theoriesanddocuments

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Update: Looking gain at the six-color nested square study, it occurred to me for the first time that the author may have been counting the four colors as black, gray, lavender, and blue--there happen to be three shades of blue. Perhaps they found a loophole.

Interaction of Color, folder XVI, “Color juxtaposition – harmony – quantity.” This week, we are exploring the role color quantity plays in changing the overall appearance of a visual work. Albers’ instructions are to use the same 4 colors “in 4 different juxtapositions, so different that all 4 studies appear as unrelated as possible.”

Albers makes a reference to the theater: “A set of 4 colors is to be considered–singly as ‘actors,’ together as ‘cast.’” The color actors take on different roles in four different plays. In a similar manner, former Yale art professor and Albers student Richard Lytle told his students to use four colors to create four distinctly different environments or worlds. 

Four vertical stripe studies, at top, by James McNair.

Nested rectangle study by May Kedney. Albers suggests considering these not as a single group, but as a series of potential groupings, using a sheet of paper to isolate columns or rows.

Broken vertical stripes in orange, lavender, gray, and green by Mark Strand (left), target study by unknown artist (right).  Mark Strand  became known as a poet, but studied painting with Albers during the 1950s.

Nested square study, author unknown. This study actually contains six colors, not four. I appreciate the way the author altered both quantity and overall scale to create his or her distinctly different realizations.

Confetti study, at bottom, author unknown.

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Leo Kenney (American 1925-2001). Fire Sign 1972. Gouache on Chinese paper, 27 ¾ x 10 inches. Private collection. Northwest painter Kenney was not trying to solve an Albers color problem, but note that the very different top and bottom targets contain varying quantities of the same colors.

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This week I wanted to cover a few chapters we skipped over, chapters that might not lend themselves to class projects.

Interaction of Color, folder X, “Factual mixtures – additive and subtractive.” When we refer to additive mixtures, we are speaking of color mixed in the form of direct light. White light contains all of the colors of the spectrum, combined. When colored spotlights of red, blue, and green are shone on the same spot, the resulting pool of light is white. This is the principle used to create the colors of electronic displays, such as the one you are using to view this. Albers calls additive mixture “the realm of the physicist.” 

By way of contrast, he calls subtractive mixture “the area of the painter.” Here we are describing light bouncing off a surface, reflected light. This is where pigment comes into play. Different color wavelengths are absorbed by different material surfaces; whatever wavelengths pass through, to be reflected back at us, are the colors we see. As anyone who has ever tried to mix paint knows, the more colors you add (other than white), the darker the mixture becomes. This darkening is why we use the term “subtractive” here; as we mix an increasingly darker color in paint, we are creating a material that subtracts more and more light, resulting in black.

The Interaction of Color additive study example appears at top, the subtractive study at bottom; no author is given. Source. Albers recommends making monochrome additive and subtractive studies, “for the sake of simplicity and to avoid difficult complications.” The additive study becomes increasingly lighter as each layer is combined; the subtractive study becomes increasingly darker.

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Additive and subtractive mixture and/or film color (addition and subtraction), author unknown.

I found this study in the book Josef Albers: Late Modernism and Pedagogic Form by Jeffrey Saletnik (The University of Chicago Press, 2022). It is uncredited, from a class at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s. The caption identifies this as a "film color" study related to Chapter XVII: Film color and volume color--2 natural effects; however, it appears, in construction and presentation, to be an "additive and subtractive mixture" study. It's a remarkable study, either way.

Hermann Glöckner (German, 1889-1987). Altrosa Faltung auf Gelb 1933. Japanese paper, lacquer, and gold paint on white and black primed cardboard; two-sided; 13 3/4 x 9 3/4 inches. Source.

While attempting to find more information about the study, I happened across this very similar artwork by Herman Glöckner. The Albers-related study is almost certainly a colored paper collage mimicking the behavior of layered transparent, or semi-transparent, film, but the Glöckner piece is an example of factual layering, to borrow Albers' terminology. Glöckner attached identical, folded strips of Japanese papers to two sides of a single panel, one side having been painted gold and the other black. The light/dark relationship of the layers on a light ground become inverted when placed on a dark ground. This version of the image would work well as an example for Chapter XVII.

