David Batchelor’s Chromophobia is a concise book on a large topic: the problem of color in the Western cultural imaginary of the last two centuries. The argument is anchored by, though not limited to, a consideration of color in the discourse of aesthetics and art history. Batchelor also considers literature, Hollywood cinema, television advertising, and architecture in order to bring color’s extremely paradoxical and checkered history to light. Generations of cultural producers, art theorists, and philosophers, claims Batchelor, have treated color as an object of fear and loathing, as an alien invader within the cultural organism. Chromophobia’s extremely eye-catching cover offers a bold emblem of those cultural prejudices about color: the simple shapes of glossy red, blue, and yellow-green set into a matte magenta field turn out to be a tinted microphotograph of the Hepatitis B virus. Batchelor’s purpose in this book is to anatomize the myth of dangerous color and then to propose a chromophile account of art since the 1960s. The book opens with an illustrative anecdote. The author visits the home of an art collector in a wealthy district of a northern European city, a home in which the banal facade gives no warning of the disturbing...