The rainbow's gravity : colour, materiality and British modernity / Kirsty Sinclair Dootson
- Author
- Dootson, Kirsty Sinclair
- Published
- London : Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2023.
- Copyright Date
- ©2023
- Physical Description
- vii, 224 pages : illustrations (some colour) ; 27 cm
- Contents
- The texture of capitalism : oil painting and industrialisation in the nineteenth century -- The complexation of the chromolithograph : colouring skin in late Victorian print -- Modern women, modern colours : Madame Yevonde and the feminisation of photography between the wars -- Decolonising in technicolour : chromatic imperialism and post-war colour cinema in Britain and India -- The BBC's colour problem : race, migration and colour television in the 1960s.
- Summary
- From Victorian breakthroughs in synthesising pigments to the BBC's conversion to chromatic broadcasting, the story of colour's technological development is inseparable from wider processes of modernisation that transformed Britain. This revolutionary history brings to light how new colour technologies informed ideas about national identity during a period of profound social change, when the challenges of industrialisation, decolonisation of the Empire and evolving attitudes to race and gender reshaped the nation. Offering a compelling new account of modern British visual culture that reveals colour to be central to its aesthetic trajectories and political formations, this chromatic lens deepens our understanding of how British art is made and what it means, offering a new way to assess the visual landscape of the period and interpret its colourful objects. Across a kaleidoscopic array of materials, from radiant paintings by major Victorian artists, vivid print advertisements and vibrant interwar fashion photographs, to glorious Technicolor films and the prismatic programmes of the BBC's early years of colour television, The Rainbow's Gravity reveals how Britain modernised colour and how colour, in turn, modernised Britain.
- Subject(s)
- 1900-1999
- Color in art
- Color—Great Britain—History—20th century
- Color—Social aspects—Great Britain—History—20th century
- Couleur dans l'art
- Couleur—Grande-Bretagne—Histoire—20e siècle
- Couleur—Aspect social—Grande-Bretagne—Histoire—20e siècle
- Color
- Color—Social aspects
- Intellectual life
- Great Britain—Intellectual life—20th century
- Grande-Bretagne—Vie intellectuelle—20e siècle
- Great Britain
- Genre(s)
- ISBN
- 9781913107369 (hardcover)
1913107361 (hardcover) - Bibliography Note
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 206-213) and index.
- Endowment Note
- Barbara S. Klein Libraries Collection Endowment in Art History and International Affairs
View MARC record | catkey: 42792439