shower? In fairy tales, too, gold often signifies wealth as well as purity, for example in the Grimms’ Mother Holle, where the hardworking, dutiful girl is showered in gold and named Gold Mary, while her lazy sister gets covered in pitch.

My earliest memories of gold are seeing ancient masks and ritual objects made of solid gold, including the coverage in glossy magazines of The Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition, which toured the world in the 1970s. I didn’t see the exhibition then, but years later I visited Cairo and saw the tomb’s contents (dating from the 14th century BCA) in the Egyptian Museum.

There is little that compares to the impact of Tutankhamun’s famous funerary mask, but what we tend to forget is that this was only one of hundreds of gold objects in the tomb. There are many more masks, sculptures and objects made of or inlaid with gold, and the message is clear. This is the colour and material that represents the greatest power, beauty, wealth and status: the colour of deity.

Similar uses of gold in ritualistic and religious contexts can be found in many other early civilisations: there are gold masks in ancient Greek culture; conical gold hats in Bronze Age central Europe that would make Marge from The Simpsons envious, and then there is the so-called Nebra Sky Disc, an object very close to my heart, as I have a special interest in our relationship with the cosmos. This dinnerplate-sized object dates from around 1,600 BCE and was found in 1999 by amateur metal detectorists near the town of Nebra in Germany. Made of bronze and decorated with gold motifs that show a sickle moon, possibly the sun, and star clusters, it is likely the first attempt to chart the sky, predating Egyptian sky maps by around 200 years. What makes the disc even more intriguing is the fact that while the bronze came from central Europe, the gold originated in Cornwall. It tells us that gold was transported and exchanged between cultures more than two and a half thousand years ago, possibly in a ritualist context.

When I took up silversmithing in the early noughties, gold was largely out of my reach, but occasionally I would get a gold commission, usually for wedding rings, or something more elaborate for family members. It is a very different feeling working with gold compared to silver. While annealing, shaping, and soldering it, you are constantly aware of the high cost of the material, as well as its symbolic preciousness. It is beautifully malleable, which is why it lends itself to being used in art: you can form, bend and decorate it easily, but you also need to yield to its nature: the higher the carat unit (a measurement for gold’s purity), the softer it is, so while a 22-carat gold ring would look wonderful, it would also scratch very easily, which is why most rings (and indeed gold teeth or crowns) are 9 or 14 carat.

Because gold is such an important metal in human history and culture, and because it is not a colour in the Newtonian sense, it rarely features in theoretical writings about colour. We do find it discussed in some handbooks on architectural colour and decoration, and of course in the context of gilding surfaces, but not in many colour diagrams. I have come across one exception though, by the spiritualist, actress and inventor Beatrice Irwin. In her 1915 treatise The New Science of Colour she included a complicated but intriguing colour diagram in the shape of a high-pointed triangle of ‘physical’, ‘mental’ and ‘spiritual’ colours set in a golden circle representing ‘the ether’. Since gold leaf was out of the question, the diagram had to be printed using a saturated orange, which Irwin greatly regretted.

Because of its value, lustre, stability and, well, golden glow, gold was often used in religious art to frame important figures, either iconographically with golden haloes, or by giving the composition a background of gold, against which whole figures (and their stories) are silhouetted. In Medieval and Renaissance art this was mostly achieved by using gold in leaf form: extremely thinly rolled sheets of the real precious metal. And if this kind of heavenly illumination and framing was not enough, the gold leaf would often be further decorated through scratching, engraving, or pouncing. I urge you to look very closely at the Wilton Diptych next time you are in the National Gallery. Try to ignore the glorious ultramarine blue and you will notice an intricate pattern punched into the gold leaf background (on both sides).

But there were also subtler ways of using gold that make the most of its gleaming look: in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1485–1486), for example, the artist added tiny highlights of ‘shell gold’ – gold powder mixed in seashells with gum arabic –to give the egg tempera painting a glistening look. All this was of course done to elevate, illuminate and glorify the subjects of the paintings by means of gold, and the symbolic potency was not lost on 20th-century designers, image-makers and artists. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Marilyn Monroe wore one of the most famous dresses in film history, a figurehugging gold lamé gown, designed by William Travilla. It was deemed so sensuous and sexy that it was nearly censored. Instead it transformed Monroe into a golden screen goddess.

What it comes down to in art and design is whether an artist uses real gold to represent gold, or whether they create an illusion of gold. In sculpture and decoration, this can be achieved by gilding, which is essentially a way of upcycling a material, making it appear like gold by covering it in a thin layer of gold leaf. At my place of work, the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, many objects and surfaces (wood, bronze, copper, plasterwork) are gilt, such as the doors, architraves, pelmets and frames in the Saloon (see ROSA #9 regarding silvering), almost all the silverware in the building, and the entire ceiling of the Music Room. Our Pavilion gold comes in many colours: there are examples of rose gold, yellow gold and green gold, often with transparent glazes added. George IV did like his bling, and particularly loved a gilt dragon.

In painting, I like all the variations: the use of real gold, powdered gold, artificial metallic pigments, as well as the masterful illusion of gold painted with non-metallic pigments. Gustav Klimt enveloped the magnificent looking Adele BlochBauer (1903-07) and his smooching couple in The Kiss (190708) in a glittering, patterned sea of gold, using real gold leaf, just like the Old Masters in great religious paintings. But Klimt lights up earthly beauty and secular desire with the help of the divine colour. In 1875, James McNeill Whistler shocked the art establishment with a near-abstract painting that depicts fireworks at night at Cremorne Gardens in London: Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket, is composed with a neat and harmonising palette of green, blue and yellow pigments, with which he achieves the impression of a luminous and sparkling fireworks display. The leading Victorian art critic John Ruskin was offended by the splattered look of the painting and accused Whistler of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’, which in turn led to one of the most famous and entertaining lawsuits in British art history.

I immediately thought of Whistler’s Nocturne when I saw Maggi Hambling’s Nightingale Night series of paintings on display at Pallant House, Chichester. She uses a similar combination of dark and sombre tones and gold-colour that looks as if it has been thrown or poured onto the canvas, being allowed to drip, billow, and disperse, like light taking over darkness. I bet Ruskin would have disapproved. Naturally, I would like to know whether Hambling used gold, or created an illusion of gold. When ROSA editor Alex Leith asked her how she mixed her gold, half-expecting her to provide a complex recipe, her answer was simply “I buy it in a tube”. And that is the beauty of colour today: even if you are not a gifted alchemist or colour maker, you can find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or in good colour shop, and get creative.

Alexandra Loske is the Curator of the Royal Pavilion. Her latest book The Artist’s Palette was published in October by Thames & Hudson