Bibliography and Suggested Reading
Color Vision & Art · Bibliography
Recommended Books
A working bibliography on color in art — how painters have used pigment, how the eye and brain translate light into color, and how the meanings of color have changed across centuries. Most titles are written for general readers; a few are reference works for the seriously curious. Affiliate links to Amazon support WebExhibits.
Featured
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Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing
Margaret S. Livingstone · 2002 (updated ed. 2014)
A Harvard neurobiologist explains how the eye and brain translate wavelengths of light into the colors and forms of the world, from Mona Lisa’s smile to Monet’s atmospherics. This exhibit draws on many of the topics in her book.
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The Story of Color — Pigments & Materials
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Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color
Philip Ball · 2003
A chemist-turned-writer traces the entwined history of pigments, painting and chemistry from Egyptian wall painting to the digital image. A National Book Critics Circle finalist and the single best introduction to the materials of color.
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Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay · 2004
A travel journalist’s quest after the origins of ochre, indigo, ultramarine, cochineal and the rest. Finlay was the first woman to tour an Afghan lapis mine, and the book reads like a colorist’s On the Road.
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The Secret Lives of Color
Kassia St. Clair · 2017
Seventy-five short, gossipy biographies of individual shades — lead white, mummy brown, Vantablack — tracing the cultural fortunes of each. A bestselling gateway to the subject.
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Colors: The Story of Dyes and Pigments
François Delamare & Bernard Guineau · 2000
An Abrams Discoveries pocket survey from the painted caves of Lascaux through the medieval cloth industry to modern chemistry. Brief, lavishly illustrated, easy to give as a gift.
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Pigment Compendium: A Dictionary and Optical Microscopy of Historical Pigments
N. Eastaugh, V. Walsh, T. Chaplin & R. Siddall · 2008
The technical reference: a dictionary of every pigment name and synonym used in Western painting, paired with optical-microscope identification keys. Indispensable for conservators and serious students.
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The Craftsman’s Handbook (Il Libro dell’Arte)
Cennino Cennini, trans. D. V. Thompson · 1437 (Dover, 1954)
The classic fifteenth-century workshop manual: how to grind a pigment, lay gold, gesso a panel, regulate your life as a painter. Still the easiest way to feel the materials of late-medieval art.
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Color Theory — Classics & Workshops
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Interaction of Color: 50th Anniversary Edition
Josef Albers · 1963 (Yale, 2013)
The Bauhaus master’s teaching text on what colors do when they sit next to each other — afterimages, transparency, vibrating boundaries. Sixty studies illustrate every principle. The anniversary edition restores Albers’s plates at full scale.
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The Elements of Color
Johannes Itten, ed. Faber Birren · 1970
The condensed companion to Itten’s Art of Color: the seven contrasts (hue, light-dark, cold-warm, complementary, simultaneous, saturation, extension) that have organized Bauhaus-derived color teaching ever since.
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Theory of Colours
J. W. von Goethe, trans. C. L. Eastlake · 1810 (MIT, 1970)
Goethe’s phenomenological reply to Newton: a poet’s catalogue of how color actually appears to the eye, with the famous color circle and a long section on psychological effects that shaped Turner, Kandinsky and modern color teaching.
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Color: A Workshop for Artists and Designers (3rd ed.)
David Hornung · 2020
A studio sequence of structured exercises for learning to see and mix color. Widely adopted in art schools; the third edition adds digital examples from textiles, illustration and animation.
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Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter
James Gurney · 2010
The Dinotopia illustrator distills the studio knowledge a representational painter needs: how light reveals form, how pigments behave, how to handle atmosphere, shadow and reflected color. A modern classic.
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Color and Human Response
Faber Birren · 1978 (Wiley reprint)
Birren’s readable survey of how color affects perception, mood and physiology — the book that introduced twentieth-century designers to color psychology and is still cited in lighting and interior research.
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Color in Cultural & Art History
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Blue: The History of a Color
Michel Pastoureau · 2018 (orig. 2000)
The first volume in the medievalist’s long color cycle. Pastoureau follows blue from its near-absence in classical antiquity to royal favor in the twelfth century to its modern omnipresence in denim and the EU flag.
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Red: The History of a Color
Michel Pastoureau · 2017
Companion to Blue, Black, Green and Yellow: a richly illustrated cultural history of red as blood, fire, sin, power and love — from cave painting to Rothko and Albers.
