Interaction of colour article
INTERACTION OF COLOUR BY JOSEF ALBERS AND FORMULATION: ARTICULATION BY T G ROSENTHAL
If you found yourself stranded on a desert island, you could do worse than to have only these two books. And we should consider ourselves lucky, whether it was planned or not, that the revised and expanded edition of Albers' seminal work Interaction of Color has been published at the same time as Formulation: Articulation. Within these two volumes there is enough visual food for thought that when your rescuers arrived, you would probably insist on bringing these books back with you and would possibly keep them on your nightstand. When Interaction of Color was originally published in 1963, Albers' was two‐thirds into his professional career as teacher, artist and designer. This, his manifesto, was essentially based on his mistrust of colour, and was wildly successful, if not controversial, ultimately being translated into eight languages.
For someone who was born into moderate circumstances in Bottrop, a small German mining town, in 1888, it was a long, productive journey to becoming known as one of the most important colour theorists of the twentieth century. As the eldest son of Lorenz and Magdalena Schumacher, he could have easily followed in his father's footsteps and worked in the mines, or taken after his mother's side of the family and become a blacksmith. Instead, young Albers chose to take teacher‐training classes and became certified in 1908, followed by art teacher certification in 1915, and that became his profession until his passing in 1976.
In spite of its humble location, it was the church window in Bottrop that has been considered especially influential in his choice of an art‐related career. Shortly after his teaching career began, Albers studied drawing in Munich before becoming involved as a student and teacher with the Bauhaus school in Weimar and, ever true to his modest beginnings, was known to have collected glass shards from the Weimar town dump to use in his earliest colour studies. In 1925 he met and married the weaver Annelise Fleischmann, a member of the prestigious Ullstein publishing family, who was also to become his creative partner as well. It is in The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut that the archives for both of them now reside.
At the Bauhaus, Albers also developed his skill as a graphic designer and furniture designer, no doubt strongly influenced by the Bauhaus Manifesto penned by Walter Gropius in 1919, the final paragraphs of which read:
The creation of art is independent of and superior to all methodology. Art itself cannot be taught, but craft certainly can be. Architects, painters and sculptors are craftsman [sic] in the original and true sense of the word.Therefore all students must receive a thorough training in the crafts of the Workshops and in the experimental and practical sites as the indispensable basis of all creative work. Our own Workshops will be gradually extended and apprenticeship agreements will be made with outside Workshops. The School is the servant of the Workshops and will one day be absorbed by them. There are no teachers and students at the Bauhaus, only Masters, Journeymen and Apprentices.
So much for pedagogy and theory!
Albers stayed at the Bauhaus until the school's demise in 1933 as a result of the Nazi coup.
Fortunately, Josef and Anni Albers were able to relocate to the USA, at Black Mountain College, as a result of Phillip Johnson's introduction to Eddie Warburg, a patron of the arts and friend of Alfred H Barr, MOMA's founder. BMC was founded in North Carolina by John Andrew Rice, ultimately becoming known as ‘the American Bauhaus’. Although neither Josef nor Anni spoke a word of English, they were taken in with welcoming arms and prospered there until 1949, followed by a handful of years at other schools before Albers joined the faculty of Yale University in 1950. Albers remained at Yale for the rest of his career, ultimately retiring in the early 1970s. His first decade at Yale must have been tremendously exciting for this most pragmatic of men, for it was in 1963 that Interaction of Color was first published, thanks in no small part to his skilful band of students, who silk‐screened the colour panels and were the subjects of the book's dedication.
Unlike Newton and Goethe, whose colour theories were based on the refractions of light and the psychology of colour, respectively, Albers departed radically and wrote about the relativity of colour, its emphemera‐like quality and how it was ‘not to be trusted’, making colour sound like some funhouse mirror, some illusion. Make no mistake about his expertise, however: Albers, the colour magician, knew how to make the same colour look different and how to make different colours look the same.
It was in 1972 that Formulation: Articulation (all images in which are by Albers) first appeared as a set of prints, so for the decade after his first manifesto, Albers continued to refine and expand his ideas about colour, ever urging his students to develop their own colour literacy, almost as though it were a muscle.
Both these books belong in every serious painter and art historian's libraries. Enough said.
Comments
Post a Comment