Interaction of Color: 50th Anniversary Edition

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Josef Albers' book Interaction of Color continues to be influential despite criticisms that arose following his death. He asserted that color "is almost never seen as it really is" and that "color deceives continually", and he suggested that color is best studied via experience, underpinned by experimentation and observation.

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. 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. Albers' experimental art exploring color theory and its effects on spatial relationships impacted modern artists of the 20th century.But his presentation of it gave readers a direct, structured, and personal way to explore color’s complexity — moving them beyond passive recognition of its dynamism to a visceral and active understanding. The perceptual exercises in Albers’s series experiment with and complicate the relationship between artist, artwork, and audience, drawing attention to this relationality within the reduced format of strict geometry and color. In the text, he expanded on color theory, stating that color is “almost never seen as it really is” and that “color deceives continually. As a younger instructor, he was teaching at the Bauhaus among established artists who included Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. The Homage paintings engage the viewer’s process and understanding of visual perception, presenting ambivalent forms that demand from the viewer different decisions.

The first living artist to be given a solo show at MoMA [2] and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, [3] he taught at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, headed Yale University's department of design, and is considered one of the most influential teachers of the visual arts in the twentieth century. In respect to his artworks, Albers was known to meticulously list the specific manufacturer's colours and varnishes he used on the back of his works, as if the colours were catalogued components of an optical experiment. Dedicating the book to his students, Albers acknowledged their help in having “visualized and discovered new problems, new solutions, and new presentations. The examples are drawn principally from Albers’s collection of student responses to his classroom prompts: with colored paper, make one color look like two, make two different colors look alike, make three colors look like two. Albers, who led the art school’s design department for nearly a decade, wasn’t the first to grasp the phenomenon.

Aurora references the Roman goddess of the dawn and generates associations with the warm glow of a morning sunrise. A man with the very tight, intense, highly disciplined brain of a laboratory scientist, a careful, systematic and procedural method to his teaching (learning about colour is *not about self-expression! Outside of this, it is group perception that can activate colors and give them purpose within a space. The images, while mind-bending, weren’t meant to trick our eye but instead to challenge what and how we’re seeing based on the interaction of hues.

In 2013, the anniversary edition presented a significantly expanded selection of close to sixty color studies alongside Albers’s original text. Having an understanding of its power—and how to achieve the color relationships you want—is vital for any practicing artist. In this essay Foster claims that this “attention to ‘relationality’ is key to both Albers’s practice and his pedagogy; it might well qualify as his version of the Bauhaus idea.

At Black Mountain, his students included Ruth Asawa, Ray Johnson, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Susan Weil. In November 1933, he joined the faculty of the college where he was the head of the painting program until 1949. But beyond this straightforward premise, Albers created optical effects using color and spatial relationships. Hundreds of people can talk, for one who can think,” John Ruskin wrote, “but thousands of people can think, for one who can see.