The History of Color: A Universe of Chromatic Phenomena

Parkinson (Digitisation in the U.K.), archives and collections manager at the Royal College of Art, London, takes a sweeping and mesmerizing look at humanity’s relationship with color from ancient Greece through the present day. He notes that color’s “everyday magic” has eternally “fascinated, perplexed, and infuriated” scientists, theologians, and philosophers alike, including Aristotle, who studied visible hues in such natural phenomena as rainbows, and Isaac Newton, whose groundbreaking experiments revealed that “white light could be split into a rainbow of hues by channeling a sunbeam through a prism.” Religious thought was also intimately bound up with color, according to Parkinson, who references a late 19th-century pamphlet by Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon that framed color as a “metaphor for Christian faith,” from “the blackness of sin” to the “redemptive red blood of Christ.” As the Enlightenment popularized quantitative modes of thinking, efforts were made to standardize and organize color, from the first color wheel in 1704 to chemists’ attempts to synthesize certain hues in labs. In the 20th century, color streamed into “mass communication” and enlivened cinema and television. Parkinson lovingly details humanity’s endeavors to quantify and organize color and wisely makes no attempt to do so himself, choosing instead to celebrate its resonance through human history. Enriched by the author’s palpable enthusiasm and finely detailed knowledge of the subject, this will enthrall art lovers. (Sept.)