The E-book of Color Concepts will quickly be published by Taschen in a multilingual edition, containing textual content in English, French, German, and Spanish. This selection makes its abundance of explanatory scholarship hugely accessible at a stroke, however even those that learn none of these 4 languages can take pleasure in the e book. For it takes a deep dive — with Taschen’s characteristic visual lavishness — into one of many truly universal languages: that of color. By means ofout its two volumes, The E-book of Color Concepts presents greater than 1000 photographs drawn from 4 centuries’ value of “uncommon books and manuscripts from a wealth of institutions, including probably the most distinguished color collections worldhuge.”
Reproduced within are selections from greater than 65 books and manuscripts, including such “seminal works of color theory” as Isaac Newton’s Opticks and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre, as previously featured right here on Open Culture.
Kate Mothes at Colossal provides that “learners can even discover studies from Color Problems, the early Twentieth-century hande book by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, which described theories that may pattern in subsequent many years in design and artwork, like Joseph Albers’s sequence Homage to the Square.” In The E-book of Color Concepts’ 800 pages additionally seem a variety of works that don’t belong, strictly communicateing, to the sector of color theory, equivalent to a botanical worde book by the spiritualist and early summary artist Hilma af Kint.
Co-authors Sarah Lowengard and Alexandra Loske convey serious credentials to this endeavor: Lowengard is a historian of technology and science with greater than 40 years’ experience as an “artisan color-maker,” and Loske is an artwork historian and curator who specializes in “the position of girls within the history of color.” Each would little question agree on the special value of revisiting the history of this particular subject right here within the early twenty-first century, with all its discourse about the disappearance of color from our eachday lives. It’s worrisome sufficient that spoken and written languages outaspect the English-French-German-Spanish league appear to be declining; relegating ourselves to an ever-narrowing vocabulary of color could be a good graver loss certainly.
Related content:
The Vibrant Color Wheels Designed by Goethe, Newton & Other Theorists of Color (1665–1810)
The Lady Who Theorized Color: An Introduction to Mary Gartside’s New Theory of Colors (1808)
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facee book.