Josef Albers is in many ways comparable to Johannes Itten, although better known for his artistic work. In the year of 1920 Albers joined the Bauhaus as a young student skilled in the art of glass painting. He was already 32 years old, and was by far the oldest student at the school. Already in 1922 he became a teacher in the department of design, and by the time he was still focused on glass paintings. He slowly started creating work based on more strict, geometric principles, and most of them were in black and white only. Compared to Itten, Albers was more of a craftsman.
Albers later immigrated to the U.S, and relatively late in his career (1950) he became the head of the graphic design department at Yale University. There he continued his work on geometric forms, and his pieces from the time include explorations in graphic tectonics, structural constellations and geometric surrealism, like we now it from Sol Lewitt.
At yale his works became more minimalistic, yet more colorful.
He started teaching color theory, and in 1963 he released one of the most famous books about color theory, “The Interaction of Color”. Like Itten his focus was on the interaction of colors, and how a designer can manipulate human perception by knowing about color combination. The book is as much about phycology as it is about color, and this is well illustrated by the fact that only in the last chapter of the book he introduces the color systems. The rest of the book is written lectures and exercises with color paper intended for students. He describes:
“In visual perception a color is almost never seen as that which it actually is, i.e as that which it is physically. Thus color becomes the most relative medium of art. In order to use color successfully, one must recognize that color deceives constantly. Therefore we do not start with the study of color systems. One has to experience the fact that one and the same color permits innumerable variants. This book therefore does not accept the academic concept of theory and practice. Perhaps it proceeds inversely – places practice before theory which, as a matter of fact, is only the product of practice”.
The exercises in the book are remarkably similar to those of Itten, though Albers include more colors in his exercises. In the following example, the same orange square is shown on two different background, with a stripe of blue and yellow between them. Even though the two square have identical colors, the eye will perceive the bottom square to be darker. More interestingly, the bottom orange background will seem to have the same color as the square at the top, even though they are very different colors.
Similar examples with other color combinations takes this further, making it even harder to understand that the squares are actually identical.
The last example is particular effective. Only by re-creating the example with colored paper, and moving the one square across the backgrounds, it’s possible to see how the perception changes as the square falls on different backgrounds.
With his Homage to the Square series, Albers found a geometric figure that allowed him the versatility to demonstrate most of his exercises in a single shape. The figure is a square filled with either three or four colors, always adhering to the same geometric principles. The series consist of more than a thousand works, and it became a template for him to investigate his the subjectivity of color.
By filling this geometric shape with different colors, Albers uses color to create a false sense of depth in the image. In some of the paintings, the center square will look like it’s at the end of a long hall. Another painting will look like the center dot is lying on top of the other colors. In the book “Interaction of Color”, Albers explains this in great detail:
“This back-and-forth on which the plastic perception of these interlaced color zones is dependent, us modified by illumination. In clear daylight a blue zone remains dark and deeply hidden in the picture frame, while in the twilight the complete opposite is true: the red loses brightness, the blue assumes an increasingly powerful glow”
Albers “Interaction of Color” is still today considered a graphic design classic.
Next post: Summary
The block quote was really illuminating. Growing up I always thought of color as being fixed, but it is relative. Especially when dealing with light and projections. Although I enjoy Albers’ paintings, I find the same repetitive exercises (similar to Itten’s) a bit dull.
Hey Rune, nice job!
I find it interesting that Itten and Albers’ approach to color theory is are both so strictly theoretical and I found their conclusions to be highly subjective. I wonder if any of their studies were more scientific than what you discussed in your research. For instance, did they ever perform any extensive studies by interviewing multiple subjects about how they perceived the different shapes and colors in the images that you discussed?
I personally do not agree with the assertions made by Itten in regards to the images of colored squares. To me, when I first looked at those images of the red and yellow squares, the yellow squares looked the same size, and the red square on the white background seemed bigger, now looking at it again, I get a different effect. I wonder if this has to do with the fact that I am looking at the images on a screen as opposed to how Itten originally observed the images on paper. I’m sure this different medium of presentation must have an effect on how the images are perceived since the interplay between light and surface are very different in the two cases.
Also, there seems to be no discussion of the actual biology physiology of perception, and how that might influence these effects described by the two designers. In my own research, I stumbled upon a collection of scientific research papers dealing with the matters of perception very similar to the ones discussed by Itten and Albers, and I wonder how having a more informed scientific understanding about the nature of perception would have influenced their own work.