Thursday, July 6, 2023

Book Nook - New Quarto Books: The History of Color and The Art of Fantasy

 This comprehensive, beautiful book delves deep into the complex but fascinating story of our relationship with color throughout human history. The History of Color explores the history of our understanding of color, from the ancient world to the present, from Aristotle to Albers. Interspersed in the historical story are numerous thematic essays that look at how color has been used across a wide range of disciplines and fields: in food, music, language and many others. The illustrations are drawn from the Royal College of Art’s renowned Colour Reference Library which spans six centuries of works and nearly 2,000 titles, from a Gothic manuscript on the composition of the rainbow to hand-painted Enlightenment works on color theory and vibrant 20th-century color charts.


This beautiful, fully illustrated book presents a compendium of artworks throughout history which have been inspired by myth, fantasy and the unreal. The Art of Fantasy is a visual sourcebook of all that is fantastical – from fine art to illustration, and from surrealists and symbolists to the creatives working in undefined territories. While the artists in our history books (Blake, Goya, Dali, Magritte, Ernst) first brought fantasy art to the galleries, it was the twentieth century artists who brought it to the masses. It is in this book that, for the first time, they are united and equally weighted, presenting a mesmerizing and thoughtful curation of the best fantasy artwork out there.

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