On Color

Ranging from Homer to Picasso, and from the Iranian Revolution to The Wizard of Oz, this spirited and radiant book awakens us anew to the role of color in our lives

Our lives are saturated by color. We live in a world of vivid colors, and color marks our psychological and social existence. But for all color’s inescapability, we don’t know much about it. Now authors David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing offer a fresh and imaginative exploration of one of the most intriguing and least understood aspects of everyday experience.

Kastan and Farthing, a scholar and a painter, respectively, investigate color from numerous perspectives: literary, historical, cultural, anthropological, philosophical, art historical, political, and scientific. In ten lively and wide-ranging chapters, each devoted to a different color, they examine the various ways colors have shaped and continue to shape our social and moral imaginations. Each individual color becomes the focal point for a consideration of one of the extraordinary ways in which color appears and matters in our lives. Beautifully produced in full color, this book is a remarkably smart, entertaining, and fascinating guide to this elusive topic.

“On Color is a deliciously readable, gloriously illumined work of meditation and exploration, written in high resolution.”—Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal  

“Here is a subtle and imaginative insight into the slippery phenomenon we call colour – and how variously we perceive and emblemise it: a wise and fascinating study.”—Colin Thubron  

"Like the best works of cultural criticism, On Color changes how we see the world. I mean that quite literally.  After reading this brilliant book, the mundane appears sharper, richer, and more meaningful."—James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare  

“This lively, erudite, and far-reaching introduction to the poetics of color combines anecdotal art history with cultural and literary studies to illustrate a fundamental truth: that color is relational as well as subjective. This entertaining and humane book effortlessly deepens our engagement with the visual world.”—David Salle  

A conversation with David Scott Kastan:

How did you get interested in color?

I have always been deeply affected by the colors around me. I was a little boy in Arizona, and those desert colors impressed themselves upon me. I still love them. But I love color in a way that is different from, say, how I love Shakespeare. It is something physical. Maybe because of that, I was eager to see if I could find ways to write about color. Colors seem to defy language, and yet of course they are inextricably implicated in it. I wanted to find some of the places where they intersect, as well as where they resist each other.

What was the most surprising thing you learned while writing On Color?

Probably that there was no word for “orange” in any European language until oranges were imported from India. It isn’t that no one saw the color; they just didn’t have that name for it.

What was the most unsettling thing you learned?

I suppose it was discovering how the remarkably inexact metaphors of color that we use for race came about and shaped—and continue to shape—our social lives.

Who was the biggest influence upon the book?

Van Gogh—his paintings, of course, but maybe even more so his amazing letters, written often to his brother, as he tries to figure out how to use color and eventually discovers that color is actually what he is painting, rather than something he is using to paint other things.