On Color

Ranging from Homer to Picasso, and from the Iranian Revolution to The Wizard of Oz, this “sparkling and informative” book awakens us to the role of color (Wall Street Journal).

Our lives are saturated by color. We live in a world of vivid colors, and color marks our psychological and social existence. But for all color’s inescapability, we don’t know much about it. Now authors David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing offer a fresh and imaginative exploration of one of the most intriguing and least understood aspects of everyday experience.

Kastan and Farthing, a scholar and a painter, respectively, investigate color from numerous perspectives: literary, historical, cultural, anthropological, philosophical, art historical, political, and scientific. In ten lively and wide-ranging chapters, each devoted to a different color, they examine the various ways colors have shaped and continue to shape our social and moral imaginations.

Each individual color becomes the focal point for a consideration of one of the extraordinary ways in which color appears and matters in our lives. Beautifully produced in full color, this book is a remarkably smart, entertaining, and fascinating guide to this elusive topic.

“[A] scholarly yet highly entertaining book.” —Natalie Angier, New York Times

“A gift book, beautifully produced with fine illustrations. . . .to be kept on your night table to be read episodically.” —Ana Daniel, East Hampton Star

“A gorgeously illustrated in-depth exploration of color on all of its symbolic, visual, literary, political, historic, and scientific registers . . .conversational, personal, witty in tone.” ——Stefanie Sobelle, Los Angeles Review of Books