Books & Ideas

Josef Albers spent years teaching at Black Mountain College and later Yale, and Interaction of Color is the distillation of that teaching: not a theory to read but a practice to do. The central argument is simple and unsettling — color is the most relative medium in art. The same color looks entirely different depending on what surrounds it. What you see is not what is there. Perception is not neutral. The book works through this systematically, using color studies — pairs and groups of colors arranged to demonstrate specific effects. Color relativity: the same gray appearing lighter or darker depending on its background. Simultaneous contrast: adjacent colors shifting each other's appearance at their boundary. Vibrating edges, vanishing boundaries, the illusion of transparency, reversed grounds. Each principle is shown rather than explained, because Albers understood that you cannot learn to see color by reading about it. You have to be tricked into it first. Originally published in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates — a luxury object, technically demanding to produce — the book has been in continuous print since its 1971 paperback edition. This 50th anniversary edition presents close to sixty color studies alongside Albers's original text, significantly expanding the visual material while leaving the writing unchanged. Nicholas Fox Weber contributes a foreword. What makes the book endure is that it remains genuinely active as a teaching tool. The effects Albers demonstrates are not historical curiosities — they are the conditions under which all color is perceived, by every painter, photographer, designer, and viewer. The section on how color temperature shifts under different light conditions alone is worth the book. For anyone working with color in any medium, this is one of the books to own and return to. Not as a reference to consult but as a training, to be done slowly, study by study. 208 pages · Paperback · English · Yale University Press · 50th Anniversary Edition, 2013 · ISBN 978-0300179354

The premise is simple and almost vertiginous: take the entire RGB color space — every combination of red, green, and blue values, millions of colors — and print it as a three-dimensional gradient across three cube-shaped books. Open to any page, any point, and you are holding a precise coordinate in that space. The whole of digital color, made physical and navigable by hand. Tauba Auerbach made three books, each 8 × 8 × 8 inches (20.3 × 20.3 × 20.3 cm), the cube format chosen because the RGB color space is itself cubic — three axes, three channels, a volume rather than a spectrum. The books are not a selection or a sample. They are a complete map. Every possible value is present somewhere in the sequence of pages. The production is meticulous: digital offset print on paper, case bound, with airbrushed cloth covers and page edges — the gradient continuing across the outside of the object as well as the inside, so the book itself becomes a colored solid, a cross-section of the space it contains. The binding was co-designed by Auerbach and bookbinder Daniel E. Kelm, and bound by Kelm with Leah Hughes at the Wide Awake Garage. What makes the object remarkable is not just the concept but the experience. The gradient is steady, unhurried — you can turn pages and watch color shift in small increments, or flip quickly and see the space compress. Each page is different from every other page that has ever been or will ever be printed, because each carries a unique coordinate. The book is a map of a territory that had never been mapped in this form before. It sits in a different category from reference books about color. This is not about the history or the culture of color, or about combinations and their meanings. It is color as pure data made sensuous — the complete digital palette held in the hand. Available to view at taubaauerbach.com. Three books · 20.3 × 20.3 × 20.3 cm each · Digital offset print on paper · Airbrushed cloth cover and page edges · Binding co-designed by Daniel E. Kelm and Tauba Auerbach · 2011

"In the beginning was black," Pastoureau opens — and then immediately complicates it. Black has always carried powerfully opposed meanings at the same time: authority and humility, sin and holiness, rebellion and conformity, wealth and poverty. No other colour in the Western tradition has been simultaneously the colour of priests and fascists, ascetics and fashion designers. The history moves through several sharp reversals. Early Christianity made black the colour of hell and the devil — but also of monastic virtue and penitence. In the medieval period it became the habit of courtiers and a mark of royal luxury, a complete inversion of its earlier meaning. Then the printing press changed everything: the world began to think in black and white, and Newton announced that black was no colour at all — a claim that haunted European art and perception for centuries. The Romantics reclaimed it as the colour of melancholy. The twentieth century made it dominant: in art, photography, film, and eventually fashion, where it became the universal neutral that is somehow never neutral. This is the earliest book in Pastoureau's colour series, and arguably the densest — black has been doing more cultural work for longer than any other colour, and the book reflects that. Part of Pastoureau's colour history series, alongside Blue, Red, Green, and Yellow. Published by Princeton University Press, 2008.

