1. Everything is blue 2. Blue is joyful-sad 3. Unwrapping Blue Boy 4. One cat, four girls, three blue and white pots: Walpole's 'Selima' and Sargent's Daughters of Edward Darley Boit 5. 'A thing of Beauty is a guilt for ever' 6. Milk and sugar are blue 7. Timber, timbre: hearing blue again 8. A bolt from the blue 9. Cyanoclasm 10. Like a stocking: two paths of metaphor and metonymy 11. Blue lessons: a Patch of Blue, a blue cardigan buttoned and a robin's egg 12. To blue: Helen Chadwick's Oval Court 13. 'A foggy lullaby' 14. Words fail 15. A blue fawn's eye 16. Blue Albertine and Blue Ariane: (Marcel Proust and Chantal Akerman) 17. A blue lollipop (Krysztof Kieslowski) 18. 'O blue' 19. Venice is a wet map 20. Domestic blues: Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur 21. Aran is a blue place where it is hard to find anything missing 22. In Lieu of a Blue Ending: Un-Knitting a Cerulean Jumper
Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Manchester. She has published widely on photography, cinema, colour and childhood. Her books include Aurelia: Art and Literature through the Mouth of the Fairy Tale (Reaktion Books, 2017).
Julia Kristeva has said that “colour is not zero meaning: it is
excess meaning”. Art historian Carol Mavor’s evocative and eclectic
collection of essays demonstrates how true this is . . . Drawing on
the history of art, photography, literature and her own memories,
Mavor dives deep into an ocean of blueness . . . Sumptuously
illustrated throughout, Mavor’s writing – inspired by Roland
Barthes’s Mythologies – is rich with insights, both theoretical and
persona . . . To quote Colette, Mavor is without doubt a true
“connoisseur of blue”.
*The Guardian*
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*
In Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour, Carol Mavor, moves
between mediums and centuries, examining Paul Gauguin’s paintings,
Marcel Proust’s writings, the films of French director Agnes Varda,
and much more. Fifty-nine color plates add lush visuals and the
blue ribbon marker is a nice touch.
* Boston Globe*
[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*
The color plates reveal an astonishing variety of shades, from the
blue-tinged grey of Gauguin’s Little Girl Dreaming to the rich
purple of Yves Klein’s painting People Begin to Fly to the foggy
light-blue sky and cliff in Fred Holland Days photograph, Nude
Youth in Rocky Landscape . . . This fine, multi-disciplinary work
explores the color’s aesthetic and emotional resonances from a
fresh perspective.
*Publishers Weekly*
Mavor offers an engaging and poetic exploration of the color blue.
Like Joseph Cornell assembling one of his boxes, Mavor articulates
this metaphorical exploration in a series of short chapters. As
expected, the symbolic meanings and psychological effects of the
color are introduced. Less expected is the wide range of media,
including literature music poetry film objects places and
individuals. Theory, notably that of Roland Barthes (whose
Mythologies inspired the books structure) is integrated skillfully
so as not to interrupt the reader’s progress. Recommended.
*Choice*
Describing a color is the challenge Carol Mavor takes up in Blue
Mythologies, and more obliquely in Black and Blue, and she does it
beautifully. These two books are the latest blossoms Mavor has
cultivated, works that confirm the tenderness of her critical
passions. She is a kissing cousin of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and
Susan Stewart, in her attention to touch and affect, in her
sensitivity to her own emotions and sense perceptions in her
apprehension of art. So, for an art historian in particular, her
work is singular, unusually labile, sensuous, associative . . .
*Critical Quarterly*
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*
An exciting literary treasure hunt that maps out the color blue as
a pathway to experience and memory.
*Shelfawareness*
Carol Mavor’s work is the closest to that of Roland Barthes we are
ever likely to have. What I like about it is that it is as artistic
as the art which is its subject matter. Carol Mavor not only
studies blue, she bleeds it.
*Hayden White, Emeritus Professor of the History of Consciousness,
University of California*
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