What remains of the colours of our childhood? What are our memories of a blue rabbit, a red dress, a yellow bike? Were they really those colours? And later on, what colours do we associate with our student years, our first loves, our adult life? How does colour leave its mark on memory? How does it stimulate memory? How does it transform it? Or, to reverse that question, how does colour become the victim of memory's whims and lapses?In an attempt to reply to these questions - and to many others - Michel Pastoureau presents us with a journal about colours that covers over half a century (1950-2010). Through personal memories, notes taken on the spot, uninhibited comments, scholarly digressions and the remarks of a professional historian, this book retraces the recent history of colours in France and Europe. Among the fields of observation that are covered or evoked are the vocabulary and data of language, fashion and clothing, everyday objects and practices, emblems and flags, sport, literature, painting, museums and the history of art. This text - playful, poetic, nostalgic - records the life of both the author and his contemporaries. We live in a world increasingly bursting with colour, in which colour remains a focus for memory, a source of delight and, most of all, an invitation to dream.
Author
Pastoureau was born in Paris on 17 June 1947. He studied at the École Nationale des Chartes, a college for prospective archivists and librarians. After writing his 1972 thesis about heraldic bestiaries in the Middle Ages, he worked in the coins, medals and antiquities department of the French National Library until 1982. Since 1983 he has held the Chair of History of Western Symbolism (Chaire d'histoire de la symbolique occidentale) and is a director of studies at the Sorbonne's École pratique des hautes études. He is an academician of the Académie internationale d'héraldique (International Academy of Heraldry) and vice-president of the Société française d'héraldique (French Heraldry Society). When he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lausanne in 1996, he was described as an eminent scholar who has made a radical contribution to several disciplines. Professor Pastoureau has published widely, including work on the history of colours, animals, symbols, and the Knights of the Round Table. He has also written on emblems and heraldry, as well as sigillography and numismatics.