The ancient Greeks had almost no word for blue and largely considered it ugly and barbaric. Most people today, when asked their favourite colour, say blue. How did that happen? Michel Pastoureau — the French medievalist who has devoted his career to the cultural history of colour — traces that transformation across two thousand years. The story moves from the near-absence of blue in prehistoric and ancient Western art, through the medieval moment when the Church began associating blue with the Virgin Mary and it became a dominant colour in cathedral glass and illuminated manuscripts, to its rise as a royal colour in the twelfth century and a revolutionary symbol in the eighteenth. By the time blue jeans arrived, it had become the colour of democracy, labour, and everyday life. And then — as seen from space — the colour of the Earth itself. Pastoureau's central argument is that any history of colour is, above all, a social history. Colours do not simply exist in nature waiting to be perceived: they are produced, named, regulated, and fought over. What a colour means changes with the society that uses it. Blue is beautifully illustrated and moves at the pace of its subject — slowly, accumulating meaning. For artists working with colour as material, symbol, or history, it is essential reading. His book on red is equally worth seeking out. Published by Princeton University Press, 2001.

The first volume reprinted Wada's 1933–1934 collection and became an enduring reference, praised by Die Zeit as a source of inspiration filled with "hues we didn't even know existed." This second volume reaches back to two further works Wada published in 1935–1936 and 1938, bringing the total archive into one place. The book divides into two distinct sections. The first presents 72 colour combinations of three to seven colours, each themed on one of the twelve months of the Japanese year — seasonal colour as a design system, rooted in the precise observation of light, foliage, fabric, and ceremony across the calendar. The second presents 165 combinations drawn from Japanese fashion, interior, and graphic design of the 1910s to 1930s — a period of enormous visual invention, when Western modernism and traditional Japanese aesthetics were being renegotiated in real time. Both sections include colour names in Japanese and English. The book also contains 172 removable colour chips — making it a working tool as much as a reference, something you can cut up, hold against fabric, place beside other colours, carry to a print shop. Read alongside Volume 1 the two books give a comprehensive picture of Wada's colour thinking. Volume 1 is the broader collection; Volume 2 is more specific — seasonal and period — and may be the more useful of the two for anyone working with historical reference or Japanese aesthetic traditions. 148 × 105 mm · 336 pages · Softcover · Japanese and English · Seigensha, 2020 · ISBN 978-4-86152-772-2

Sanzo Wada (1883–1967) was active at a moment when colour use in art and design was becoming increasingly avant-garde and diversified. His response was to focus systematically on colour relationships — how colours work together, what combinations are possible, how traditional Japanese colour sensibility could be documented and transmitted. This book is the result: 348 colour combinations, each named and presented as swatches, drawn from Wada's decades of research and practice. The combinations are not abstract exercises. They come from someone who used colour across an extraordinary range of disciplines: painting, art school instruction, kimono design, fashion, stage design, and film costume. Wada received the Academy Award for Best Costume Design in 1954 for Gate of Hell, and was recognised as a Person of Cultural Merit by the Japanese government in 1958. He founded the Japan Standard Color Association in 1927 — now the Japan Color Research Institute — which established the first systematic framework for colour standardisation in Japan. The book was mentioned in a VSG session on colour theory — alongside the Chromosphere podcast and the work of Kai Rennes — as a practical reference that rewards slow browsing. Unlike Pastoureau's social histories, this is not a book you read from start to finish. You return to it. You use it. The combinations have names that carry their own poetry, and the swatches have a quiet authority that comes from being grounded in a specific cultural and material tradition. An interactive version of the combinations is available online at sanzo-wada.dmbk.io for anyone who wants to explore before buying. Published by Seigensha, Japan. Available in two volumes.

Of all the colours Pastoureau has written about, green may be the most contradictory. It has signified life, luck, and hope — and disorder, greed, poison, and the devil. It was the colour of love and childhood, of the fleeting and the changeable. It was connected to the Roman emperor Nero. It became the colour of Islam. Goethe believed it was the colour of the middle class. Some nineteenth-century scholars speculated that the ancient Greeks could not see it at all. Part of the reason for this instability is chemical. Green pigments were for centuries difficult to produce and even harder to fix — they faded, shifted, corrupted other colours they touched. The unreliability of the material shaped the cultural meaning: green became associated with everything transient. Only in the Romantic period did it settle into something more stable, becoming definitively the colour of nature. From there, the path to environmentalism and the green movement of the twentieth century is direct. Pastoureau also shows why the Bauhaus and Kandinsky actively denigrated green, and how its rehabilitation in contemporary culture is almost entirely tied to ecological symbolism — a dramatic reversal from centuries of ambivalence. Like the rest of the series, the book argues that colours do not carry fixed meanings: their histories are histories of reversals, accidents, and social decisions. Green makes that case most strikingly of all. Part of Pastoureau's colour history series, alongside Blue, Red, and volumes on black and yellow. Published by Princeton University Press, 2014.

