The Book Club: Chloë Ashby

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2022

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the critic, novelist and art historian Chloë Ashby. In her new book Colours of Art: The Story of Art in 80 Palettes she takes a look at how the history of colour - how it was made, how much it cost, what it was understood to mean - has shaped the history of painting. She tells me about the age-old disagreement between the primacy of drawing and colour in composition, where Goethe and Gauguin butted heads with Newton, why Matisse was so excited by red, how Titian got blurry… and how the first female nude self-portrait was, astonishingly, as recent as 1906.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.
0:09.0	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and this week my guest is the novelist and critic Chloe Ashby, whose new book is a...
0:17.0	It's a different look at the history of art from prehistoric times to the modern day,
0:22.5	and it's called Colors of Art, the story of art in 80 pallets.
0:27.3	Chloe, welcome.
0:28.5	Hi, thank you, Sam.
0:29.7	What was it that made you think that looking at the history of art through colour
0:32.8	was going to have productive things to say and to discover?
0:36.5	Is it something that's been done before?
0:37.6	Is it something that sort of popped into your head?
0:39.8	What's the project?
0:41.5	So, I mean, there are so many different lenses
0:44.5	through which you can look at art,
0:47.8	which is helpful because sometimes when you stand in front of an artwork,
0:51.0	it can be quite paralyzing, I think,
0:53.5	when you don't know where to begin,
0:55.2	you don't know where to start. This book actually, so to tell the total truth about the book's
1:02.3	beginnings, it started because I wrote another art book and was having conversations with
1:10.0	an editor off the back of that one. The previous book I wrote
1:13.9	was called Look at This If You Love Great Art and it was a survey of 100 artworks that I think are
1:21.1	worthy of discussion. So very subjective, kind of opening myself up to differences of opinion, which is great. But this one, this
1:30.3	editor had, she wanted to do something to do with colour. She asked me what I thought, how I would
	...

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