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As a bonus, here is one of the early silkscreened color proofs of Jay Maisel's study, top, with the original Color-aid paper study on the bottom. I suspect the original study was presented with a mat covering the outer edges of the cardboard support. Incidentally, the notes in Interaction of Color suggest that the study be viewed horizontally, with the blue section on the left.

Interaction of Color, folder XII, “Optical mixture.” According to Albers, optical mixture is when “2 colors (or more), perceived simultaneously, are seen combined and thus merged into 1 new color.” For examples he reminds us of the work of the Impressionists, and particularly Pointillists such as Seurat (next post). 

XIII-1, by Josef Albers. Albers writes, “As the different designs intermix differently with the white of the paper ground, the inks appear as several reds, and as different blues, that is, as optical mixtures of blue with white, and red with white.”

XII-2 by Jay Maisel. This is a useful model for our “four color problem” studies, last post in this set: the same colors share space throughout this composition, but the character of each discrete passage is markedly different because the quantity of each color changes.

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Georges Seurat (French 1859-1891). The Bridge at Courbevoie 1886-1887. Oil on canvas, 28 x 31 ¾ inches. The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Source. Perhaps more than any other painter of his time, Seurat was interested in perception. Works like The Bridge at Courbevoie famously employ optical mixture: tiny dots of paint appear to blend into complex colors as we move further away from the canvas.

Bridget Riley (British b. 1931). Copy after The Bridge at Courbevoie by Georges Seurat 1959. Oil on canvas, 28 x 35 7/8 inches. Private collection. Source. According to Riley, the experience of copying Seurat’s painting from a reproduction sparked her career-spanning interest in perceptual phenomena.

Pink Landscape 1960. Oil on canvas, size unknown. Riley followed her Seurat copy with this original composition, and in 1961 she painted her first work in a recognizable Op Art style.

Apollo/Saturn V Space Vehicle postcard, date unknown. The four-color printing process makes use of optical mixture, along with the transparency of printing inks, to generate complex colors using a limited palette of color–cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

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Interaction of Color, folder XIII, “The Bezold Effect.” Wilhelm von Bezold (German 1837-1907) was a meteorologist and physicist who apparently also found employment in the textile industry. His contributions to color theory included the observation that the replacement of one single color in a multi-colored pattern resulted in a strong perception of difference on the part of the viewer. This has economic implications in industry, but the effect can be exploited by visual artists as well.

In folder XIII-1, by Louis Lo Monico, the bricks surrounded by black mortar appear to be a darker, richer red than the bricks surrounded by white mortar.

XIII-2, by Isabel Hooker (left) and May Kedney (right).

XIII-3 by Robert Zimmerman.

Color Plate V, Bezold Theory of Color (right) Wilhelm von Bezold. Source.

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Edna Andrade (American 1917-2008). Untitled 1980. Acrylic on canvas, 42 x 42 inches. Source. I very much wanted to share this lovely, subtle painting, but I wasn’t sure where to put it. Note how the uniformly dark background appears bluer underneath the thin, pale blue stripes and redder underneath the pale pink stripes.

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Interaction of Color, folder XV, “The middle mixture again – intersection.” We return to the concept of middle mixture, the child of two parent colors that contains equal amounts of each parent, distinguished by equally strong boundaries all around.

Top: three color intersection study by Julian Stanczak. In this study, gazing for an extended time at the middle color will reveal a perceived darkening at the left-hand boundary, where it meets pink, and a perceived lightening at the right boundary, where it meets the darker brown. These perceived dark and light colors appear to match the parent color from the other side. Another way to experience this effect is to take three carefully chosen parent/child mixtures in paper and overlap them in a stack, leaving both parents visible but covering all but a small sliver of the child. Slowly pulling the topmost paper away to reveal the child should immediately create a perceived gradient of color across the surface of the middle-mixture child color.

