Green: The History of a Color

Awards:   Short-listed for The Globe and Mail 75 Book Ideas for Christmas 2014 Short-listed for The Guardian 's Best Books 2014 Short-listed for TheAustralian.com's In the Good Books 2014
Author:   Michel Pastoureau
Publisher:   Princeton University Press
ISBN:  

9780691159362


Pages:   240
Publication Date:   24 August 2014
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable   Availability explained
The supplier advises that this item is temporarily unavailable. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out to you.

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Green: The History of a Color


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Awards

  • Short-listed for The Globe and Mail 75 Book Ideas for Christmas 2014
  • Short-listed for The Guardian 's Best Books 2014
  • Short-listed for TheAustralian.com's In the Good Books 2014

Overview

In this beautiful and richly illustrated book, the acclaimed author of Blue and Black presents a fascinating and revealing history of the color green in European societies from prehistoric times to today. Examining the evolving place of green in art, clothes, literature, religion, science, and everyday life, Michel Pastoureau traces how culture has profoundly changed the perception and meaning of the color over millennia--and how we misread cultural, social, and art history when we assume that colors have always signified what they do today. Filled with entertaining and enlightening anecdotes, Green shows that the color has been ambivalent: a symbol of life, luck, and hope, but also disorder, greed, poison, and the devil. Chemically unstable, green pigments were long difficult to produce and even harder to fix. Not surprisingly, the color has been associated with all that is changeable and fleeting: childhood, love, and money. Only in the Romantic period did green definitively become the color of nature.Pastoureau also explains why the color was connected with the Roman emperor Nero, how it became the color of Islam, why Goethe believed it was the color of the middle class, why some nineteenth-century scholars speculated that the ancient Greeks couldn't see green, and how the color was denigrated by Kandinsky and the Bauhaus. More broadly, Green demonstrates that the history of the color is, to a large degree, one of dramatic reversal: long absent, ignored, or rejected, green today has become a ubiquitous and soothing presence as the symbol of environmental causes and the mission to save the planet. With its striking design and compelling text, Green will delight anyone who is interested in history, culture, art, fashion, or media.

Full Product Details

Author:   Michel Pastoureau
Publisher:   Princeton University Press
Imprint:   Princeton University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 22.90cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   1.361kg
ISBN:  

9780691159362


ISBN 10:   069115936
Pages:   240
Publication Date:   24 August 2014
Audience:   General/trade ,  College/higher education ,  General ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable   Availability explained
The supplier advises that this item is temporarily unavailable. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out to you.
Language:   English

Table of Contents

Reviews

Praise for the French edition: A beautiful presentation of a long-unloved color. --Daphne Betard, Beaux-Arts Praise for the French edition: A beautiful book that opens the windows wide. --Marie Chaudey, La Vie


[S]umptuously illustrated... These are books to look at, but they are also books to read... Individual colors find their being only in relation to each other, and their cultural force depends on the particular instance of their use. They have no separate life or essential meaning. They have been made to mean, and in these volumes that human endeavor has found its historian. --Michael Gorra, New York Review of Books Pastoureau's engaging cultural history of the color green tackles art history and color theory... With the look and feel of an artbook, this book holds equal amounts of substance of in the text... His anecdotes are insightful, the references occasionally delightfully esoteric... [H]e gives this substantial discussion further contemporary relevance. --Publishers Weekly Beautifully illustrated. --Daily Mail From the ample green gown in Jan van Eyck's painting The Arnolfini Wedding to the chartreuse and shamrock in Paolo Veronese's work, from Paul Cezanne's apples to Kees van Dongen's Fauvist use of mint and jungle greens, there's much to sink your eyes into. --Mary Louise Schumacher, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel As this beautifully illustrated work shows, the 'uneasiness' of being green is what makes its story so interesting. --Fiona Capp, Sydney Morning Herald [C]easelessly fascinating and erudite. --Michael Glover, Independent We absolutely loved this book and we didn't merely read it, we read it twice... Colors are not just colors: they have a history and we can't imagine it ever being superseded by anything more than what Michel Pastoureau has accomplished in his monumental work, Green. Designers of all ilks everywhere need to read this book, and the prior colors (Blue and Black) and future colors he comes out with as well. The thought process, planning and impeccable research that must have gone into this book is prodigious... [T]hough Kermit said it's not easy being green, reading this book is an easy decision! ... This is a hefty tome that lends credence to the academic side of fashion theory... Pastoureau has provided us with a tour de force erudite approach to color... [P]ut it on your Christmas gift list for anyone in the fashion or art world. It's a must to own, and so much fun as a read. Academically speaking, it's popular culture at its best... Green is highly recommended by Whom You Know! --Whom You Know [Pastoureau's] pleasantly rambling illustrated narrative charts the changing place of green in Western thought, art and life, from prehistory to the present day. --Caroline Bugler, World of Interiors [S]prightly... Green is a dash through domains and contexts as varied yet related as optics, clothing manufacture, vexillology, literature, color lexicons, and the history of painting... The point, Pastoureau emphasizes, is that green is, among the colors, exquisitely unstable--both in color theory and in real-life manufacture... Pastoureau is fascinating in describing the long decline of green in the period just before the Age of Revolution. --Eric Banks, Chronicle Review Michel Pastoureau's Green: The History of a Color is an interesting look at how this sometimes forgotten hue has been perceived in art, fashion, and culture. Beautiful art and a thorough historical survey make this book an irresistible read. --Traditional Home Praise for the French edition: A beautiful presentation of a long-unloved color. --Daphne Betard, Beaux-Arts Praise for the French edition: A beautiful book that opens the windows wide. --Marie Chaudey, La Vie


Praise for the French edition: A beautiful book that opens the windows wide. --Marie Chaudey, La Vie


Author Information

Michel Pastoureau is a historian and director of studies at the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes de la Sorbonne in Paris. A specialist in the history of colors, symbols, and heraldry, he is the author of many books, including Blue and Black (both Princeton) and The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

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