Interaction of Color; Revised and Expanded Edition

by Josef Albers; Foreword by Nicholas Fox Weber

• ISBN13: 9780300115956
• ISBN10: 0300115954
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2006-05-15
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

Josef Albers'sInteraction of Coloris a masterwork in twentieth-century art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers's unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience. Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates,Interaction of Colorfirst appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative color studies chosen by Albers. The paperback has remained in print ever since and is one of the most influential resources on color for countless readers. This new paperback edition presents a significantly expanded selection of more than thirty color studies alongside Albers's original unabridged text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusions of transparency and reversed grounds. Now available in a larger format and with enhanced production values, this expanded edition celebrates the unique authority of Albers's contribution to color theory and brings the artist's iconic study to an eager new generation of readers.

Author Biography

Josef Albers, one of the most influential artist-educators of the twentieth century, was a member of the Bauhaus group in Germany during the 1920s. In 1933 he came to the United States, where he taught at Black Mountain College for sixteen years. In 1950 he joined the faculty at Yale University as chairman of the Department of Design. The recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees, Albers was the first living artist ever to be given a solo retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Nicholas Fox Weber is Executive Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
Nicholas Fox Weber
Introduction	1	(2)
Color recollection---visual memory	3	(1)
Color reading and contexture	4	(2)
Why color paper---instead of pigment and paint	6	(2)
A color has many faces---the relativity of color	8	(4)
Lighter and/or darker---light intensity, lightness	12	(6)
Gradation studies---new presentations Color intensity---brightness
1 color appears as 2---looking like the reversed grounds	18	(2)
2 different colors look alike---subtraction of color	20	(2)
Why color deception?---after-image, simultaneous contrast	22	(2)
Color mixture in paper---illusion of transparence	24	(3)
Factual mixtures---additive and subtractive	27	(2)
Transparence and space-illusion	29	(4)
Color boundaries and plastic action
Optical mixture---after-image revised	33	(1)
The Bezold Effect	33	(1)
Color intervals and transformation	34	(3)
The middle mixture again---intersecting colors	37	(2)
Color juxtaposition---harmony---quantity	39	(6)
Film color and volume color---2 natural effects	45	(2)
Free studies---a challenge to imagination	47	(5)
Stripes---restricted juxtaposition
Fall leaf studies---an American discovery
The Masters---color instrumentation	52	(2)
The Weber-Fechner Law---the measure in mixture	54	(5)
From color temperature to humidity in color	59	(2)
Vibrating boundaries---enforced contours	61	(1)
Equal light intensity---vanishing boundaries	62	(3)
Color theories---color systems	65	(3)
On teaching color---some color terms	68	(6)
Explanation of color terms
Variants versus variety
In lieu of a bibliography---my first collaborators	74	(1)
Plates and commentary	75