Yellow

Like Pastoureau's earlier volumes, this is a beautifully produced book and an impressive work of scholarship . . . it is a fascinating and sensual celebration of our complex love-hate relationship with what Goethe called this 'joyous colour'. ---Peter D. Smith, The Guardian Yellow: The History of a Color is the fifth such volume that Pastoureau has produced. Like its predecessors, which recount the visual and cultural histories of blue (2001), black (2009), green (2013), and red (2017), this one is elegant and engaging - as alluring to gaze at as it is compelling to read. Yellow may be an unsettling color, but this is a lovely and striking book. ---Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe Pastoureau's main aim is not simply to record how hues have been used, but to seek out the various values they have expressed and embodied in different times. . . . Yellow is worth buying as much for its sumptuous images as its scholarship. ---Kevin Jackson, Literary Review Michel Pastoureau continues his study of colors, following up on similar works about blue, black, green and red. Pastoureau's book, a measured and scholarly approach, is filled with images of art and artifacts as well as the color's interesting role in world history. ---Diane Cowen, Houston Chronicle If you are contemplating going to a museum, or purchasing a painting for millions for your private collection, this book is going to involve less gas or less investment, and the outcome might be more nourishing. ---Anna Faktorovich, Pennsylvania Literary Review Yellow: The History of a Color takes readers on a Eurocentric tour of the color. ---Alicia Eler, Minneapolis Star Tribune Beautifully illustrated. . . . [Pastoureau] unpicks the meanings of the colour by delving into a broad range of cultural references, from history, clothing and myth to art and etymology, and shows the different roles each colour has played in society and how they have changed. ---Michael Prodger, The Times Yellow is perhaps the most difficult of the colors Pastoureau has undertaken so far. Nonetheless, he handles it with the same sure hand and informed historical perspective he did its predecessors (Blue, Green, Red, and Black). . . . Visuals are handsome and accompanied by text that is both scholarly and easily readable, and that addresses subjects ranging from perception, philology, etymology, and dyes and pigments, to the artistic and symbolic use of color from antiquity onward. ---R.M. Davis, Choice [Yellow: The History of a Color] tells the fascinating story of yellow's evolving place in art, religion, literature and science from its sacred and symbolic status in antiquity, through its demonic associations with lawlessness when tinged with green, but in its pure state, still engendering feelings of pleasure and abundance, to its positive position in Asian societies and its lasting status as the colour of Buddhism. ---Wendy and Ian Lipke, Queensland Reviewers Collection The French scholar Michel Pastoureau investigates how individual colours have been viewed and used in the past. Yellow: The History of a Colour is the successor to similar volumes on blue, green, black and red. But it turns out that yellow has had an intriguing, though chequered, time. ---Martin Gayford, The Spectator Australia Yellow is in part the story of gold, but that was just the beginning, Michel Pastoureau points out in the fifth of his lively, informative, brightly illustrated series about individual colours. ---Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times Richly illustrated and impressively wide-ranging. * The Week *