Malcolm X - James Fox TV - Andrew Lloyd Webber TV - G K Chesterton - Keith Reid -
Everywhere he’s gone he’s created havoc. Everywhere he’s gone he’s created destruction. So I charge him. I charge him with being the greatest kidnapper on this Earth. I charge him with being the greatest murderer on this Earth. I charge him with being the greatest robber and enslaver on this Earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest swine-eater on this earth, the greatest drunkard on this Earth. He can’t deny the charges. You can’t deny the charges. We are living proof of those charges. Malcolm X, 1992 starring Denzel Washington & Angela Bassett & Albert Hall & Al Freeman & Delroy Lindo & Spike Lee & Theresa Randle & Kate Vernon & Ernest Thomas & Christopher Plummer & Tommy Hollis et al, director Spike Lee
In the history of art white isn’t quite as pure as we think. Dr James Fox, A History of Art in Three Colours: White III, BBC 2012
White came to symbolise an enlightened world. ibid.
The Elgin Marbles were a set of ancient Greek sculptures that had once adorned the Parthenon in Athens, and they were widely seen as the bedrock of Western art. ibid.
Winckelmann had stumbled on a vast storeroom filled with ancient white statues and they came in all shapes and sizes. ibid.
Winckelmann had pointed the way to a new white utopia based on antiquity. ibid.
Josiah Wedgwood was a giant of the enlightenment ... Wedgwood was also a disciple of Winckelmann ... Wedgwood’s true genius was pottery. ibid.
Whistler ... set to work on ... paintings all of women in white. ibid.
In Whistler’s hands white had become the cold and exclusive colour of the artistic elite. ibid.
Duchamp’s famous Urinal which he called somewhat euphemistically Fountain. ibid.
That canvas is for ever tainted with our own flaws and failings. White is the immaculate reflection of an impure world. ibid.
Primed in white so that the colours stand right out at you. Andrew Lloyd Webber, Perspectives, ITV 2011
White is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. G K Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Her face, at first ... just ghostly
Turned a whiter shade of pale. Keith Reid, A Whiter Shade of Pale, song 1967