Remarks on Color: Boorish Beige
April's Hue

by Eve Wood | Mar 30, 2021

Charles Garabedian, "Jean Harlow," 1964

It’s true. Boorish Beige is quite ubiquitous with not much to say and one hell of a tan. He holds a monopoly on wall space in all the commercial buildings downtown and in many of the drab and dreary houses in the suburbs.

It doesn’t seem to matter which country you are visiting, as every room in every hotel is decked out in Boorish Beige décor from the vintage French damasks of Pierre Rousseau to more provincial motifs – everywhere you look an onslaught of BEIGE like weak coffee or dirty hair. Beige insinuates himself into people’s lives like a sour, but necessary odor; At some point, Boorish Beige constitutes the backdrop of every human life — wall to wall in kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms and attics across the globe. He famously once proclaimed that only HE could be everything to everyone, a color to fall into, the blasé background from which beautiful dreams are born, forever proposing the endless and empty narrative of desire, bloodless and long out of touch.

Like Zelig, Boorish Beige was there when Alexander the Great carved his silhouette with a rusty blade into the arm of his lover Hephaestion in a dimly lit tent somewhere in the center of Mesopotamia; Beige was the fabric in the coffin of Abraham Lincoln’s favorite son, Willy, the day he was laid to rest; Beige was present in the dense and richly foliated tapestries at Versailles in the early morning of October 6, 1789 when the poor stormed the palace in search of justice and a heel of stale bread. Boorish Beige were the walls of Hitler’s bunker and the sheets on Marilyn Monroe’s bed at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive that day in 1962 when poor Eunice Murray found her cold.

Boorish Beige is by all accounts a self-proclaimed wallflower, punctual and pragmatic, believing it’s better to blend in than to appear too overt, yet do not be deceived! Though you would not know it to look at him, Beige has a secret and deeply satisfying penchant for TROUBLE.