A monograph on the work of Kai Rennes, VSG member and Swedish-Finnish artist working between Stockholm and Barcelona. The book brings together a selection of his photography, video, and installation work spanning three decades — a practice centred on vision itself: what it means to see, what an image does to the person looking at it, how meaning shifts in the encounter between a viewer and a surface. Art historian Juha-Heikki Tihinen writes in the book: "In his work, Kai Rennes investigates the meaning of vision and knowledge in art. He is fascinated by the encounter between different worlds — by the moment when things acquire entirely new dimensions of meaning. An enduring feature of Rennes' art is the exploration of masculinity, which also extends to questions of identity and sexuality. In this context, 'the other's knowledge' is of paramount significance." The book focuses on the installations, videos, and photographs. The paintings are a separate body of work not covered here. Texts are by Tihinen and curator Zsolt Kosma in English, and by Rennes himself in Swedish. Rennes presented the book at a recent VSG session alongside his new sculpture All Things Shining — optical prism cubes assembled into a constructed presence that refracts and scatters whatever light is in the room. That conversation, and more on his Gray Matter video installation (Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo, 2019), is in the VSG article The Weight of What You Make. Available at Konstig Books, Stockholm. 195 × 275 mm · 126 pages · Hardcover · English and Swedish · Self-published, 2025 · ISBN 9789526502212

Pink feels inevitable now. Its associations with femininity, softness, and a certain kind of girlhood seem like they must have always existed. Pastoureau's opening move is to dismantle that assumption completely: it was only with the introduction of the Barbie doll in 1959 that pink became decisively feminised. Before that — as recently as the eighteenth century — pink was frequently a masculine colour. The colour itself has a late start. Pink pigments appear in ancient Macedonian paintings, but vivid, saturated pinks for dyeing and painting were not developed until the eighteenth century. At the same time, a popular new flower — the pink rose — gave the colour its standard name in European languages. Before that, what we now call pink was generally described as a pale or light red, without its own identity. Once named, pink accumulated its own symbolism quickly and contradictorily: the prim and the vulgar, the romantic and the eccentric, softness and nudity, pleasure and excess. It has been adored and detested in almost equal measure, often at the same time. This is the most recent and shortest volume in the series — 192 pages against the usual 240 — but it covers the most compressed history, since pink as a distinct colour is essentially a modern invention. Which makes it a useful counterpoint to the older colours: a reminder that not all colours have ancient histories, and that the ones we take for granted as eternal are often the youngest. Part of Pastoureau's colour history series, alongside Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Black, and White. Published by Princeton University Press, 2025.

Red is the oldest colour in human use. The first pigment our ancestors ground for painting and dyeing, it was for much of history not just one colour among many but the colour — in some languages the word for red and the word for colour were the same. Pastoureau opens there, and from that starting point traces red across four thousand years of Western culture. In antiquity, red meant war, wealth, and power. In the medieval period it held both sacred and secular weight simultaneously: the blood of Christ and the fires of Hell on one side; love, glory, and beauty on the other. Red was the prestige colour, the one worthy of ceremony and rank. Then came the Protestant Reformation, which turned against red as the colour of Catholic excess and moral indulgence, and its status collapsed almost overnight. It took the French Revolution to rehabilitate it — now as the colour of radical politics and the left, a meaning it has largely carried ever since. Pastoureau builds the history through images: cave paintings at Lascaux, Renaissance masters, Rothko, Josef Albers. Each chapter earns its argument visually as well as historically. This is the companion to Blue, and the two books reward reading together — the same method, two completely different trajectories. Pastoureau has also written volumes on black, green, and yellow, each following the same approach. Any one of them is a way into the series; Red and Blue are the strongest starting points. Published by Princeton University Press, 2017.

