A star curator at the American Museum of Natural History widens the
palette and shows how the physical, natural, and cultural context of
color are inextricably tied to what we see right before our eyes.
Is color a phenomenon of science or a thing of art? Over the years,
color has dazzled, enhanced, and clarified the world we see, embraced
through the experimental palettes of painting, the advent of the color
photograph, Technicolor pictures, color printing, on and on, a vivid and
vibrant celebrated continuum. These turns to represent reality in
"living color" echo our evolutionary reliance on and indeed privileging
of color as a complex and vital form of consumption, classification, and
creation. It's everywhere we look, yet do we really know much of
anything about it?
Finding color in stars and light, examining the system of classification
that determines survival through natural selection, studying the arrival
of color in our universe and as a fulcrum for philosophy, DeSalle's
brilliant A Natural History of Color establishes that an understanding
of color on many different levels is at the heart of learning about
nature, neurobiology, individualism, even a philosophy of existence.
Color and a fine tuned understanding of it is vital to understanding
ourselves and our consciousness.
