color

On the one hand, two cushions in my office.  On the other, homage to Laura Kalba's new book, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (Refiguring Modernism),  which she was talking about at USC today.  It's a really terrific work of art history, visual history, cultural history - ranging from Impressionist paintings to flowerbeds, fireworks to autochromes - a tour de force of interweaving images and texts from many different contexts and in different registers - it's also extremely readable.  These bright colors, though - they're Indian in origin - at least, the cushions themselves are: dyed fragile silk, they're just starting to fray.  Some other, similar ones in New Mexico are already disintegrating into thin threads.  I'm so aware of the vivid colors in non-Western textiles, and the passage, in the C19th, of shifts in textile production, including the dye process: I wanted to hear more at Laura's talk about the international circulation of colors and fabrics in the C19th.  Not, of course, that this is exactly an unexplored area - and I was hooked by her comments about linguistic anthropology and color, and C19th fascination with what people actually saw, and how they did, or didn't, communicate this in language (color, I know, will be featuring prominently in the course I teach next semester ...).