An anthology of texts by artists and researchers on colour from Antiquity to Albers and beyond.

Patrick Syme’s editions of "Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours" (1814, 1821) attempted to establish a universal colour reference system for the natural world. Baty’s book presents historical illustrations of animals, vegetables and minerals alongside each colour swatch, and includes essays by himself and four other contributors on the background and influence of the editions.

“Fox takes seven elemental colors―black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple, and green―and uncovers behind each a root idea, based on visual resemblances and common symbolism throughout history… .By creating a new history of color, Fox reveals a new story about humans and our place in the universe: second only to language, color is the greatest carrier of cultural meaning in our world.”

This engaging, visually stunning book by art historian, curator, and editor Alexandra Loske surveys the past four centuries by exploring the diverse ways that color has been expressed, understood, and applied through charts, color wheels, palettes and publications - both scientific and artistic. Loske tells her readers that the book aims to “celebrate the visual quality and beauty of color systems and concepts, and to showcase the creativity with which these have been devised.” A Win-Win contribution to your color library. Loske has written several highly engaging books on color - see her instagram page and publications page for a list of her other books and publications.links to lectures.

Derek Jarman was an artist, a poet and a film maker. This book is a curious but rather wonderful mix of observation, memoir, facts, speculation, quotations and poetry. Jarman follows colour into many byways of human enquiry and experience, touching on aspects of physics, chemistry, physiology, psychology, sociology, and history, as well as art and design.

A very thorough and scholarly, yet highly accessible, book about the history of colours in Western art. This vibrant book uses many artworks as case studies to tell the story of colours. Paul provides sources for all the quotations used.

A beautifully illustrated book for textile professionals. Color theory is treated in the traditional way (therefore not exactly up to modern expectations) but showing superb examples of textile applications. The chapter on the relativity of colour illustrates the interaction of colours on fibre, yarn and fabric, optical mixture with fibre blending and also good advice on how to control and reduce the effect of simultaneous contrast. Still in print.

An entertaining volume on pigments from Victoria Finlay, consisting primarily of historical anecdotes relating to each pigment, accompanied by numerous illustrations of paintings and historical photographs, diagrams and artefacts.

An entertaining account of Victoria Finlay’s adventures as she travels the world to track down the sources of pigments and dyes used by artists and artisans from pre-historic times to the middle of the nineteenth century. As she explains in the preface: “There is a little theory mixed in with the journey but this is not the place to find detailed debates on colour harmonies or colour science. Instead this is a book full of stories and anecdotes, histories and adventures inspired by the human quest for colour.

Evaluated by the number of famous and successful students he taught, Hans Hofmann was the most influential artist-pedagogue in the USA from the 1940s to the early 1960s. “From how Hofmann taught to what he taught, artists talk shop about the inner workings of the visual language, a discussion essential to the contemporary dialogue in the arts and required reading for those engaged in creative composition, whether visual, verbal, musical, architectural, cinematic, or choreographic.”

Published in conjunction with MoMA’s exhibition with the same title. An important resource for understanding a particular aspect of colour in contemporary art, namely the postmodern tendency to disband with formal theory, traditional aesthetics and ideas of beauty and the sublime – and to replace them with chance, found colour and the colour palettes of everyday life.

This book was the result of an exhibition on colour in contemporary art. Colour After Klein explores the significance of colour as it emerges in the work of 20 of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Yves Klein, Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman, Louise Bourgeois, Andy Warhol and James Turrell.

Although small in size, this little compendium of dyes and pigments and their history is packed with information and fascinating illustrations. An alternative to Finlay.

Color Image Scale, by Shigenobu Kobayashi, is an attractive and inexpensive paperback which deals with the ways in which colours, colour combinations communicate particular images. Kobayashi’s ideas have been tested with students of design who found that their conclusions were essentially the same, in effect endorsing Kobayashi’s findings.