Albers, on the other hand, states that his goal is simply to help us “see” color in its continually changing state and advocates for a relativity or equivalency of color values: “By giving up preference for harmony, we accept dissonance to be as desirable as consonance.” And later: “references and dislikes-as in life so with color-usually result from prejudices, from lack of experience and insight.”

Itten hoped to provide tools for creating color harmony and claims that color combinations can reveal specific psychological and symbolic meanings. But the authors had distinct-and irreconcilable-aims. The two books incorporate virtually identical examples of color squares superimposed on other squares. The reader, attentively going back and forth between text and image, is confronted by a disturbingly mutable visual and cognitive experience, by the deep instability of color.Īt first glance, these color studies appear similar to those by Albers’s fellow Bauhaus master Johannes Itten, who published his own color-course book, The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color, in 1961. Instead, it is an argument against color systems of all types: It proposes a practice of looking at and working with color that understands it to be constantly in flux. Surprisingly, though, the book is not really a pedagogical treatise on the modernist use of color. Together, the tomes meticulously reconstruct the core elements of Albers’s famous color course, which he developed over a forty-year period in collaboration with his students at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and finally Yale University. They contain a poetic, lilting text that is studded with aphorisms and plates of mostly abstract images-color experiments accompanied by instructions on how to understand the effects that they demonstrate. THE LAVISH NEW EDITION of Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color, first published in 1963, arrives in two cloth-covered volumes of blue and green (or, some might say, green and yellow).

Josef Albers, Interaction of Color: New Complete Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

Josef albers color theory book