COLOUR

This is the title of the latest book I am reading. It is composed of a collection of texts all related to colour as the subject.
This book is part of the series on Documents of Contemporary Art and is edited by David Batchelor who writes a short introduction.




The cover is catchy but the book appears dull without photographs and a very dense typography. The selected essays are organized more or less by chronological order with a related bibliography at the end of each entry.

The editor characterizes the book as an "unruly assortment of 150 texts", starting with Baudelaire in 1946 and ending with a comment from Tacita Dean in 2007 .


This book is not to be read from cover to cover. I cannot quote a particular text or sentence. It is full of thought provoking comments from artists, philosophers, anthropologists, poets, musicians, architects...


At the end, this is a condensed collection of enlightening texts. Their messages take a different dimension as they are read and reread. This book, small at first glance, is pretty heavy on substance. I will keep it closeby, ready when I need good material for thoughts.

To stay on the subject, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art hosts an exhibition related to colour titled "Colour in Art" from the 5th of January till the 13th of June. At first, I made plans to visit...till I realized: the museum is located in Denmark, far away from New Orleans where I live.

PS: the paintings belong to the Merzbacher collection