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Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction
John Gage · 1999
The Mitchell-Prize-winning survey of how color has been thought about and used in Western art from Democritus to the late twentieth century. Dense, indispensable.
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Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism
John Gage · 2000
Gage’s follow-up of essays: medieval color symbolism, mosaic optics, Goethe vs. Runge, the color ideas of Blake, Turner, Seurat and Matisse.
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Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting
Marcia B. Hall · 1994
Twenty Renaissance paintings, from Giotto to Tintoretto, analyzed for what color and technique contribute to meaning. Incorporates conservation-laboratory findings, including the Sistine Chapel restoration.
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The Primary Colours: Three Essays
Alexander Theroux · 1995
Three discursive, encyclopedic essays on blue, yellow and red — their literature, botany, food, religion and folklore. Theroux’s sequel The Secondary Colors (orange, purple, green) is also worth seeking.
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Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color
Charles A. Riley II · 1995
Twelve years of studio interviews with painters, composers and writers (Lichtenstein, Stella, Halley, Foss, Byatt) read against Wittgenstein, Derrida, Schoenberg and Albers.
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On Painting
Leon Battista Alberti, ed. Martin Kemp · 1435 (Penguin Classics)
The Renaissance treatise that codified linear perspective and gave painters their first systematic vocabulary for distance, proportion, composition, light and color.
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The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat
Martin Kemp · 1992
A profusely illustrated history of how perspective, optics and color theory entered the Western painter’s working knowledge, from Brunelleschi’s mirror to Seurat’s divisionism.
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Colour: Art & Science (Darwin College Lectures)
Trevor Lamb & Janine Bourriau (eds.) · 1995
Eight Cambridge lectures by physicists, biologists, historians and artists — a one-volume orientation to color from every angle for the non-specialist.
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Colour (National Gallery Pocket Guide)
David Bomford & Ashok Roy · 2000
A short, pocket-sized National Gallery guide to how pigments and binders combine into the paint layer, illustrated with pictures from the collection. Eighty pages, ideal for students.
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Painters & Movements
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The Fauves: The Reign of Colour
Jean-Louis Ferrier · 1995
The standard one-volume survey of Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Marquet, Camoin, Manguin, Van Dongen, Friesz, Braque and Dufy — the “wild beasts” of 1905. 170 color plates.
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Matisse: The Sensuality of Colour
Xavier Girard · 1994
A New Horizons pocket monograph on Matisse’s paintings, sculptures, prints and paper cutouts, with a documentary section of letters and studio photographs.
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Bonnard, Colour & Light
Nicholas Watkins · 1998
Catalogue of the Tate / MoMA Bonnard show: 48 paintings arguing that the interplay of shadow and color — not Impressionist sentiment — is the engine of Bonnard’s art.
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Techniques of the Impressionists
Anthea Callen · 1982
Thirty Impressionist paintings examined for materials and method — pigments, supports, brushwork, the influence of photography and the new chemical colors of the 1860s.
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Masters of Colour: Derain to Kandinsky
Stephanie Rachum & John Gage · 2002
The Royal Academy catalogue of the Merzbacher Collection: Fauves and German Expressionists alongside Cezanne, Picasso, Klee, Chagall and Calder, with Gage on early-twentieth-century color theory.
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Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko and Still
John Golding · 2000 (A. W. Mellon Lectures)
Seven painter-by-painter chapters on the rise of abstraction and the spiritual ambitions of color. The Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery, lightly worn.
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Colour after Klein: Re-thinking Colour in Modern and Contemporary Art
J. Alison, N. Banai, K. Madden, A. Pardo et al. · 2005
Barbican exhibition catalogue: twenty contemporary artists who picked up Yves Klein’s monochrome challenge, with essays on color’s emotional and conceptual stakes.
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Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas
Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (eds.) · 2002 (2nd ed.)
340 source texts by twentieth-century artists and critics, including Kahnweiler on Cubism, Klein’s Sorbonne lecture and Signac on Delacroix and the Neo-Impressionists.
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Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics
H. B. Chipp, P. H. Selz & J. C. Taylor (eds.) · 1968
The classic Berkeley anthology — Kandinsky on the effect of color, Matisse’s Notes of a Painter, van Gogh, Gauguin, Apollinaire, Mondrian and Greenberg in their own words.
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