A Friends of Kenwood Sunday lecture given by Professor Charlotte Ribeyrol.
Britain’s industrial supremacy is often perceived through a black-and-white filter as the funereal age of coal pollution and bleak, working-class slums reflected in the dark, supposedly ‘gothic’, tones we see in films, TV series, and video games set in that period. Yet, the industrial revolution also totally transformed colour and most notably the chemical composition of colouring materials.
Charlotte Ribeyrol is lead curator of 'Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design' at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford until mid-February 2024. Exploding the old myth, the exhibition interweaves objects of visual culture, literature and chemistry. It is one of the main outcomes of a project called CHROMOTOPE.
Chrlotte Ribeyrol is Professor of 19th century British Literature at the Sorbonne Université, Paris. Her main field of research is Victorian Hellenism and the reception of the colours of the past in 19th century painting and literature. Since 2019, she has worked on her project CHROMOTOPE which explores the 19th century ‘chromatic turn’. She is author of 'William Burges’s Great Bookcase and the Victorian Colour Revolution' (2023).
Introduction music: Etudes op. 8, no. 7 by Alexander Scriabin (1872 - 1915), who associated colour with music, possibly synesthesia, but based on the theories of Newton.
Produced by Friends of Kenwood
www.friendsofkenwood.org.uk
@friendsofkenwood7574
24 янв 2024
