Colored With Complexity

Sebastian Smee celebrates the 50th-anniversary edition of Joseph Albers’ design classic Interaction of Color:

Color’s relativity had been established (and scorned by chromophobes) long before Interaction of Color came along. What was ingenious, and groundbreaking, was the way Albers presented the evidence: clearly, rationally, with each concise lesson leading on to the next, so that he achieved his goal – the honing of color sensitivity – in an unfolding, absorbing process. Using colored paper salvaged from printers’ workshops and bookbinders, pieces of magazine pages, paint samples, and rolls of unused wallpaper, he crafted extraordinarily effective demonstrations of color’s startling and deceptive behavior.

He lured readers in with the basics, showing how one color can have, as he put it, “many faces”: the same color can be made to appear quite different if judiciously modified by other colors nearby. Conversely, different colors can be made to appear the same.

But to emphasize Albers’s careful plotting – and to extol the sparely elegant primer in which he compiled his lessons – is to miss a crucial ingredient of his approach: the infectious spirit of serious play he encouraged. Until now, Albers’s classic couldn’t do justice to the hands-on, experiential nature of classroom lessons that inspired [Robert] Rauschenberg to praise him as “the most important teacher I’ve ever had” despite being “sure he considered me one of his poorest students.” Thanks to the brilliantly designed app that accompanies Interaction of Color, readers can be collagists rather than just attentive spectators. They can mix and match, and be mystified and enlightened.

On a related note, Nell Greenfieldboyce recently considered the slipperiness of color:

[Professor Mark] Fairchild, who studies color and vision science at the Rochester Institute of Technology, says that even physicists get it wrong when they confidently assert that color is just a wavelength of light. “My usual quick answer to that is I can take any wavelength and make it appear almost any color,” says Fairchild.

That’s because color is not something out there in the world, separate from us. “The agreed-upon technical definition of color,” says Fairchild, “is that it’s a visual perception.” So don’t try to tell Fairchild an apple is red. He’ll say, no it’s not, technically – red is just your perception. “I could change the color of illumination on that apple and make it look green or blue or something completely different,” he says. “The redness isn’t a property of the apple. It’s a property of the apple in combination with a particular lighting that’s on it and a particular observer looking at it.” All three of those elements are critical to the idea of “red” or any other color, he says. “You have to have somebody looking at that in order to combine all that information and produce a perception.”