Customer Reviews

Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism

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John Gage, the most thorough and clear-thinking historian of color theory, has produced another superb book, rich in references and sound historical bases from which we may go forward ourselves. There are a number of things any reader will delight in finally grasping. With me, it was that interesting distinction between pluralist and unified color modes (page 224) that I finally understand; and there are many other sound explanations that will delight the serious student of color. It is all the more baffling that Gage never reaches a discussion of such things as Land's color theory in relation to Polaroid, and even more important, the workings of color in the computer and its printer. If there ever was a codification millions of colors in relation to primaries it is in the design of these systems used by all of us. Yet Color and Meaning reads as if the computer has not yet been invented. I yearned to get to those chapters, but they were not there. And I regret it.

Is color just a physiological reaction, a sensation resulting from different wave lengths of light on receptors in our eyes? Does color have an effect on our feelings? The phenomenon of color is examined in extraordinary new ways in John Gage's latest book. His pioneering study is informed by the conviction that color is a contingent, historical occurrence whose meaning, like language, lies in the particular contexts in which it is experienced and interpreted.

Gage covers topics as diverse as the optical mixing techniques implicit in mosaic; medieval color-symbolism; the equipment of the manuscript illuminator's workshop, the color languages and color practices of Latin America at the time of the Spanish Conquest; the earliest history of the prism; and the color ideas of Goethe and Runge, Blake and Turner, Seurat and Matisse.

From the perspective of the history of science, Gage considers the bearing of Newton's optical discoveries on painting, the chemist Chevreul's contact with painters and the growing interest of experimental psychologists in the topic of color in the late nineteenth century, particularly in relation to synaesthesia. He includes an invaluable overview of the twentieth-century literature that bears on the historical interpretation of color in art. Gage's explorations further extend the concepts he addressed in his prize-winning book, Color and Culture

Great book, interesting, but am I the right public? As my first book on colour it misses homogenity. The same with references, nice but I don't have access to those hunderd other books about colour.