It is with the subtractive color synthesis at the latest that you quickly gain an idea of your own limitations: It’s plainly impossible to see what is so obvious here! Even if you really do know better, have a knowledge of art theory and have grown skeptical due to the optical illusion images so popular in the 1990s, you can’t help but despair at the experiments that Albers and his students arrange so comprehensibly here: You know that this light grey and this near-black are the same color, you can even check it using simple tricks, but it is all to no avail, since no exercise and no meditation can reconcile perception and reality.

Ocher-colored and brown-green diagonals on a red and white background, slanted stripes in various shades of red and blue, the secret of which only comes to light when you follow the accompanying exercise. Here Albers referred to Kandinsky, among others, who had already researched the topic of perception as the ultimate starting point for any kind of art in books like “Point and Line to Plane” and who, like Albers, had come to a similar conclusion: Fine art depends much more on the “how” than on the “what”.Īlbers recorded his findings so they were easy to understand, broke them down into individual chapters, and assigned to each a corresponding color chart. So what happened? Over 50 years before the internet phenomenon of “#TheDress”, which demonstrated to even the greatest of skeptics among us just how unreliable your own color perception is, Josef Albers and his students were already carrying out comprehensive studies into the mutable effect of colors.

And even though there is an inconceivable variety of colors, everyone quickly reaches their limits here: It is only for a fraction, perhaps 20 or 30 seconds, that we are even able to find a name. The example of color perception demonstrates that one sometimes fails to see what is actually there – even contrary to already knowing it better! And that’s not all: It is virtually impossible for a person, according to Albers, to remember a specific color tone. With these words Albers, who at the time of the book’s publication was already 75 years old, touches upon something which has long been considered an extremely liberal realization: One does not just see what the mind knows, as Goethe put it.

Josef albers color theory book