CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Color Theory
Art grounded in ideas about how colours mix, contrast and change one another, from Chevreul and Seurat to Albers and Op Art.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Colour theory covers how colours mix, which pairs clash or balance, and how the eye alters a colour according to its neighbours. Isaac Newton bent the spectrum into a circle in Opticks (1704), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe answered with a study of colour as experienced. The chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul's 1839 treatise on simultaneous contrast was read closely by painters.
Georges Seurat set small touches of complementary colour side by side in A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86), trusting the eye to combine them. Josef Albers, who taught at the Bauhaus, insisted that colour is relative and painted his nested Homage to the Square series from 1950 onward. Carlos Cruz-Diez and Richard Anuszkiewicz made colours flicker and shift, and James Turrell works with coloured light alone. Look for edges that vibrate and one colour appearing as two.
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