Late convert

For a long time I have believed that paintings of the sort included left were largely content free and that the extensive homage paid to them and their creators was a conspiracy of US art dealers to extract money from the rest of the world. More important as a test of the parable of the emperor's new clothes, as an experiment in social anthropology than as anything else. With the publication date of the parable - 1837 - telling us that this sort of thing has been around for at least two hundred years.

However, over the past few days, I have been trawling around in the world of tri-chromatic colour. Through the helpful reference 1, to the quaintly produced reference 2 (in the May 1959 number of Scientific American) and then yesterday, more or less by chance, in Epsom Library, to reference 3, for a more arty take on all this. Well, not altogether by chance, as Epsom Library, with all the students at the University of Creation, has quite a good art section.

In which I come across the work of Josef Albers and others, clearly interested in the mysteries of colour vision and perception. With the painting or print above (I think the property of a San Fransisco art gallery. The white border is the frame, not part of the work itself) being part of a long series of similar paintings and prints called 'Homage to the Square'. Paintings which, on a sample of two, appear to give rise to interesting subjective effects, at least in their paper versions. Effects which may not have been produced to order, but which were certainly produced using methods & principles which were likely to produce odd effects of one sort or another. No doubt I shall learn more when reference 4 turns up from abebooks.

So while I do not offer a opinion on the place of Albers in the history of western art, I do withdraw the allegation that his work is content free.

PS: I had thought that Seurat was interested in dots, without paying him or his work that much attention. So I have also learned that he only used eleven pure colours, that is to say the colours of eleven narrow spectral bands of light, for his dots, on a white ground, on the not unreasonable grounds that this would result in far more vibrant colours than could be obtained by the then conventional techniques for mixing paints.

Reference 1: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colper.html.

Reference 2: The Retinex Theory of Color Vision - Edwin H. Land – 1979.

Reference 3: Colour - Zelanski and Fisher - 1989. 

Reference 4: Interaction of Color - Josef Albers – 1963.