Chromophobia names a long-standing cultural fear of color

Batchelor coins this term to describe a recurring pattern he finds throughout Western art criticism and philosophy: color repeatedly treated as suspect, excessive, or dangerous compared to the supposedly more serious, intellectual qualities of drawing, structure, and line. This isn't simply a matter of individual taste but a broadly shared cultural reflex, visible in art schools, museum hangings, and centuries of critical writing that praise restraint and dismiss vivid color as gaudy or unserious.

He frames chromophobia as operating through two main strategies: making color the property of some 'other' — a foreign culture, a lower class, a feminine sensibility — and thereby external to legitimate high culture, or reducing color to a superficial surface effect layered onto a deeper, more essential form. Both strategies allow color to be acknowledged while still being kept subordinate.

Takeaway: what looks like a purely aesthetic preference for restraint over vividness often carries buried assumptions about whose culture, gender, or sensibility counts as serious.