The Colours of Our Memories

What remains of the colours of our childhood? What are our memories of a blue rabbit, a red dress, a yellow bike – and were they really those colours? What colours do we associate with our student years, our first loves, our adult lives? How does colour leave its mark on memory?

In an attempt to answer these and other questions, Michel Pastoureau presents us with a journal about colours that covers half a century. Drawing on personal recollections, he retraces the recent history of colours through an exploration of fashion and clothing, everyday objects and practices, emblems and flags, sport, literature, museums and 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.

I. CLOTHING

In the beginning was yellow

Turbulent stripes

The navy-blue blazer

Subversive trousers

A particular blue

From the garment to the myth

Colour against flesh

Neutral shades in good taste

Mitterand beige

Slimming colours

In the London Underground

II. DAILY LIFE

My mother's pharmacy

The sad tale of young Philippe

Sweet-dispensers

Choosing a colour: an impossible undertaking?

Greyness

Metro tickets

Red or blue?

Traffic lights

Colour and design: a missed chance?

Eating colours

III. THE ARTS AND LETTERS

In a painter's studio

A painter caught between two volumes

In darkened halls

Ivanhoe

'Vowels'

The Red and the Black

Chrétien de Troyes at the cinema

Pink pigs and black pigs

When Dalí assigned marks

The colours of a great painter

Historians without colours

The workings of time

IV. ON SPORTS GROUNDS

Goals and referees

The yellow bike

Bartali and the Italian flag

The Tour de l'Ouest

Colour by default

Easy colours and difficult ones

Pink and orange

V. MYTHS AND SYMBOLS

Little Red Ridinghood

Long live school Latin

My discovery of heraldry

The black cat

Green superstitions

The colour of destiny

Furling the colours

A historical object that is alarming

Playing chess

Wittgenstein and heraldic colours

VI. ON TASTES AND COLOURS

An American gift

Sunbathing through the years

The 'bling' of the 1950s

A brief history of gold

A mysterious shade of green

Do you see red clearly?

No purple for children

The whims of memory

Preferences and opinion polls

VII. WORDS

Brown and beige

Spelling and grammar

A day at the races

The zero degree of colour

A part that stands for the whole

The Greek blue

The demise of nuances

Speaking of colours without showing them

What is colour?

Bibliography

Index

A few helpful chronological details

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