Square Bear

Josef Albers
Formulation : Articulation
London, Thames & Hudson, 2006

Most people know Joseph Albers as the master of the square. As you will see from the cover there are some nice examples in this facsimile collection of prints, however it's a nice surprise to find a range of other strong designs included.

The book contains reproductions of two sets of prints Albers produced as the summation of 40 years teaching and theorising about art and colour. The beautifully printed images often appear disarmingly simple at first, and it is when the viewer is forced to figure exactly out how the colours and lines interact to create pictures that one's brain begins to ache a bit, in the nicest possible way.

 

 

Ellsworthy

Ellsworth Kelly - The Years in France, 1948-1954
Yve-Alain Bois (et al)
Munich, 1992 

Great catalogue published on the occasion of a partial retrospective at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu du Paume, Paris. I was familiar with the first two images but hadn't seen this series of spectrum collages. Pixelation avant la lettre, it seems many artists including the Great Gerhard Richter himself may have been 'inspired' by these works.

Seine, oil on wood, 1951

Spectrum Colours Arranged by Chance, oil on wood, 1951-53

Sanary, oil on wood, 1952

Colours for a Large Wall, Oil on canvas on wood, 1951

Spectrum I, oil on canvas, 1953

Spectrum Colours Arranged by Chance I, collage, 1951

Spectrum Colours Arranged by Chance II, collage, 1951

Spectrum Colours Arranged by Chance III, collage, 1951

Spectrum Colours Arranged by Chance IV, collage, 1951

Spectrum Colours Arranged by Chance V, collage, 1951

Spectrum Colours Arranged by Chance VI, collage, 1951

Spectrum Colours Arranged by Chance VII, collage, 1951

Spectrum Colours Arranged by Chance VIII, collage, 1951

Spectrum Colours Arranged by... hang on ...

Freund Indeed

Gisèle Freund, L'Oeil frontière : Paris 1933-1940
RMN, Paris, 2011

This exhibition catalogue from a show at the Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent contains mostly black and white images, which are very good and make the smaller colour selection from 1939 jump out. Freund had a brief flirtation with Kodakchrome. I wish it had been longer as the hues and saturation are great and give the subjects a jolt of contemporaneity, albeit with a slightly sickly pallor.

Myopic James Joyce

Brainiac Walter Benjamin

Smouldering Colette

Marcel Marceau Duchamp

Sideshow Jean Cocteau

Puffin' André Breton

Smokin' Jean-Paul Satre

Chintzy Virginia Woolf

Cheery Herbert Read and Anytime Peggy Guggenheim

Old Possum T.S.Eliot

Wild Man Thornton Wilder

Ars Longa Vita Sackville-West

Dark Side - Colour Me Badd

Methuen Handbook of Colour
A. Kornerup and J.H. Wanscher
Methuen, London, 1963

Charts, dictionary, harmony, contrast, names and samples - all in living colour. This was the colour reference book of the period and it's usefulness continued for many years until usurped by Pantone, RAL and others. Originally a Danish publication (think Denmark's famous Modernist designers), now quite collectible with dustjacket. It is still an fascinating reference and object of beauty. (Sorry to disappoint Pink Floyd fans).

The Art of Colour

The Art of Colour
Johannes Itten
Van Nostrand, New York, 1973

Originally published as "Kunst der Farbe", 1961, Germany.

Johannes Itten taught at the Bauhaus before he disagreed with Walther Gropius over the direction of the school toward mass production over individual artistic endeavor. He left and was replaced by Maholy-Nagy. Itten continued to write and teach at a number of other institutions.

Here are some students from Itten's harmonic colour combination art class. After voicing their dissatisfaction with the colour combinations they had been assigned, Itten allowed them to come up with their own combinations.

Every student produced different results and Itten realized that each had their own private conception of colour harmony, or subjective colour. He discusses the way the students' work reveals their 'auras' and 'painting personalities', a classic example of the modernist urge to categorize and order, with a dash of mysticism thrown in.

Itten's colour harmony diagrams have their own geometric beauty.