Publisher's Synopsis
In this history of colour, Kelly Grovier takes readers on a search for the intriguing and unusual. In Grovier's telling, a colour's connotations are never fixed but are endlessly evolving. Knowledge of a pigment and its history can unlock meaning in the works that feature it. Grovier employs the term 'artymology' to suggest that colour is a linguistic device, where pigments stand in for syllables in art's language. How might it change our understanding of a well-known masterpiece like Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night to know that the intense yellow moon in that painting was sculpted from clumps of dehydrated urine from cows that were fed nothing but mango leaves? Or that the cobalt blue pigment in Van Gogh's sky shares a material bloodline with the glaze of Ming Dynasty porcelain?
