Color Lectures Series -...

Color Lectures Series © Brian Curtis - 2008 University of Miami

BRIAN CURTIS UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI Coral Gables, Florida

History of color theory

The search for a comprehension of exactly what color is and how it functions has been going on for hundreds of years. Numerous models and systems have been developed, and the following is an attempt to summarize some of the major leaps that have been made to bring our understanding to its current level.

The first known studies of color were done in ancient Greece by Aristotle, who theorized that color existed in the form of rays sent down from the heavens by God. His theory was not disputed until the Renaissance when more sophisticated color systems were developed by Aguilonius (1613) and Sigfrid Forsius. Aguilonius' system was the first attempt at defining all colors and was based on his observations of the changing color of the sky from dawn to dusk, (see below).

History of color theory - Sir Isaac Newton

Issac Newton, besides being a great mathematician and a scientist was also a believer in mysticism and Numerology. Since Newton believed that the essence of light was divine and that 7 was the perfect number he described the spectrum as including red, orange, yellow, green, blue, Indigo (blue violet) and violet. By closing the color wheel he also made room for extraspectral red violet (magenta) which does not appear in the visible spectrum of light but is a mixture of the colors at both ends of the light spectrum.

1642-1727

EXTRASPECTRAL HUES

Purple, Magenta, Rose

The first color wheel of logical color order based on scientific observation was invented by Sir Isaac Newton in 1666. Newton, besides being a great mathematician and a scientist was also a believer in Numerology. Since Newton believed that the essence of light was divine and that 7 was the perfect number he described the spectrum as including seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet (ROY G. BIV). He then he joined the two ends of the color wheel together to make room for red violet thereby completing a natural circular progression of colors.

That light is the source of color was first demonstrated when Isaac Newton passed a beam of sunlight through a glass prism, producing the rainbow of hues of the visible spectrum. This phenomenon had often been observed before, but it had always been related to latent color that was said to exist in the glass of the prism. Newton, however, took this simple experiment a step further. He passed his miniature rainbow through a second prism that reconstituted the original white beam of light, His conclusion was revolutionary: color is in the light, not in the glass, and the light people see as white is a mixture of all the colors of the visible spectrum.

Newton associated each color with a note of a musical scale.

History of color theory - Johann Wolfgang Goethe

A century after Newton, Johann Wolfgang Goethe began studying color. Goethe challenged Newton's ideas and created his own color system. Newton's and Geothe's approaches were very different. Newton's studies in color were scientifically based, while Goethe's interest was more in the psycological effects of color. He wished to investigate whether rules could be found to govern the artistic use of color.

1749 - 1832

Originally he planned on creating an improved color wheel, but later Goethe found his ideas were best expressed within an equilateral triangle. He noticed that blue gives a feeling of coolness and yellow has a warming effect. Goethe created a color wheel showing the psychological effect of each color. He divided all the colors into two groups – the plus side (from red through orange to yellow) and the minus side (from green through violet to blue). Colors of the plus side produce excitement and cheerfulness.Colors of the minus side are associated with weakness and unsettled feelings.

Goethe reformulates the topic of color in an entirely new way. Newton had viewed color as a physical problem, involving light striking objects and entering our eyes. Goethe realizes that the sensations of color reaching our brain are also shaped by our perception — by the mechanics of human vision and by the way our brains process information. Therefore, according to Goethe, what we see of an object depends upon the object, the lighting and our perception.Goethe seeks to derive laws of color harmony, ways of characterizing physiological colors (how colors affect us) and subjective visual phenomena in general. Goethe studies after-images, colored shadows and complementary colors. And he anticipates Ewald Hering’s “opponent-color” theory, which is one basis of our understanding of color vision today. The opponent color theory suggests that there are three opponent channels: red versus green, blue versus yellow, and “Black” versus white (the latter type is achromatic and detects light-dark variation, or luminance). Responses to one color of an opponent channel are antagonistic to those to the other color.Above all, Goethe appreciates that the sensation of complementary colors does not originate physically from the actions of light on our eyes but perceptually from the actions of our visual system.

History of color theory - Philip Otto Runge

In 1810 Philip Otto Runge, after researching colour for several years and corresponding with Goethe, he published Die Farbenkugel (The Colour Sphere), in which he describes a three-dimensional schematic sphere for organizing all conceivable colours according to hue, brightness, and saturation. Pure hues were displayed around its equator. Through the central axis was a gray value scale, from black at the bottom to white at the top. Across the surface of the sphere, the colours were graded from black to the pure hue to white, in seven steps. Intermediate mixtures theoretically lay inside the sphere His theory was revolutionary at the time, as it attempted to arrange colors based on hue (red,cyan,orange,etc..), whiteness, and blackness (representation of color, value, and intensity). You can see from the two top views in the example, that the pure hues on the outside of the sphere lighten and darken as they reach the two poles. Horizontal and vertical cross-sections are shown below them. His sphere was adopted 150 years later by the great German teacher Johannes Itten. Itten opened the sphere into a star to display the entirety at once in 2-D.

1777 - 1810

James Clerk Maxwell - 1832 - 1879

A Scottish mathematican and theoretical physicist who had a considerable influence on 20th Century physics. He is credited with discovering color photography through the use of red, green, and blue filters. The Maxwell Triangle is an attempt to demonstrate additive colour mixing. However, it turns out that this straightforward triangle fails to encompas the entireity of color space. There is only one way around this problem - is CIE Imaginary Primaries - that is including primaries that can't be found in the spectrum.

