Truth Is Always Grey: A History of Modernist Painting

Frances Guerin argues that painters select grey to respond to the key question of modernist art: What is painting? By analyzing an array of modernist paintings, Guerin demonstrates that grey has a unique history and identity as a color, tracing its use by painters as far back as medieval and Renaissance art.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 352 pages
Publication date: 30 January 2018
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

Why did many of the twentieth century's most renowned abstract painters frequently choose grey, often considered a noncolor and devoid of meaning? In her book, Frances Guerin argues that painters, including Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden, Mark Rothko, and Gerhard Richter, select grey to respond to a key question of modernist art: What is painting? By analyzing a range of modernist paintings, Guerin demonstrates that grey has a unique history and a legitimate identity as a color. She traces its use by painters as far back as medieval and Renaissance art, through Romanticism, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernism, to show how grey is the perfect color to address the questions asked by painting within art history and to articulate the relationship between painting and the historical world of industrial modernity. A work of exceptional erudition, breadth, and clarity, presenting an impressive range of canonical paintings across centuries as examples, The Truth Is Always Grey is a treatise on color that allows us to see something entirely new in familiar paintings and encourages our appreciation for the innovation and dynamism of the color grey.

Weight: 440g
Dimension: 140 x 215 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781517900458