Color Theorists Lecture Notes PDF

ID: JM-MARATON PRESENTATION Copyright 2019 jmmaraton ® USC SAFAD Color Theorists  Color Theorists During the eighteenth century in Europe, an historical period known as the Enlightenment (or Age of Reason), there was a fresh and vigorous search for rational, rather than mystical,...

ID: JM-MARATON PRESENTATION Copyright 2019 jmmaraton ® USC SAFAD Color Theorists  Color Theorists During the eighteenth century in Europe, an historical period known as the Enlightenment (or Age of Reason), there was a fresh and vigorous search for rational, rather than mystical, explanations for all kinds of natural phenomena. People began to believe in the existence of irrefutable laws of nature. There was an assumption that there were natural laws for everything, including laws for combining colors, and that these laws, like laws of gravity, only awaited discovery. The intellectual world of the eighteenth century was quite fluid. People didn’t think of themselves as writers, biologists, or mathematicians but as “natural philosophers,” “theologians,” or “geometricians,” all with wide-ranging and overlapping areas of interest.  Color Theorists In this way the “behavior” of colors could be explained and predicted, and the mystery of observed color phenomena mastered through an understanding of natural laws. The search for laws of color harmony was only one small part of the sweeping intellectual ferment of the time. Two themes dominated eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century color study. The first was the search for a comprehensive color-order system, including an appropriate format for visualizing it. Once in place, a color-order system could become a field in which the all important search for laws of color harmony could take place. These treatises, dating from the late eighteenth century and continuing today, make up the collective body of knowledge known as color theory. Just as there are classics in literature, there are classics of color study. Two towering and very different figures dominate the beginnings of this discipline: Isaac Newton (1642–1727) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Their observations are the foundations of modern color theory.  Isaac Newton www.washingtonpost.com/history Newton observed that as each Isaac Newton, working at Cambridge in the Because glass, the material of the prism, late 1690s, first split sunlight into its slows each wavelength down at a slightly wavelength enters a prism it component wavelengths by passing it different rate, each emerges as a separate bends, or refracts. through a prism. beam of light: a distinctly different color.  Isaac Newton A drawing of Sir Isaac Newton dispersing light with a glass prism., Photo: Apic/Getty Images fineartamerica.com A rainbow is a naturally occurring Newton recombined the separated beams He published his results, entitled demonstration of Newton’s experiment. with a lens and reconstituted white light. Opticks, in 1703. Newton’s conclusion Droplets of water in the atmosphere act as tiny From this he hypothesized the nature of that light alone generates color prisms, and sunlight is broken into visible colors. light and the origins of perceived color. remains a basis of modern physics.  Jacques Christophe LeBlon archive.org https://sewsitall.blogspot.com/ LeBlon’s treatise, Coloritto (c. 1730) Unlike Newton’s earlier theories, which offers the first concept of three Jacques Christophe LeBlon (1667–1741), a addressed colors of light, and Goethe’s later subtractive primary colors. His work French printmaker, identified the primary ones, which included ideas about perception remains a foundation of present-day nature of red, yellow, and blue while mixing and aesthetics, LeBlon’s efforts and printing. pigments for printing. observations deal with practical realities.  Moses Harris project Gutenberg brightonmuseums.org.uk www.biodiversitylibrary.org Harris, also addressing subtractive (artists’ an English engraver, used LeBlon’s Harris believed that red, yellow, and blue and printers’) colors, was the first to publish were the most different from each other and them as an expanded circle of relationships three primaries to produce the first should be placed at the greatest possible — a true visualization of color organization. known printed color circle (c. 1766). distances apart on the circle.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe https://www.bbc.co.uk/ Goethe’s most familiar contribution to www.physicsorfantasy.co.uk/ color study is the six-hue color circle. Goethe spent a great deal of energy trying to Although Goethe believed that there prove that Newton was wrong, publishing his first www.britannica.com/ were only two primary colors, blue and treatise (of a lifelong series intended to refute Newton’s hypotheses) in Announcement for a Goethe was fascinated by color. He was yellow, and that all colors derived from Thesis in Color in 1791. Goethe viewed colors not familiar with Newton’s theories of color but them, LeBlon’s red-yellow-blue primary as light, but as an entity of their own, as color basis prevailed, and the completed strongly opposed them, and bitterly resented Goethe color circle reflects that experienced reality. Like Newton, Goethe was both a genius and a child of the Enlightenment. the acceptance of Newton’s ideas. convention.  Otto Philip Runge https://www.colorsystem.com/?page_id=771&lang=en https://www.colorsystem.com/?page_id=771&lang=en The colour-sphere has the pure colours art theorist known for his around the equator, starting with the expressive portraits and symbolic three primary colours of red, yellow and landscapes and for his Otto Philip Runge (1770–1840), a German painter, blue. Three mixed colours take their groundbreaking colour theory, shared in conceptualizing what are now called place in each of the equal intermediate expounded in Farben-Kugel (1810; complementary colors. He called them, with spaces between the primaries, while Colour Sphere). enormous insight, “completing colors.” white and black form the sphere’s poles.  Johannes Itten https://paulinaaleshkina.com/ personal.utdallas.edu/ Itten codified color harmonies as a series of He theorized seven contrasts of color based Johannes Itten (1888–1967) chords based on the complementary relationship on perception alone: contrast of hue, value, and diagramed them as geometric forms and saturation, warmth and coolness, followed Goethe in exploring color although these chords are mathematically based, complementary contrast, simultaneous as a series of contrast systems and Itten’s approach to color theory is notably less contrast, and contrast of extension (area). opposing forces. rigid than many that preceded it.  Johannes Itten www.huevaluechroma.com/ www.amazon.com Itten’s focus was as much on individual perception as on mathematical relationships. Significantly, his major work is titled The Art of Color  Josef Albers https://arthistoryteachingresources.org/ Josef Albers taught that true He became the most influential name understanding of color comes from an in color theory in the United States, Josef Albers (1888– 1976), made the final intuitive approach to studio exercises. but his 1963 book Interaction of Colors break with the color-order tradition. Albers He stressed the instability and relativity contained nothing like the usual charts fled Nazi Germany in the early 1930s and of perceived colors and the power of or systems. brought his teaching methods to Yale. visual training.  Josef Albers https://www.brainpickings.org/ https://www.brainpickings.org/ Albers was not the first to recognize that the visual experience, In Interaction of Colors (1963), Albers casually discounts the more than conscious choice, determines how we perceive generations of theory that preceded him: “This book colors, but he was the first to assert the primacy of the visual...reverses this order and places practice before theory, experience over structure or intellectual considerations. For which is, after all, the conclusion of practice.” Albers, the visual experience, not theory, was paramount.  Bauhaus School bauhaus-movement.tumblr.com Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, Georg Muche and Paul Klee in Paul Klee’s studio at the Bauhaus Weimar, 1925. The Bauhaus group brought the study of color to a level of attention not seen since Goethe’s challenge to Newton. Feininger, Klee, Kandinsky, Itten, Albers, and Schlemmer, master-students of color and color theory, approached color from new directions with intelligence, wit, and energy.  ID: JM-MARATON PRESENTATION Copyright 2019 jmmaraton ® USC SAFAD Color Theorists Sources: Holtzschue, L. (2021). Understanding Color: An Introduction for Designers 4th (fourth) edition. Example Product Manufacturer. Blumberg, N. (2021, July 19). Philipp Otto Runge. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Philipp-Otto-Runge