Bottom, intersection study by Sally Bauer. The perceived gradient that happens when a mixture meets its parents is the point of Bauer’s study. The scalloped edges of the study are intended to reinforce the “fluting” effect created by the gradient illusion.

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Julian Stanczak (American, born in Poland, 1928-2017). Offering White 1991. Acrylic on canvas, 33 ¼ x 24 1/8 inches. Source. Stanczak studied painting under Albers at Yale and became an early proponent of Op Art. This painting reminded me of the grayscale studies we talked about a few weeks ago.

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Interaction of Color, folder XIV, “Color intervals and transformation.” Four very different responses to the same problem. Albers makes a musical analogy here: a tune remains recognizable, regardless of what key it is played in or what instrument it is played on, because the intervals between notes remain the same. He describes this “color interval” problem as being one that has little to do with color as hue, but everything to do with value, what he calls “light intensity.”

Top, folder XIV-1, by Sewell Sillman. Here, the artist has elected to start with four reds arranged in a grid. The two reds on the left side of the grid are darker than the two reds on the right–it is useful to pay attention to these relationships within the grid when selecting colors. He then went in search of four blues that had a similar relationship to one another as the reds did, arranged in the same manner, but each of these blues is also darker than its red counterpart. It is the red group played in a lower key.

Comparing the red grid with the blue grid, we can see that the darkest color in each quad is in the upper left, and we see that the two left-hand colors are similarly darker than the two right-hand colors. The second part of the study demonstrates the accuracy of his color choices. He has cut the centers out of each quad and switched them. If we follow the central boundaries with our eye, top to bottom, left to right, we see that the contrasts are the same, shown by the boundary hardness appearing consistent with each jump from red to blue, blue to red.

Next, folder XIV-2, by Lola Roppel. Here, the same red quad is repeated three times, each time with a different inset quad. The blue inset appears to be very close in value to the red, the brown inset is considerably darker, and the orange lighter.

The third example, folder XIV-3, is by Amy Meyers. Albers writes, “Here, 4 colors different in hue and in light are changed into 4 other colors equally different but of a higher key.” This study must be extremely difficult to reproduce, as every version I’ve seen contains slightly different color and value relationships, sometimes to the detriment of a clear reading.

In the bottom example, XIV-4 by Austin Towle, the musical reference becomes explicit. The same four colors are used in each of the three squares. The progression of change from quad to quad–dark, to light, to not-quite-as-light–is accompanied by the letters N, B, and C. This is intended to replicate the intervals in the three chime sequence used by the National Broadcasting Company.

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Interaction of Color, folder IX, “Color mixture in paper – illusion of transparence.” 

Top to bottom, left to right: 

Left, author unknown; right by James McNair.

Left by Joseph McCullough, right by Carol Sirot. In the notes on McCullough’s green study with triangles, Albers writes, “we easily sense 4 colors here.” What he means is this: we tend to disassociate the central green of the overlapping triangles from the background green, despite the fact that it is the same color, because we mentally assign two different roles to that color. As a result, I perceive the overlap portion to be slightly lighter than the background. Incidentally, the darker color reads too brown in this reproduction; elsewhere, it is rendered as a more appropriate darker gray-green. 

Bottom two, authors unknown. Albers writes, “even texture effects submit to the illusion of transparence.” In class I suggested that the newspaper study was originally executed using one portion of old, yellowed newsprint and one portion of fresh, white newsprint.

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I was delighted to find pictures of a set of test proofs for Interaction of Color. These belonged to Sewell Sillman, a former student of Albers and one of the people responsible for printing the portfolio. Here is IX-2, from the previous post, in progress, with the position of the studies reversed and showing a simpler geometry for the study marked "IX-2 top," on the right side here. The darker color in that study is clearly a darker shade of gray-green, and not the completely different, and illogical, gray-brown color shown in the previous post.

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Interaction of Color, folder IX-1, “Transparence and space.” The third, fourth, and fifth examples show the most common approach to this type of study, depicting three levels of mixture. These are reproductions of reproductions, so it can be difficult to determine whether the original authors succeeded in finding the “elusive” middle mixture, the color that has equal parts of both parents and is distinguished by boundaries of equal contrast all around.

