The Truth Is Always Grey: A History of Modernist Painting

(Paperback)

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Frances Guerin argues that painters select grey to respond to a key question of modernist art: What is painting Presenting an impressive range of canonical paintings across centuries, this book is a treatise on colour that allows us to see something entirely new in familiar paintings and encourages our appreciation for the innovation and dynamism of the colour grey.

Reviews

"The Truth Is Always Grey is a work of exceptional erudition, breadth, and clarity. The range and force of Frances Guerin's examples are truly impressive, showing how attention to one color alone allows us to see relations between bodies of work across period and nation in unexpected ways."Brian Price, author of Neither God nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics

"Frances Guerin's discussion of grey in modern European and American abstract painting is extensive, original, and grafted on alternative critical opinions. She has done a magisterial job in selecting and combining a variety of points of views on grey as a color of major significance, in its own right, throughout the history of art."Angela Dalle Vacche, Georgia Institute of Technology

"In this timely book Frances Guerin addresses the central but neglected subject of grey in painting. Both material and philosophical in her analysis, she gives us a well researched, vibrant, and thoroughly engaging reconsideration of that widely underestimated color."Anthea Callen, author of The Work of Art

"This engaging book advances study of color and contemporary painting."CHOICE

"This is a history of the colour grey that incorporates numerous in-depth analyses and arguments: a history that was much overdue, and certainly worth reading." Visual Studies

Author Bio

Frances Guerin is senior lecturer in the School of Arts at the University of Kent. She is author of Through Amateur Eyes and A Culture of Light, both from University ofMinnesota Press.