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Book Review: Interaction of Color, J. Albers
A brief detour from the recent work. Yesterday the power went out at 3 (half an hour after I got home from errands), came back on at 7, at which point the internet connection was dead. Sigh. Since I got nothing wothwhile done (although sitting on the screened porch, getting misted with the sideways rain during the thunderstorms was wonderful), I thought I’d post this book review which I wrote a while ago….
I read this book while visiting my mom in California in early May, and have been wanting to blog about it ever since, but stuff keeps happening in the meantime!
First published in 1963 by Yale University Press, Josef Albers’ approach to color was considered radical and outside the mainstream at the time. By now, his theories are so widely accepted that it’s hard to believe they were ever “outside” ideas.
The introduction says the books is a “record of an experimental way of studying color and of teaching color.
“In visual perception a color is almsot never seen as it really is–as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.
“…First, it should be learned that one and the same color evokes innumerable readins. … distinct color effects are produced –through the recognition of the interaction of color.”
For example, in the scan just above, the ochre squares in the blue field and in the yellow-orange field are the same color. By being surrounded by complementary colors (opposites on the color wheel), one’s “reading” of the ochre color is completely changed. In the blue field, the ochre loos orange-ish; in the orange field, the ochre looks brown. Albers says that in the original design for this study, the horizontal blue and yellow stripes were strips of paper that could be lifted to reveal that a single strip of ochre paper was used to make both the small squares…wow!
The book is a fairly academic treatise, so will not suit all readers. But, if like me, you learn from words as well as pictures, it’s a fabulous work.
The original book and class was significantly larger, and therefore priced out of range of most folks. Over the past forty years, a smaller version of the book was available, but many called for an expanded edition with more of the illustrations. This revised and expanded paperback edition is copyrighted in 2006, and is now available through Amazon for an amazingly low price, so you can see why I snapped it up!
Here’s another page /example that fascinated me… hope it entices you to get the book from the library or add it to your library!
Here’s the technical stuff:
Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color: Revised and Expanded Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, (c) 1963, revised and expanded edition (c) 2006.
ISBN-13: 978-0-300-11595-6
ISBN-10: 0-300-11595-4
List Price US $15, Amazon Price $9.75.
July 22nd, 2006 at 10:39 am
I used this book as a resource for my MS in Human Development at Penn State! Love that book.