He traverses history, literature, art, and science to uncover behind the seven primary colors – black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple, and green – a root idea, based on visual resemblances and common symbolism throughout history.
Below are the artworks he featured in his book + some I added myself for each color for my own curation.
Black
In the apparent blackness of darkness we discerned our deepest fears;
In the beginning there was darkness: in this remarkably modern image, the seventeenth-century cosmologist Robert Fludd depicted the primordial void as a simple black square
Sesshū’s Splashed-Ink Landscape, made in 1495. From one ink, variously diluted and masterfully applied, springs an evocative mountain scene: a wine tavern by a lake, complete with two boaters at the bottom right
Red
in the glossy reds of blood we saw reflected our own lives and bodies;
L'Atelier Rouge , 1911, Henri Matisse
The Dessert: Harmony in Red, 1908, Henri Matisse
Le verre de porto (A Dinner Table at Night), 1884, John Singer Sargent
Yellow
in the blinding yellow sun we glimpsed, through squinted eyes, our most powerful gods;
In this Annunciation, by Fra Angelico in the 1420s, God is a golden sun, and his divine message a beam of light
Turner’s Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus is dominated by a vast and heroic sunset. The faint outlines of stallions carrying the sun over the horizon can just be made out
In Regulus, Turner used chrome yellow and lead white to re-create the intense experience of staring directly into the sun. Contemporary critics advised viewers to keep a safe distance
The evanescent sunrise behind Norham Castle depends on a phenomenon called isoluminance. In black and white, we can see the sun’s yellow haze is exactly the same brightness as the blue sky around it
Blue
and in cerulean skies and and seas we imagined worlds beyond our horizons.
Wassily Kandinsky’s Improvisation 19 (also known as Blue Sound) is dominated by an exuberant blue haze that seems to transfigure the figures who pass through it
Bacchus and Ariadne (1522–1523), Titian
White
We championed clean white surfaces as paragons of visual, moral, and social purity
Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), Kazimir Malevich
White Painting, 1951, Robert Rauschenberg
Purple
celebrated the synthetic purples of the nineteenth century as beacons of technological progress
Monet’s The Houses of Parliament, Seagulls is a pageant of purples
view of Waterloo Bridge, city’s industrial skyline smothered with synthetic purple emissions
Green
and embraced the myriad greens of nature as emblems of paradise and renewal.
The Green Interior (Figure Seated by a Curtained Window), 1891, Édouard Vuillard
Camille, 1866, Claude Monet
Still Life: Vase with Pink Roses, 1890, Vincent van Gogh
We have projected these hopes, anxieties, and obsessions onto color for thousands of years. The history of color, therefore, is also a history of humanity.
