There is so much more to colour than meets the eye. It is a subject that has occupied the minds of artists since the earliest cave painters chose to use red ochre instead of black charcoal. The ordering and theories of colours came later, and a new tome The Book of Colour Concepts brings together four centuries’ worth of colour charts, diagrams, blots and wheels. Below, its editor, the colour historian and curator Alexandra Loske, has picked five of the best books on colour.
Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (1995) by John Gage
“The late John Gage began his research into colour in the late 1960s with a close look at J.M.W. Turner’s use of and engagement with colour and colour theory. His groundbreaking and erudite work on colour in Western art and culture is authoritative, exhaustive and unflinchingly academic, yet an exciting read. Gage gave us an overview of what makes colour a fundamental aspect of human creativity and rang in a new era of literature about colour.”
Chromophobia (2000) by David Batchelor
“The artist David Batchelor’s slim volume Chromophobia, presented in shocking pink covers, is a focused discussion of fear and suspicion of colour in the Western imagination, something we may have forgotten about in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, Pop art and colour TV. Batchelor unpicks our difficult historical relationship with colour, and why it has been considered dangerous, vulgar, superficial, feminine, foreign or pathological.”
The History of Colour: A Universe of Chromatic Phenomena (2023) by Neil Parkinson
“Neil Parkinson has been the guardian of the UK’s greatest collection of books about colour: the Colour Reference Library at the Royal College of Art, London. Some of the most important and curious books from this collection are presented here and put into historical and cultural context. It offers fascinating glimpses into human thinking about colour from antiquity to the present, written with great clarity, wit and passion.”
The Rainbow’s Gravity: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity (2023) by Kirsty Sinclair Dootson
“The ‘rainbow’s gravity’ alludes to the materiality and tangibility of colour, even when experienced as fleeting light. Based on years of academic research, this book is about the explosion of colour in print culture, advertising, cinema, TV and photography from the late 19th century to the 1960s, made possible through new technologies. Dootson explains the chemical, political and ethical messiness of these technologies, and how our brave new chromatic world was often linked to capitalism, imperialism and overt racism.”
The Black Book of Colours (2010) by Menena Cottin and Rosana Faria
“Every page in this book is a matt black, with raised line drawings in a glossy black. Presented as a children’s book that deals with visual impairment, it is much more than that. The short lines of white text that describe a range of colours, colour phenomena and colour associations through the narrator are also included in Braille, while line drawings illustrate his thoughts. This extraordinary book brings together sight, touch, language and thought in a poetical way: you can feel and read your way through the darkness, light and colour.”
• Alexandra Loske (ed) and Sarah Lowengard, The Book of Colour Concepts, Taschen, 846pp, £150 (hb)