Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour - Rilegato

Mavor, Carol

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1780230834 ISBN 13: 9781780230832

Casa editrice: Reaktion Books, 2013

Riassunto

The sea, the sky, the veins of your hands, the earth when photographed from space—blue sometimes seems to overwhelm all the other shades of our world in its all-encompassing presence.

The blues of Blue Mythologies include those present in the world’s religions, eggs, science, slavery, gender, sex, art, the literary past, and contemporary film. Carol Mavor’s engaging and elegiac readings in this beautifully illustrated book take the reader from the blue of a newborn baby’s eyes to Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and from the films of Derek Jarman and Krzysztof Kiéslowski to the islands of Venice and Aran.

In each example Mavor unpicks meaning both above and below the surface of culture. In an echo of Roland Barthes’ essays in Mythologies, blue is unleashed as our most familiar and most paradoxical color. At once historical, sociological, literary, and visual, Blue Mythologies gives us a fresh and contemplative look into the traditions, tales, and connotations of those somethings blue.

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Recensione:

What is it about blue that prompts a precious kind of reverie, just a sigh away (or maybe not) from whimsy? It's surely the hue of bright modernity: blue jeans, blue-liveried liners on blue seas under blue skies, a blurry blue world seen from space. Of course, all those new blues are now old ones: 20th-century blues. There are blues and blues, chromo-culturally speaking, and Carol Mavor's Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour is all about infinite or involuted meanings, the plunge into a blue that Rebecca Solnit, in her Field Guide to Getting Lost, calls 'the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in.' Blue, in Mavor's vertiginous essay, is not so much an object of art-historical analysis as an energy or atmosphere, the very mood in which [Mavor] thinks and writes. --Brian Dillon, Modern Painters

[An] evocative new book - a work which wanders at will over a world of blue. Mavor's book could hardly be less constrained by its divided subject. Hers is a stream of consciousness, illustrated by a lavish wash of colour reproductions. --Times Higher Education

In Blue Mythologies, Carol Mavor provides her own 'reflections' on blue, as her subtitle reads, employing as a guide no discernible chronology but for the admirable compass of her own affective and intellectual sensibilities . . . Mavor has developed a style that marries the erudition of scholarly writing with the intimacy of a diary . . . illustrated throughout by lavish reproductions of everything from 14th century frescoes to 21st century contemporary daguerreotypes, Mavor is at her somersaulting best, moving effortlessly between disciplines . . . The success of her book is to coax us into having a less complacent attitude to our own contradictory investments, even when it comes to something as apparently innocuous as a color.' --Los Angeles Review of Books

L'autore:

Carol Mavor is professor of art history and visual culture at the University of Manchester. She has published widely on photography, cinema, color, and childhood. Her books include Aurelia: Art and Literature through the Mouth of the Fairy Tale, also published by Reaktion Books, as well as Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Reaktion Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1780230834
• ISBN 13: 9781780230832
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 207