Interaction of Color: 50th Anniversary Edition

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Furthermore, Jameson explains that Lee's own understanding of additive and subtractive color mixtures is flawed. A print workbook by artist Fritz Horstman, the education director at the Albers Foundation, is scheduled for publication in 2024.

And, as “Interaction of Color” proves, it’s always possible that one of the latter, through time, circumstance, or merit, will emerge among the former. The Josef Albers papers, documents from 1929 to 1970, were donated by the artist to the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art in 1969 and 1970. In 1919 he moved to Munich, Germany, to study at the Königliche Bayerische Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, where he was a pupil of Max Doerner and Franz Stuck. Fifty years after Interaction’s initial publication, this new edition presents a significantly expanded selection of close to sixty color studies alongside Albers’s original text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusion of transparency and reversed grounds. Its mesmerizing illustrations are a revelation for anyone interested in color theory and human perception.Having an understanding of its power—and how to achieve the color relationships you want—is vital for any practicing artist. The paperback was one element of a triumphant year: that November, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened a solo retrospective of Albers’s work, the museum’s first for a living artist. The course was not a fixed body of color wisdom, but rather an ongoing inquiry in which solutions were not conclusions, but steps on an endless path. In place of systems, Albers developed an “experimental way of studying color and teaching color,” a method based on the idea that only by observing color in the push and tug and pull of context can one begin to understand the nature of color.

More than the typical author, Albers cared about — and knew about — fonts, typefaces, graphic design, line breaks, and printing techniques, and he was as deeply involved in the preparation of the book as physical object as he was with its content, Weber said. There are many books on color on the market, but no one combines eyesight with such profound insight as Josef Albers does in Interaction of Color. This artist and educator in Europe and the United States formed the basis of modern programs of the 20th century.The paperback has remained in print ever since and is one of the most influential resources on color for countless readers. The vertical asymmetry in the composition also suggests movement among the colored squares, with the blue square receding and the yellow square projecting forward in a telescopic manner. Albers also emphasizes that color should be considered for its value, inasmuch as for its saturation. Biography [ edit ] Josef Albers, Rosa mystica ora pro nobis, 1918 (reconstruction, original destroyed c.