Oltrecolore. Hopper, Rothko, Warhol, Basquiat

Does the color mean anything? Is it the same for everyone? What is the relationship between colors and life? These are questions that may seem eccentric, yet one cannot think of a life without colors, a life ‘in black and white’ (also colors!). As Antonio Spadaro explains in these pages, color is one of the channels through which the world comes to us, it is a powerful means of communication, ‘it comes from outside, from beyond that offers meaning to things here, to life, to objects. Color reaches the artist who discovers it; it is the intuition of a world yet to come.’ This book is precisely about four artists, protagonists of twentieth-century U.S. art, and their quest through color: Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Their works are like ‘icons’ that allude to a ‘beyond’: icons of waiting, of light, of elsewhere, of the dark side. Variations of a constant in human experience: life is radically colored. It has endless shades, obvious distinctions and dense plots of relationships, right down to what poet Mary Oliver called the splash of happiness: ‘How could there be a day in your whole life that doesn\’t have its splash of happiness?’ And the splash is always a stain. Of color.