COLOR THEORY • RICHARD KE YES
A PARTIAL HISTORY OF COLOR SYSTEMS white yellow red purple
green blue gray black
School of Aristotle (about) 300 BCE
François d’Aguilon 1613
Throughout history the nature of color has been difficult to comprehend. Until relatively recently, attempts to categorize, measure or define color have largely been arbitrary or based on analogy. Systems begin with numbers. In the ancient world the number usually applied to the idea of color was usually four, since it was agreed that there exist four directions, elements, seasons or basic Pythagorean geometric shapes. Empedocles used the idea of the painter’s pots of color to illustrate the harmony of the four elements. Democritus wrote of four “simple” colors—white (smoothness), black (roughness), red (heat), and chlõron (composed of both the solid and the void—the word probably referred to a pale yellow). Aristotle was the first to not merely name colors and ally them with elements, but to increase the amount of basic hues to seven (the number of notes in an octave), and to organize them in linear array. His organization is based on value alone; in fact, he thought that hue was a function of the mixture between dark and light. This model of arranging hues according to the their lightness or darkness (in their most saturated form) was to become the only working model of color for the next 2,000 years.
In Opticorum Libri Sex, published in 1613, François d’Aguilon offered the illustration to the left to show that the relationships between colors worked very much like the relationships between musical notes. A very similar diagram was published forty years previous to this that was only concerned with musical consonance. D’Aguilon’s drawing is considered the first published attempt to show that color relationships, and therefore the first modern color diagram.
In the late middle ages and during the Renaissance, philosophers had a tendency to use circular forms to describe the workings of cosmological or earthly forces. Robert Fludd and Athanasius Kircher have left behind a wealth of diagrammatic explanations of cosmic mysteries. Fludd’s circular arrangement of seven colors, which include a juxtaposed black and white, and a juxtaposed red and green is only in a circle because circles were used so often to explain mysteries. As an arrangement of hues, it is useless.
Robert Fludd 1626
COLOR THEORY • RICHARD KE YES
René Descartes 1650
Scientific exploration of color begins with Issac Newton. Newton’s observation that light refracting through a prism the white light spreads into bands of colored light, and that those bands could be squeezed back into a single beam of white light established that color is made of light itself. When he published the results in Opticks in 1702 he divided the spectrum into seven parts, largely because seven was considered a sacred or magic number (Newton was an alchemist). The other reason was that René Descartes had published a diagram of musical intervals in Compendium Musicae fifty years previous to Opticks, and Newton just borrowed that diagram. Newton’s initial conception of color was linear, since that is how the refracted rays of light displayed themselves, but he used a circular diagram for the same cosmological reasons that Robert Fludd did. The difference was that Newton’s circle was initially based on observation rather than conjecture. In order to make the rays of light work in circular fashion, he had to add a redpurple, which is not in the observable spectrum. Although Newton’s circular arrangement of hues was immediately influential, it took another 75 years for anyone to notice that the color wheel was a useful device for describing relationships between hues.
Issac Newton 1702
In Prismatic Colors (now one of the rarest of printed books—only two exist), Moses Harris published a hand-tinted color wheel that is one of the first entirely symmetrical arrangements of hues, and the first to be printed in color. He was also the first author to publish the observation that opposites on the wheel complemented each other and he tied the idea to the occurrence of successive contrast.
Moses Harris 1776
YELLOW tertiary GREEN tertiary BLUE
ORANGE tertiary VIOLET
RED
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1810
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s extensive work with color largely concerns color phenomena, and applying attributes to our impressions of hues. Although he did publish a circular arrangement of hues, he is remembered for his triangular arrangement, seen at left. The importance of Goethe lies more with the history of color theory and the acceptance of theory as an adjunct to an artist’s intellectual toolbox. He had a reactionary dislike for science (or, at least, Newton) and would have been glad to set back color theory two thousand years by insisting that hues are constructed from the differences between light and dark. His work is often used as validation by emotional and romantic personalities.
COLOR THEORY • RICHARD KE YES
Otto Runge 1809
Theories about color had developed slowly during the last 2,500 years, but began to dramatically coalesce in the nineteenth century. Explaining “how color works” in scientific terms became more important than “what color is like,” although poetic language for color still thrived. Otto Runge’s ideas about color were more mystical than scientific. Runge states that color contrasts are mirrored in the world of ideals (red stands for the ideal world of love, and green stands for the real world). His double triangle/circular color wheel is based on Goethe’s alternative wheel, and he adds that the warm side of the wheel is considered masculine, and the cool side, feminine.
Although Eugène Delacroix was interested in color theories, he favored the spontaneous impulse too much for us to consider his approach a scientific one. This color diagram was found in a notebook from 1830, and seems to have been known by a number of impressionist painters. Eugène Delacroix 1830
Charles Blanc’s 1867 art textbook, Grammaire des Arts du Design was one of the most influential books on the subject in France during the second half of the nineteenth century. His color diagram was actually modeled after Delacroix’s triangular sketch noted above. It is mainly interesting to present day readers for his attempt to name the tertiary hues after vegetable dyes and flowers. Charles Blanc 1867
Wilhelm von Bezold was considered one of the leading scientists of his time. This additive color wheel from his book The Theory of Color inserts a triangle in the top center to point out the additive primaries.
Wilhem von Bezold 1876
COLOR THEORY • RICHARD KE YES
Ewald Hering 1878
Ogden Rood 1879
Ewald Hering asserted that the brain sees green as a primary or archetypical color, basing the idea on the opponent theory of color perception. According to the opponent theory, the sensation of color takes place in the brain, and the brain processes color impressions in terms of three sets of color opposites—red/green, yellow/blue and dark/ light. Hering said that all colors appear reddish, yellowish, greenish or bluish. Other color theories prevalent in the late 1800’s concentrated on additive color mixtures, whose components, when added together, would create white in the center. Hering’s psychological color wheel (he was more interested in subjective experience than physics) yielded a sum of gray. This color arrangement from the book Modern Chromatics by Ogden Rood, was quite influential among the Neo-Impressionists, especially Seurat. One of the most useful aspects of any circular arrangement of hues is to point out hues that complement each other, and Rood felt that he was the first to nail down the specific complements of paint pigments available at the time, based on how the brain/eye perceives them. The fact that his subject was pigment and not theoretical color perception explains why the wheel looks so asymetrical. Rood stressed a need for the standardization of color terminology, a need that came out of the arbitrariness of names that manufacturers gave to their ready-made tubes of paint.
Albert Munsell was a painter frustrated by the problem noted above by Rood. His color arrangement was intended to standardize a naming system for all colors that could be used by any person dealing with color, in any location. His wheel is based on five primaries and their afterimage complements (because he was impressed with the decimal system), but his three dimensional arrangement of color, the Munsell color tree, was actually a more important contribution to defining what is now called color space. This color system is now among the most influential in the world. Albert Munsell 1898
Wilhelm Ostwald based his eight part color circle on the theories of Ewald Hering. Ostwald, like Munsell, was trying to define and categorize color, and, like Munsell, is best known for his three dimensional model of color space. These last two color wheels are much more involved in the attempt to provide a way for language to deal with color than in helping artists understand relationships between colors. Wilhelm Ostwald 1916