Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction is the first comprehensive study to trace colour's role in Western art and thought from ancient Greek philosophy through to late twentieth-century abstraction, asking what colour actually is — stimulus, symbol, or material substance.
About This Book
Art historian John Gage constructs a sweeping intellectual history of colour in Western culture, moving from the earliest Greek theories through Roman systematisation, Renaissance alchemy, Newton's spectrum, Goethe's influential colour theory, and the radical nineteenth-century experiments of artists like Seurat. Along the way, Gage examines colour's religious and heraldic symbolism, the persistent dream of uniting colour with music, and the emergence of colour as an autonomous abstract language. This is not a survey of pigments or palettes but a sustained inquiry into how colour has been theorised, contested, and deployed across centuries — essential reading for artists, designers, and historians of visual culture who want to understand what colour means, not merely how it looks.
Key Features
- 496 pages of scholarly analysis supported by art-historical case studies spanning antiquity to abstraction
- Author: John Gage
- Published by Thames & Hudson, ISBN 9780500027936
What You'll Discover
- How Greek philosophers first articulated colour theory, and how Romans and Renaissance thinkers attempted to systematise and assign symbolic power to colour
- The role of alchemists as collaborators with Renaissance artists in understanding and manipulating colour as a material substance
- Newton's spectral analysis and how Goethe's counter-theory shaped the practices of nineteenth-century painters, including Seurat's chromatic experiments
- The extraordinary attempts to fuse colour and music into a unified perceptual language, and colour's eventual emergence as a fully abstract expressive medium
About the Author
John Gage is an art historian whose work centres on the theory and history of colour in Western art. Colour and Culture is recognised as his landmark study, described as the first comprehensive undertaking to address the perennial questions surrounding colour's role in art and thought across more than two millennia.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 496
- Dimensions: 21.4 x 26.9 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780500027936
- Publisher: Thames & Hudson
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Artists, architects, interior designers, and design historians seeking a rigorous intellectual grounding in colour theory, symbolism, and the cultural history of colour in Western visual practice.