Art books

Colour, the painter Patrick Heron once proclaimed, is a continent that artists have yet to explore. The mammoth two-volume The Book of Colour Concepts (Taschen, £150) catalogues numerous attempts to map this mysterious chromatic domain, from the late 17th century to the mid 20th. It quickly becomes clear that this area is infinitely vast. One only has to glance at the plates of the ‘Viennese Colour Cabinet’ (1794) – a whole column of blue-greens – to realise that. The effect of these technical diagrams is beautiful in the manner of abstract art. The illustrations from Goethe’s On Colour Theory (1810-12) could easily have been produced at the Bauhaus, while the

Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas first met in a gallery at the Louvre. Degas was standing, etching plate in hand, copying a picture. How audacious, Manet exclaimed, to work without a preliminary drawing. ‘I would not dare to do the same.’ And thus he revealed the essential difference between the two. Degas was a supreme exponent of drawing, while Manet was a magician of the brushstroke. In many ways they moved on parallel tracks, each interested in subjects from contemporary life, both at odds with academic convention. But their talents were at a tangent. Famously, they fell out after Degas painted a double portrait of his friend and his wife.