Chromatlas

Person

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The poet who spent decades fighting Newton, and found that color is born where light meets dark.

Lived
1749–1832
Color book
Zur Farbenlehre, 1810 (English 1840)
Key idea
Colors arise at the meeting of light and dark

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) wrote Faust, yet according to his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann he took more pride in his color theory than in his poetry. It began around 1790 with a borrowed prism. Expecting a white wall to burst into a rainbow, he saw it stay white; color appeared only at edges, where light met dark. He decided on the spot that Newton was wrong.

His Theory of Colours (1810) is a vast catalogue of how color looks: colored shadows, afterimages, the yellow of light seen through haze and the blue of darkness seen through lit air. He drew a symmetrical color wheel with opposites facing each other, anticipating Ewald Hering's opponent colors, and split colors into a lively 'plus' side and a restless 'minus' side, the root of talk about warm and cool.

As physics his attack on Newton failed: white light really is a mix of spectral colors. As a study of perception it was ahead of its time, and artists and philosophers read it closely. J. M. W. Turner, painter of The Fighting Temeraire, exhibited Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) in 1843, and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour grew out of reading him.

Goethe also gave colors moral and emotional qualities, an early color psychology. On one circle he paired red with the beautiful, orange with the noble, yellow with the good, green with the useful, blue with the common and violet with the unnecessary. It's poetry rather than evidence (see color psychology), but it shaped how Kandinsky and the Bauhaus talked about color.

Swatches

Colors

Sources

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