This is not a history of a colour. It is something harder to categorise — a philosophical essay, a work of literary criticism, and a kind of ghost story all at once, written in the mode of the thing it describes. Fioretos begins from a simple observation: gray is the colour of vagueness, uncertainty, suspension. Smoke, fog, ashes, dust. The threshold region where life seems held in abeyance without having ended. From there he builds an argument that gray is the medium of literature itself — "that grainy gas of language" — the space where things blend and blur, where distance and proximity become indistinguishable, where time past and lost leaves its tint. The book is written with a lead pencil, he tells us — in the tradition of Nabokov, Rilke, Svevo, Poe, Dickinson — and it chronicles what graphite leaves behind while also recording its own diminishment. Rather than the four classical elements, Fioretos organises the book around four revisions: not water but tears, not fire but vapor, not earth but grain, not air but clouds. The texts he reads range from Homer to Beckett. What makes the book strange and memorable is what happens to it. The themes from the quoted texts begin to leak into the narrative itself. The border between fiction and fact dissolves. An increasingly unreliable narrator takes hold. The book becomes affected by its subject — a poetics of gray that gradually turns gray itself. It sits in a different register from Pastoureau's social histories — less illustrated, less chronological, more literary and philosophical. A companion rather than a continuation. For anyone interested in what a colour can mean when it resists the fixed meanings that other colours accumulate, this is the book to read alongside the series. Published by Stanford University Press (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics), 1999.

White is often treated as the absence of colour — the blank, the neutral, the default. Pastoureau's central argument is that this is a modern misconception with a specific historical origin. Before the seventeenth century, white's status as a full colour was never contested. From antiquity through the Middle Ages, white formed a chromatic triad with red and black that was central to art and social life. The true opposite of white, in that system, was not black but red. Newton and the physics of light changed that perception. Once white came to be understood as the sum of all colours — or their absence, depending on the medium — it lost its place as a colour in its own right and became a kind of non-colour. The symbolic history of white ran separately from this scientific demotion: it accumulated associations with purity, virginity, innocence, wisdom, peace, and cleanliness that it still carries today. White is the most recent full volume in the series and in some ways the most quietly surprising — because white appears so simple and turns out to be so layered. The comparison with black is inevitable, and the two books reward reading together: black was always culturally overdetermined, white always considered self-evident, and both assumptions turn out to be wrong. Part of Pastoureau's colour history series, alongside Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, and Black. Published by Princeton University Press, 2023.

Yellow is almost invisible in contemporary European life — a discreet colour, rarely carrying strong symbolism. This was not always true. In antiquity it was nearly sacred, a colour of light, warmth, and prosperity. What happened between then and now is the subject of this book. The medieval period split yellow in two. Warm yellow meant honey, gold, and abundance. Greenish yellow meant sulfur, bile, and damnation — the colour of forgers, lawless knights, Judas, and Lucifer. The same colour, different shades, carrying opposite meanings simultaneously. That instability never fully resolved; yellow simply faded from prominence rather than settling into a stable meaning. The global comparison is striking. In Asia the story runs differently: in ancient China, yellow was reserved for the emperor's clothing alone. In India it is associated with happiness. Most significantly, yellow is the colour of Buddhism — it marks the doors of temples across the continent. The same colour that was associated with the devil in medieval Europe is a colour of enlightenment elsewhere. Pastoureau draws comparisons from East Asia, India, Africa, and South America alongside the European thread, making this the most globally wide-ranging volume in the series. Part of Pastoureau's colour history series, alongside Blue, Red, Green, and Black. Published by Princeton University Press, 2019.

A gorgeous, wide-ranging survey of how animals have appeared in human art from prehistoric cave paintings to contemporary work. Each era reveals something different about our relationship with the non-human world — reverence, fear, utility, tenderness. More than a history of images, it reads as a history of human attention. Beautifully produced and endlessly browsable.

A practical, honest guide to building a sustainable art career — written not by an institution but by an artist who figured it out. Carey covers everything from grants and galleries to building relationships with collectors and the press, without the usual mystification. What makes it useful is that it treats the business of art as a learnable skill, not a secret. Recommended for anyone who makes work they believe in and wants more people to see it.

Part of the Documents of Contemporary Art series — each volume gathers artists' writings, interviews, and critical texts around a single theme. This one focuses on the ocean: as subject, as metaphor, as ecological crisis, as spiritual force. Artists and writers from across decades and disciplines contribute. An ideal companion volume to The Water Calls To Us, and to anyone whose practice touches on water, environment, or the non-human.

Not just for theatre artists. Barba and Savarese's monumental study of the performer's body across cultures — Noh, Balinese dance, commedia dell'arte, ballet, Peking opera — reveals the universal techniques underlying presence, energy, and decision. The question at the heart of the book: what happens in the body when a performer is truly alive on stage? Visual artists, dancers, and anyone interested in the body as artistic medium will find this extraordinary. An encyclopedia that reads like philosophy.

A short, quiet book about the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi — the beauty of imperfection, incompleteness, and impermanence. It is less a how-to and more a way of seeing: the cracked glaze, the weathered surface, the asymmetrical form. For artists working with process, materiality, and time, this book offers a philosophical anchor. Read it slowly. It will stay with you.