Top to bottom, left to right:

Left, author unknown; right by J. Clement. Albers praises the J. Clement study, with its nine levels of mixture, for being “unusually precise.”

Left, author unknown; right by Berit Orr.

Left, author unknown; right by Ferdinand A. De Vito.

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Paul Cézanne (French 1839-1906). Still Life with Quince, Apples, and Pears ca. 1885-87. Oil on canvas, 11 x 12 inches. White House Historical Association, Washington, D.C. Source.

“(Cezanne) was the first to develop color areas which produce both distinct and indistinct endings—areas connected and unconnected—areas with and without boundaries—as a means of plastic organization.” --Josef Albers, Interaction of Color p. 32 (XI: "Transparence and space-illusion").

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Examples of transparency in art and design. The cover of a catalog for a retrospective exhibition of the work of Albert Gleizes shows color changes happening at boundaries where flat planes appear to intersect. These changes do not attempt to mimic color mixtures, nor do they produce a naturalistic transparency illusion. Nevertheless, I find myself attempting to interpret the action at these boundaries as if it was the result of one transparent material placed on top of another–I see this particularly where green text turns black. I believe the graphic artist who designed the cover was trying to suggest the intersecting planes of Gleizes’ cubist paintings.

In the Op Art-inspired cover of Hypnotic Eye, black appears to result from a mixture of transparent red, blue, and green films. The cover of Total also suggests transparent films layered to create a spectrum of color. Graphic design software has made mixture and transparency effects ubiquitous in print and digital media. These effects are not quite same the kind of mixture Albers is talking about in the chapters we have been looking at this week and last; instead, they are more like what we will see in the upcoming chapter XVII, “Film color and volume color.”

Cover for Albert Gleizes, 1881-1953: a retrospective exhibition. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1964. Catalog design by Herbert Matter. Source.

Cover for Hypnotic Eye by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, 2014. Art Direction and design by Jeri Heiden, Ryan Corey, and Nick Steinhardt. Source.

Cover for Total: Joy Division to New Order 2011. Art direction by Peter Saville. Source.

Olafur Eliasson (Icelandic b. 1967). Your uncertain shadow (color) 2010. HMI lamps (green, orange, blue, magenta), glass, aluminum, transformers. From the exhibition Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life, Tate Modern, London. Photo by Yuki Nakamura.

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There is a long history of stripes in abstract painting. Paul Klee provides a good early example of a painter using stripes for something other than decorative purposes; there is a suggestion of deep space here, which, combined with the naturalistic colors (and the title), gives us the impression that we are viewing a landscape.

I appreciate Kenneth Noland’s raw canvases stained with watered-down paint, and some of his horizontal-stripe paintings are quite appealing. He works with a wide palette, changing colors from stripe to stripe. Agnes Martin, by contrast, seems to do more by using less: white paint and two pastels.

Martin also makes a good comparison with Bridget Riley, who is featured in the next post. Martin’s work is insistently hand-wrought and material-conscious. The visible pencil guidelines and brushstrokes keep us grounded in the fact that we are looking at a painting, an art object hanging on the wall, even as her carefully chosen, desaturated colors place remind us of the vast, bleached Southwestern landscape where she lived. Riley makes every effort to keep us focused on the physiological and perceptual effects her paintings inspire. There are no textures or brushstrokes in a Riley painting, and her edges are straight and clean. It’s intentionally impersonal, and the hands at work are in fact those of her anonymous assistants. In an interview I once read, Martin was asked if she used studio assistants to make her work; her reply, if I remember correctly, was “what would they do?”

Paul Klee (German, born Switzerland, 1879-1940). Fire in the Evening 1929. Oil on cardboard, 13 3/8 x 13 ¼ inches. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Kenneth Noland (American 1924-2010). New Day 1967. Acrylic on canvas, 89 3/8 x 184 ¼ inches. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Agnes Martin (American, born Canada, 1912-2004). Untitled #12 1981. Acrylic and blue pencil on canvas, 72 x 72 inches. Source.