Goethe's Theory of Colours (1810)
Goethe's attack on Newton was wrong about physics and right about perception, and artists loved it.
- Published
- Tübingen, 1810
- English
- Trans. Charles Eastlake, 1840
- Parts
- Didactic, polemical, historical
Zur Farbenlehre (1810), translated as Theory of Colours in 1840, was Goethe's answer to Newton's Opticks. It has a teaching part packed with observations, a fierce polemic against Newton, and a history of color theory from the ancients onward. Goethe reportedly valued it above his poetry.
Its starting point is that color is born where light meets darkness. Light seen through haze turns yellow, and darkness seen through lit air turns blue, which Goethe used to explain a yellow sun and a blue sky. Through a prism, colors appear only at edges: a blue-violet fringe where light runs into dark, a red-yellow fringe where dark runs into light.
Its most lasting chapters are on 'physiological colors', the ones the eye makes: afterimages, colored shadows, and the way a color seems to call up its opposite. He set colors in a symmetrical circle with opposites facing, foreshadowing Hering's opponent colors and modern talk of complements and warm and cool. He also gave each color a moral character, from the beautiful (red) to the unnecessary (violet).
Physicists rejected the attack on Newton, but painters and philosophers kept the book alive. Turner exhibited Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) in 1843; Kandinsky and the Bauhaus built on its color psychology; and Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour began as notes on it. Read it as a field guide to seeing, not as physics.
Swatches
- Blue-violet edge · light running into dark
- Red-yellow edge · dark running into light
- Yellow · light seen through haze
- Blue · darkness seen through lit air
Colors
Sources
- Goethe, J. W. von (1810). Zur Farbenlehre; trans. C. L. Eastlake (1840), Theory of Colours.
- Sepper, D. L. (1988). Goethe contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color. Cambridge University Press.
- Wikipedia, 'Theory of Colours'.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.