Color Codes

Riley's richly rewarding scholarly study explores the multiple meanings of color in painting, from the bold experiments of Robert and Sonia Delaunay and the Fauves, to Matisse's key influence on Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, David Hockney and Milton Avery to the spiritual use of color in Kandinsky, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the chromatic investigations of Georgia O'Keeffe, Robert Ryman and others. A thirst for an alternative, transcendental order motivated the philosophers Hegel, Oswald Spengler and Jacques Derrida in their theorizing on color, writes Riley, World Art correspondent and professor of English at Baruch College in New York. In architecture, he traces a renascence of color (Michael Graves, James Stirling); in music, he shows how chromaticism evokes the mind's complexity and spiritual yearnings (Wagner, Stockhausen, Schoenberg, Messiaen); in literature, he delves into structural analogies between color and language (Joyce, Proust, Pynchon, Wallace Stevens, A.S. Byatt). The theories of Freud, Jung and Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim help Riley elucidate the vital role of color in dreams, perception, emotion and memory. Illustrated. (Mar.)