1931 CIE Chromaticity diagram

The representation of the whole range, or gamut, of human color perception is quite large. However, when we look at the RGB and CMY color models—which are essentially models of color production—we see that the gamut of colors we can reproduce is far less than what we can actually see.While not precise, the illustration above clearly shows this problem by superimposing representative RGB and CMY gamuts over the 1931 CIE Chromaticity Diagram (representing the whole gamut of human color perception):

As its name implies, the International Commission on Illumination - abbreviated as CIE from its French title Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage - is an organization devoted to exchangeof information among its member countries on all matters relating to the science and art of lighting.

One of the most difficult tasks in displaying colored images is to render spectra even approximately correctly. The problem is not only that the fully-saturated colors of the spectrum cannot be exactly reproduced in any medium but monochromatic light itself; there is also the problem of mapping the spectral hues into the chosen display medium.People who are unfamiliar with color science often suppose that one could just take a color photograph, and then reproduce that. But color photography, while it renders many common objects reasonably well, is dismal at capturing spectra.

Triangle represents sRGB color space

C.I.E. 1976 U.C.S. Chromaticity Diagram

History of color theory - Johannes Itten

Much of contemporary of color theory was developed by Johannes Itten, 1888 - 1967, a Swiss color and art theorist who was teaching at the School of Applied Arts in Weimar, Germany. This school is also known as 'Bauhaus'. Johannes Itten developed 'color chords' and modified the color wheel. Itten's color wheel is based on red, yellow, and blue colors as the primary triad and includes twelve hues.

Itten's work on color is also said to be an inspiration for seasonal color analysis, Itten having been the first to associate color pallates with four types of people and designating those types with the names of seasons. Shortly after his death, his designations gained popularity in the cosmetics industry with the publication of “Color me a Season”. Cosmetologists today continue to use seasonal color analysis, a tribute to the early work by Itten."

Itten was a follower of Mazdaznan, a fire cult originating in the United States that was largely derived from Zoroastrianism. He observed a strict vegetarian diet and practiced meditation as a means to develop inner understanding and intuition, which was for him the principal source of artistic inspiration and practice. Itten's mysticism and hold on the students increasingly alienated him from the other leading figures of the Bauhaus, particularly Walter Gropius and Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, who were moving the school in a direction that embraced mass production rather than individual artistic expression and craftsmanship. The rift led to Itten's forced resignation from the Bauhaus.Itten's works exploring the use and composition of color resemble the square op-art canvases of artists such as Josef Albers, Max Bill and Bridget Riley, and the expressionist works of Wassily Kandinsky."

TINT SHADE MIXED WITH GRAY

NEUTRALITY SCALE

In 1914, Nobel prize winning chemist and amateur painter who made his own paints, Wilhelm Ostwald, Ostwald devised a refinement on the Runge sphere color system that is a three-dimnesional model based on four primaries and 24 color steps

History of color theory - Wilhelm Ostwald

1853 - 1932

The Ostwald color system has fallen out of favor, primarily because its coordinates are too coarse due to the fact that it is much more symmetrical than the Munsell color system.

OPTICAL COLOR MIXING

Optical Mixing

In 1905 Albert Munsell, an American artist and an art teacher, developed a variation on the Runge system whose strength lies in the fact that it is an open system that can adjust to the discovery of more intense hues. It was revised in 1943

History of color theory - Albert Munsell

1858 - 1918 Albert Munsell founded the Munsell Color Company in 1917, the Munsell Color Foundation in 1942 (to promote the advancement of the science of color), and the Munsell Color

Science Laboratory in 1983 at RIT.

The Munsell notation to specify the coordinates is HV/C (HueValue/Chroma).

• Hues are specified using have 3 different notations • Values have a numeric notation from 0 (black) at the south pole to 10 (white) at the north pole of the 3D Munsell shape. • Chroma (Saturation) has an arbitrary numeric notation 0-30+ for distance from the core of the 3D Munsell shape. Only fluorescent colors get as high as 30.

History of color theory - Joseph Albers

Josef Albers (1888-1976) was born in Bottrop, Westphalia, Germany. As a young man, he taught the primary grades in Bottrop; then, following study in Berlin, received certification to teach art. During this time Albers began to think of himself as an artist. In 1920, at age 32, he enrolled at the newly-formed, progressive Bauhaus school in Weimar. (The Bauhaus, a design workshop formed by architect Walter Gropius, was "dedicated to merging the traditionally separate disciplines of the fine and applied arts in an effort to improve the quality of modern life in all its aspects and, ideally, at every social level. At the Bauhaus, the design of a teapot was as important as the architecture of a building, and the craft of furniture making as serious an undertaking as mural painting."1) After finishing his studies there, Albers joined the faculty to teach the preliminary course on material and design.

It was during his time with the Bauhaus that Albers came into his own as a creative talent. Eventually becoming Assistant Director and Director of the Furniture Workshop, he retained his position with the Bauhaus until it was forced to close, under Nazi pressure, in 1933.

History of color theory - Joseph Albers (1888-1976)

In America, the organizers of Black Mountain College, a utopian experiment in education in the mountains of North Carolina, asked Philip Johnson, then director of the department of architecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to recommend an art teacher. He suggested Albers, who, though he did not speak a word of English and did not know where North Carolina was, accepted. (Albers's wife, Anni, thought perhaps North Carolina was in the Philippines.) According to Marcia J. Wade, "His [Albers's] influence at Black Mountain was seminal. He emerged there as one of America's most important and original teachers of art--a reputation solidified by the publication decades later of Interactions of Color, the definitive work on color theory.” Albers remained at Black Mountain until 1950 when he became head of the Department of Design at Yale University School of Art. He remained there until 1958, when he assumed the position of Visiting Professor until 1960.

Pantone Color Chart

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History of color theory

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