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art historian who wrote pioneering studies on the Turner book and a masterful understanding of color in Western art

John Gage, who died aged 73, was an art historian whose incisive intellect and deep commitment to exploring the importance of color in the painting became the One of the most original and important work in the field. His understanding masterful book of color in Western art of color and culture: practice and meaning from antiquity to abstraction (1993), became a reference book. The fruit of most of the work of a lifetime, has found a wide audience and outside the field of art history, and has been translated into five languages. John also wrote pioneering studies of Turner that have transformed our understanding of this artist's approach to painting, showing how its strong visual qualities not just talking to the eye, but in answer to both eyes and mind in a way that is meaningful symbolic and cultural.

Born in Bromley, Kent, John went to Rye Grammar School, then at Queen's College, Oxford to study modern history. He was one of those students stubbornly independent, whose commitment to the life of the mind led him to neglect the study academic standard, and went with a third-class degree in 1960. His time at Oxford was interrupted by periods of work as a freelance English teacher in Florence and an assistant in an English language school in Hesse, Germany, experiences that have shaped the European perspective brought to the study of the British Romantic art.

On leaving Oxford in London, he studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, eventually writing a thesis on Turner, directed by Michael Kitson. Drawing on a variety of jobs, dishwasher to teach part-time, completed his PhD in 1967.

From 1967 to 1979, John has taught in the Department of Art History at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where he and I were colleagues. In 1978 he married Penelope Kenrick, and in 1981, had a daughter, Charlotte. In 1979 he took a position in the department of art history at Cambridge, and became a lecturer in the history of Western art in 1995. In that year he was appointed member of the British Academy. He retired from teaching but not the stock market in 2000 and settled in Italy, the arrangement of an old farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside. He continued writing and organizing exhibitions, and embarks on a new book on Australian Aboriginal art. It is often observed that a proper study of color had to be anthropological, and historical in nature.

immobilize the exact identity of a color in isolation can be subjected to all kinds of uncertainty - that this material is a blue-red or brownish red is and how it is dark and ? But we finely tuned discrimination between shades comparative considered together. The book highlights the cultural and historical color temperatures, while steering clear of the simple assumptions of relativistic color our perceptions and deployment of black artists are simply determined by culture.

The general nature of the thinking about John quite well in the introduction, which clearly indicates that his study is very ambitious, inevitably will be a little rebellious and can not be adopted him even too seriously. "This is a landmark study in that it is one thing after another," he says wryly, but this is how a look "for the origins of methods and concepts of visual art and art as the manifestation survive living on the general attitude towards the color is expressed in visual form. "