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The World According to Colour
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  • Published: 26 August 2021
  • ISBN: 9780141976662
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

The World According to Colour

Formats & editions
Paperback
18 July 2023
EBook
26 Aug 2021
Audiobook
6 Apr 2023
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A beguiling, human history of colour by one of art history's most exciting voices

The world comes to us in colour. But colour lives as much in our imaginations as it does in our surroundings, as this scintillating book reveals. Each chapter immerses the reader in a single colour, drawing together stories from the histories of art and humanity to illuminate the meanings it has been given over the eras and around the globe. Showing how artists, scientists, writers, philosophers, explorers and inventors have both shaped and been shaped by these wonderfully myriad meanings, James Fox reveals how, through colour, we can better understand their cultures, as well as our own. Each chapter offers a fresh perspective on a different epoch, and together they form a vivid, exhilarating history of the world. 'We have projected our hopes, anxieties and obsessions onto colour for thousands of years,' Fox writes. 'The history of colour, therefore, is also a history of humanity.'
  • Published: 26 August 2021
  • ISBN: 9780141976662
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
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Praise for The World According to Colour

Flits with enthusiasm and lightly worn learning from Bronze Age gold-workers to Turner, Titian to Yves Klein

Simon Ings, Daily Telegraph (Books of the Year)

Colour becomes a philosophical feast - astrophysics, the origins of civilisation, a palette of moral associations

Ed Smith, New Statesman (Books of the Year)

A manual to navigate and enjoy the extraordinary design of the world around us

Anna Galbraith, Mail on Sunday

A book that makes you want to paint

Joad Raymond, BBC History Magazine

Leads down some wonderful rabbit holes

Chris Allnutt, Financial Times