Grey

Grey is the neutral between black and white, containing no hue, and its symbolism is correspondingly one of the in-between, the indeterminate and the muted. It is the colour of ash, of cloud, of stone and of twilight, and it carries senses of neutrality, sobriety, humility and, less kindly, of dullness, uncertainty and the nondescript, the grey area where things are neither clearly one thing nor the other.

In dress grey has signified modesty and renunciation, worn by some monastic and penitential orders and by Quakers and Puritans as a plain, unshowy colour rejecting vanity. It is also the colour of age, grey hair, and so of experience and the passage of time. Grey has little liturgical role, being read within the broader category of ash and penitence. In the modern era grey acquired strong associations with the industrial and the bureaucratic, the grey of concrete and of the anonymous suit. As a symbol it tends toward balance and reserve, occupying deliberately the middle ground its very neutrality defines.

Grey has almost no pigment history, because for most purposes nobody made it. It was mixed, or it was what a material happened to be.

In painting, grey is black and white, or a neutral obtained by mixing complementaries, and the interesting grey pigments are few. The technique that matters is grisaille, painting entirely in greys to imitate carved stone, used on the outer wings of altarpieces so that a closed altarpiece appeared to be sculpture and an opened one broke into colour. That is a use of grey as the absence of an event rather than as a colour in its own right.

In cloth, grey was undyed wool. Sheep are not white; fleece runs from cream through grey to brown to black, and cloth made without dyeing at all is some version of grey. That made it the cheapest cloth there was, and European sumptuary regulation and monastic rule both used undyed cloth to mark the renunciation of display. The greyfriars took their name from it. So, from the other direction, did the greycoats of the poor.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave grey a second meaning, as the colour of industry, of the city, of the uniform and of the office, and then a third as the colour of neutrality, of the middle position and of the undecided. None of these has any depth of tradition behind it.

Grey is the clearest example in the palette of a colour whose meanings come from economics and from materials rather than from any symbolic scheme.