A History of the World in Seven Colours

Taking us from the black nothing which preceded existence to the present-day green movement, art historian and broadcaster James Fox joins us with a cultural history unlike any other.

Colour isn’t simple surface decoration: throughout our history, it is served as a powerful bearer of meaning that has shaped our culture and our collective imagination.

In this livestream talk, James Fox will explore seven colours that have deep and profound significance to human society, showing us how their meanings have changed and multiplied over many centuries, influencing not only the history of art, but civilisation itself.

His stories amount to nothing less than a history of the world: from the black nothing which preceded existence to the birth of our red-blooded species; the gilded gods who animated the world in antiquity to the blue horizons which framed the Age of Discovery; the pristine aspirations of Enlightenment, the technicolour innovation which fuelled the Industrial Revolution and the colour which most embodies the environmental crisis which now faces us.

James Fox is an art historian and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. His many acclaimed BBC television documentaries include programmes on the history of Cornish art, the British Renaissance and the culture and politics of Vienna in 1908, Paris in 1928 and New York in 1951.