Interaction of Color: 50th Anniversary Edition

Product Information

Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this influential book presents Albers’s singular explanation of complex color theory principles. In place of systems, Albers developed an “experimental way of studying color and teaching color,” a method based on the idea that only by observing color in the push and tug and pull of context can one begin to understand the nature of color. 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! Josef Albers’s 1963 book Interaction of Color has not only changed my life, it has also affected my worldview. This is parallel to the recognition that no theory of composition by itself leads to the production of music, or of art.

The Photographs of Josef Albers: A Selection from the Collection of The Josef Albers Foundation | MoMA".He also invited important American artists such as Willem de Kooning, to teach in the summer seminar.

Also during this time, he created the abstract album covers of band leader Enoch Light's Command LP records. As an artist, Albers worked in several disciplines, including photography, typography, murals and printmaking. From 1916 to 1919 he began his work as a printmaker at the Kunstgewerbschule in Essen, where he learnt stained-glass making with Dutch artist Johan Thorn Prikker. One of the most influential artist-teachers of the century, Albers is best known for his squares—a geometric form to which he has been ‘paying homage’ throughout the years.The Albers Foundation, the main beneficiary of the estates of both Josef and Anni Albers, remains protective of the artist's work and reputation. I learned very quickly that the colors in my imagination were unreliable, and, once I understood the actual color studies, I saw the colors on the page were equally unreliable.

In respect to his artworks, Albers was known to meticulously list the specific manufacturer's colours and varnishes he used on the back of his works, as if the colours were catalogued components of an optical experiment. In 2013, the anniversary edition presented a significantly expanded selection of close to sixty color studies alongside Albers’s original text.He carefully recorded the technical details of each painting on the back of the panel, including the dimensions, the names of the paints used, and any varnishes or other materials applied to the surface of the painting. Success followed: Despite the astonishing retail cost, the initial print run sold out, delighting Albers, who was then 75 — and, through subsequent editions, delighting readers worldwide. He entered as a painter but his expertise in stained glass allowed him to join the faculty that same year as a stained glass maker. Albers was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968 and was professor emeritus of art at Yale until his death in 1976.

This and a continued use of disliked colors will teach that preference and dislike--as in life so with color --usually result from prejudices, from lack of experience and insight. Initially produced in a highly unusual format — a limited silkscreen edition consisting of two large, unbound volumes with 150 color plates, weighing 22 pounds — the book would become a classic guide to visual awakening, hailed by one early reviewer as a “grand passport to perception. I can't say I followed everything here, however, the purpose would be to stimulate a reading of the concept of Colour and to encourage analysis of our associations with Colour. In later works in the Homage series, he used closely related hues of the same color, requiring a more extended period of contemplation from the viewer.

Although their relationship was often tense, and sometimes, even combative, Robert Rauschenberg later identified Albers as his most important teacher. Such great hopes sounds slightly pathetic today, but are not unusual for the time shortly before the “Summer of Love” and the promise of a better world that went hand in hand with it. Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten color studies chosen by Albers, and has remained in print ever since. In 1971 Albers collaborated with Yale University Press to issue a small pocket edition of Interaction of Color and in 1972 a complete German edition and a paperback in German were published.