Description

By (author) Fox, James

”This book is a triumph …
an intellectual feast as well as a
visual one – a true biography of colour
which will delight readers”
Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

The subject of this book is humankind”s extraordinary relationship with colour. It is composed of a series of voyages, ranging across the world and throughout history, which reveal the meanings that have been attached to the colours we see around us and the ways these have shaped our culture and imagination. It takes seven primary colours – black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple and green – and uncovers behind each a root idea, based on visual resemblances or properties so rudimentary as to be common to all societies.

The book traces these meanings to show how they changed and multiplied, the role that they have played in our culture and history, and how understanding them allows us to see many of the milestones in the history of art – from Bronze Age gold-work to Turner, Titian to Yves Klein – in a new way. It proceeds by stories, which cumulatively tell another, larger one: a history of the world from the black nothing which preceded existence to the birth of our red-blooded species; the gilded gods who animated the world in antiquity to the blue horizons which framed the Age of Discovery; the pristine aspirations of Enlightenment, the technicolour innovation which fuelled the Industrial Revolution and the colour which most embodies the environmental crisis which now faces us.

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A book to brighten the dullest days … Optics, chemistry, philosophy, psychology, literature, neuroscience, fashion, religion, magic and myth are shaken up in this scintillating rainbow mix of a study

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A brilliantly fluent and readable history of colour, galloping across a wide cultural and scientific landscape

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Fairly shimmers with Fox”s eye for arresting facts and anecdotes … enlightening, enjoyable and deeply researched

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Intelligent, vividly written … I”m going to buy three copies

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Fox takes colours seriously, using seven to tell the history of the world, flitting with enthusiasm and lightly worn learning from Bronze Age gold-workers to Turner, Titian to Yves Klein

Biographical note
James Fox is Director of Studies in History of Art at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a BAFTA-nominated broadcaster. His many acclaimed BBC television documentaries include programmes about British art, Japanese culture and an enduringly popular history of colour in art.