A Red that Sings transports the reader to the epicentre of Belgian modernism, where colour is more than just colour: it brings spectacle, vibrates and resonates. In the paintings of James Ensor, Rik Wouters and Jules Schmalzigaug, pigments are not silent elements but musical forces: vermilion cries out, blue clatters, yellow jangles and green blares.

This book offers a compelling cultural history of colour as sound. Drawing on artists’ letters as well as art criticism, poetry, music and philosophy, it illustrates how modern artists and thinkers from Charles Baudelaire and Vincent van Gogh to Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Scriabin and the Futurists sought synaesthetic connections between seeing and hearing.