Color Theory: Artists and Color

The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse - a fear of corruption or contamination through color - lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge color, either by making it the property of some "foreign body" - the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological - or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic. Chromophobia has been a cultural phenomenon since ancient Greek times; this book is concerned with forms of resistance to it. Writers have tended to look no further than the end of the nineteenth century. David Batchelor seeks to go beyond the limits of earlier studies, analyzing the motivations behind chromophobia and considering the work of writers and artists who have been prepared to look at color as a positive value. Exploring a wide range of imagery including Melville's "great white whale", Huxley's reflections on mescaline, and Le Corbusier's "journey to the East", Batchelor also discusses the use of color in Pop, Minimal, and more recent art.

Water lilies, reflecting ponds, a Japanese footbridge, and blankets of glorious flowers: Nothing evokes Claude Monet’s Impressionist paintings quite like images from his gardens at Giverny, about 50 miles northwest of Paris. Monet discovered a profound source of artistic renewal in these gardens, a motif that appears in hundreds of his works. In Claude Monet’s Gardens at Giverny, Dominique Lobstein’s dynamic text introduces us to the many personalities that have strolled through these gardens and the role this setting played in Monet’s life, while Jean-Pierre Gilson’s lush four-season photographs offer a tour through the literally thousands of flowers—daffodils, irises, poppies, tulips, and more— winding pathways, arching trellises, cherry trees heavily laden with blossoms, and, of course, the iconic water garden. This book brings to life critical moments in Monet’s biography, presenting a vivid glimpse into the beloved artist’s personal experiences and creative universe.

Color Creates Light: Studies with Hans Hofmann brings together the man, the schools, the painting, the ideas, and the teaching. Jed Perl of The New Republic calls this book "enormously important... nothing less than the missing chapter in the history of the period," for Hofmann's decade of painting in Paris prior to World War I, combined with his observations of the masters of all cultures, enabled him to explain Cubism to the avant-garde and catalyzed the later Abstract Expressionism.

In the ateliers of German emigrant Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) in Munich, New York and Provincetown, talented students later to become some of the most significant artists and educators of the time rubbed shoulders with critics, collectors, and curators, who in turn transmitted and transmuted Hofmannâ¿¿s ideas across Europe, America, Canada, and beyond. From how Hofmann taught to what he taught, artists talk shop about the inner workings of the visual language, required reading for those engaged in creative composition, whether visual, verbal, musical, architectural, cinematic, or choreographic.

Art Special Collection

How do colors become imbued with meaning? Why do some colors attract us while others repel? How have phrases such as "green with envy" or "the blues" arisen? Here are hundreds of photographs, organized into color-coded chapters that revel in color's all-pervasive influence and accompanied by a text that explores color's symbolism and the emotions it generates. The international quest takes us to some of the planet's most exotic and far-flung places, from a workshop on the outskirts of Kyoto to a bustling market in a small town in Peru and on to a cochineal farm in the middle of the Mexican desert. Colorful World is a vibrant celebration of human creativity that will be a source of inspiration and delight for designers and artists everywhere.

Art Special Collection

A book of correspondence between two highly talented friends -- writer/critic/artist John Berger and filmmaker/artist John Christie -- I Send You This Cadmium Red began in concept in February 1997, when Christie mused to Berger: "What could our next project be?" Berger replied "Just send a color..". Soon after, a painted square of cadmium red crossed the English Channel, from Christie in London to Berger in France, and an amazing conversation began. The accompanying book reveals, in the form of letters, notes, small books, and drawings, their subsequent exchange of ideas on color -- a visual odyssey that ranges from Matisse's blue to the blue of Yves Klein, from industrial brown anti-rust paint to Joseph Beuys' Braunkreuz, from mysterious cave paintings to Byzantine gold leaf. Unprecedented and engaging, aesthetically stunning and intellectually enlightening, I Send You This Cadmium Red both explores new 'ways of seeing' and provides a key to understanding the work of these two artists.

One of the last century's most influential artists, Yves Klein (1928-1962) took the European art scene by storm in a prolific career that lasted only from 1954 to 1962, when he suffered a heart attack at the age of 34. Klein was an innovator who embraced painting, sculpture, performance, photography, music, theater, film, architecture and theoretical writing. Self-identified as "the painter of space," Klein sought to achieve immaterial spirituality through pure color (primarily an ultramarine blue of his own invention-International Klein Blue) and even went so far as to present white galleries emptied of all artworks for his renowned 1958 exhibition of "the Void." His diverse oeuvre represents a pivotal transition from modern art's concern with the material object to contemporary notions of the conceptual nature of art.Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powersis published to accompany the first major retrospective of the artist's work in the United States in nearly 30 years. It includes examples from all of Klein's major series, including his Anthropometries, Cosmogonies,fire paintings, planetary reliefs and blue monochromes, as well as selections of his lesser-known gold and pink monochromes, body and sponge reliefs, "air architecture" and immaterial works. Essays by curators Kerry Brougher and Philippe Vergne, Klein scholar Klaus Ottmann, art historian Kaira M. Cabanas and curatorial fellow Andria Hickey, as well as archival materials and translations of Klein's published and unpublished writings, offer insights into the artist's endeavors and process.Born in Nice, France, in 1928, Yves Kleincreated what he considered his first artwork when he signed the sky above Nice in 1947, making his earliest attempt to capture the immaterial. The artist carved out new aesthetic and theoretical territory based on his study of the mystical sect Rosicrucianism, philosophical and poetic investigations of space and science, and the practice of Judo, which he described as "the discovery of the human body in a spiritual space."