The History of Color - Cybèle Gontar von Redern

This course considers the history of color in art in terms of materials, meanings, words, and theories. Primarily it considers where color physically comes from and how it is extracted, the development of pigments and dyes, and how their use and commodification evolved and impacted the nature of painting. Handbooks for the use of color will be examined, such as Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte (15th century). It further reviews the meanings of colors, how they have acquired significance/symbolic value or lost it, and how color categories are both found in nature and built by culture. Finally, it will investigate what thinkers in previous centuries thought color was and consider Aristotle’s De coloribus (On Colors), Newton’s prism, Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (Toward a Theory of Color), Chevreul’s laws born from a complaint about Gobelin’s tapestry dye, the Bauhaus color wheel and Josef Albers argument that color is unstable and relational. Important museum collections such as the Forbes Pigment Collection at Harvard will be explored.

Recommended: Finlay's Color: A Natural History of the Palette (2003); The Book of Colour Concepts (Taschen)