A Cultural History of Color in Antiquity

Author: David Wharton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135019347X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
A Cultural History of Color in Antiquity covers the period 3000 BCE to 500 CE. Although the smooth, white marbles of Classical sculpture and architecture lull us into thinking that the color world of the ancient Greeks and Romans was restrained and monochromatic, nothing could be further from the truth. Classical archaeologists are rapidly uncovering and restoring the vivid, polychrome nature of the ancient built environment. At the same time, new understandings of ancient color cognition and language have unlocked insights into the ways – often unfamiliar and strange to us – that ancient peoples thought and spoke about color. Color shapes an individual's experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts. David Wharton is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA. Volume 1 in the Cultural History of Color set. General Editors: Carole P. Biggam and Kirsten Wolf

A Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age

Author: Anders Steinvall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350193615
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
A Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age covers the period 1920 to the present, a time of extraordinary developments in colour science, philosophy, art, design and technologies. The expansion of products produced with synthetic dyes was accelerated by mass consumerism as artists, designers, architects, writers, theater and filmmakers made us a 'color conscious' society. This influenced what we wore, how we chose to furnish and decorate our homes, and how we responded to the vibrancy and chromatic eclecticism of contemporary visual cultures.The volume brings together research on how philosophers, scientists, linguists and artists debated color's polyvalence, its meaning to different cultures, and how it could be measured, manufactured, manipulated and enjoyed. Color shapes an individual's experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts. Anders Steinvall is Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at Umeå University, Sweden. Sarah Street is Professor of Film at the University of Bristol, UK. Volume 6 in the Cultural History of Color set. General Editors: Carole P. Biggam and Kirsten Wolf

Colour and Culture

Author: John Gage
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780500600283
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description

Cultures of Colour

Author: Chris Horrocks
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 085745465X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
Colour permeates contemporary visual and material culture and affects our senses beyond the superficial encounter by infiltrating our perceptions and memories and becoming deeply rooted in thought processes that categorise and divide along culturally constructed lines. Colour exists as a cultural as well as psycho-physical phenomenon and acquires a multitude of meanings within differing historical and cultural contexts. The contributors examine how colour becomes imbued with specific symbolic and material meanings that tint our constructions of race, gender, ideal bodies, the relationship of the self to others and of the self to technology and the built environment. By highlighting the relationship of colour across media and material culture, this volume reveals the complex interplay of cultural connotations, discursive practices and socio-psychological dynamics of colour in an international context.

A Cultural History of Color in the Medieval Age

Author: Carole P. Biggam
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350193488
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
A Cultural History of Color in the Medieval Age covers the period 500 to 1400. The medieval age saw an extraordinary burst of color - from illuminated manuscripts and polychrome sculpture to architecture and interiors, and from enamelled and jewelled metalwork to colored glass and the exquisite decoration of artefacts. Color was used to denote affiliation in heraldry and social status in medieval clothes. Color names were created in various languages and their resonance explored in poems, romances, epics, and plays. And, whilst medieval philosophers began to explain the rainbow, theologians and artists developed a color symbolism for both virtues and vices. Color shapes an individual's experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts. Carole P. Biggam is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Glasgow, UK. Kirsten Wolf is Professor of Old Norse and Scandinavian Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Volume 2 in the Cultural History of Color set. General Editors: Carole P. Biggam and Kirsten Wolf The Cultural Histories Series A Cultural History of Color is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available as hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a tangible reference for their shelves or as part of a fully-searchable digital library. The digital product is available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access via www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com . Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available in print or digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com .

The World According to Colour

Author: James Fox
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141976667
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
'Extraordinary. An intellectual feast as well as a visual one' Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes 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 colour 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.'

Color and Culture

Author: John Gage
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520222253
Category : Aesthetics
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
An encyclopaedic work on color in Western art and culture from the Middle Ages to Post-Modernism.

The Culture of Yellow

Author: Sabine Doran
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441196900
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
This is the first book to explore the cultural significance of the color yellow, showing how its psychological and aesthetic value marked and shaped many of the intellectual, political, and artistic currents of late modernity. It contends that yellow functions during this period primarily as a color of stigma and scandal. Yellow stigmatization has had a long history: it goes back to the Middle Ages when Jews and prostitutes were forced to wear yellow signs to emphasize their marginal status. Although scholars have commented on these associations in particular contexts, Sabine Doran offers the first overarching account of how yellow connects disparate cultural phenomena, such as turn-of-the-century decadence (the "yellow nineties"), the rise of mass media ("yellow journalism"), mass immigration from Asia ("the yellow peril"), and mass stigmatization (the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany). The Culture of Yellow combines cultural history with innovative readings of literary texts and visual artworks, providing a multilayered account of the unique role played by the color yellow in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European culture.

A Cultural History of Color in the Renaissance

Author: Sven Dupré
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350193518
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
A Cultural History of Color in the Renaissance covers the period 1400 to 1650, a time of change, conflict, and transformation. Innovations in color production transformed the material world of the Renaissance, especially in ceramics, cloth, and paint. Collectors across Europe prized colorful objects such as feathers and gemstones as material illustrations of foreign lands. The advances in technology and the increasing global circulation of colors led to new color terms enriching language. Color shapes an individual's experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts. Amy Buono is Assistant Professor at the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University , USA. Sven Dupré is Professor of History of Art, Science and Technology at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Volume 3 in the Cultural History of Color set. General Editors: Carole P. Biggam and Kirsten Wolf

The World According to Color

Author: James Fox
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 125027852X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
A kaleidoscopic exploration that traverses history, literature, art, and science to reveal humans' unique and vibrant relationship with color. We have an extraordinary connection to color—we give it meanings, associations, and properties that last millennia and span cultures, continents, and languages. In The World According to Color, James Fox takes seven elemental colors—black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple, and green—and uncovers behind each a root idea, based on visual resemblances and common symbolism throughout history. Through a series of stories and vignettes, the book then traces these meanings to show how they morphed and multiplied and, ultimately, how they reveal a great deal about the societies that produced them: reflecting and shaping their hopes, fears, prejudices, and preoccupations. Fox also examines the science of how our eyes and brains interpret light and color, and shows how this is inherently linked with the meanings we give to hue. And using his background as an art historian, he explores many of the milestones in the history of art—from Bronze Age gold-work to Turner, Titian to Yves Klein—in a fresh way. Fox also weaves in literature, philosophy, cinema, archaeology, and art—moving from Monet to Marco Polo, early Japanese ink artists to Shakespeare and Goethe to James Bond. By creating a new history of color, Fox reveals a new story about humans and our place in the universe: second only to language, color is the greatest carrier of cultural meaning in our world.