Description
Book SynopsisContrary to the monochrome vision of Queen Victoria’s mourning dresses and the coal-polluted streets of Charles Dickens’ London, Victorian Britain was, in fact, a period of new and vivid colours. The Industrial Revolution had transformed the Victorians’ perception of colour and, over the course of the second half of the 19th century, it became the key signifier of modern life. Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design charts the Victorians’ new attitudes to colour through a multi-disciplinary exploration of culture, technology, art and literature. The catalogue explores key ‘chromatic’ moments that inspired Victorian artists and writers to think anew about the materiality of colour. Rebelling against the bleakness of the industrial present, these figures learned from the sacred colours of the past, the sumptuous colours of the Middle East and Japan and looked forward towards the decadent colours that defined the end of the century.
Table of Contents Section 1: Glowing Colour: Introduction; Ruskin and Colour Pedagogy; Turner, Ruskin and the Lure of Venetian Colour; The Colour of the Middle Ages; Unweaving the Rainbow: Nature’s Colours in Art and Fashion; Pretty Plant Photographers or Pioneering Women?; Object in Focus: Hummingbird Necklace by Harry Emanuel;
Section 2: Colour for All: The Aniline Revolution; The International Exhibition of 1862; Object in Focus: Technical Analysis of the Great Bookcase; Sculpture and Race; The Colours of the Ancient Past; Orientalism; Object in Focus: Joseph and his Brethren by Owen Jones; India and Colour;
Section 3: Colour for Colour’s Sake: The Colours of Decadence: Yellow, Green and Blue; Object in Focus: St. Mark’s Venice by James McNeill Whistler; Queering Colour; Object in Focus: Tanagra; Object in Focus: Japanese Boardgame; Loie Fuller
