PEHR SÄLLSTRÖM

J.W.Goethe and A.Herbin

Exhibition using ideal colours

Video at https://youtu.be/EM2PUTonVnU

Version date 2020-07-01

 

Looking around you may feel disappointed. Everything is in black and white -- there are no other colours to be seen.

- Yes. So, where are the ideal colours?

Be patient! You may occasionally have seen one of these small rainbow-coloured spots of light, appearing on a wall when the sun shines through a prism or other similar object made of cut glass.

When Goethe, in his time, got a prism in his hand, instead of letting the sun shine through it, he himself looked through it. And what he then saw, he found remarkable. Let us share his experience!

Here you are - put on these prismatic glasses!

- Wow!

Yes, he he ... the world outside suddenly look gloriously multicoloured. But take a look at this glass sculpture! In itself completely colourless. Immediately, the most enigmatic coloured shapes appear on or in the glass.

To understand a bit more of what is actually going on here -- look into the dark corner, over there, where the sun shines in through a window. Colours appear where the bright path of light borders on the shaded parts/areas. It struck Goethe that a confrontation and interplay of light and darkness might be a necessary condition for colours to appear.

To follow up this idea he aranged a number of simple geometrical patterns in black and white. Letting black represent darkness, white represent light.

He reported his findings in a booklet Beiträge zur Optik, 1791 (Contribution to opticks) and attached a number of pictures, meant to be regarded through a prism. A selection of these are shown on the walls here.

So please take a look again!

LEFT WALL

-- Yes, now the pictures are coloured.

Before you go around, let me give you some advices.

First, take a look at the left wall -- as you see there are six pictures to dwell upon.

Look at the first picture -- it is just an arbitrarily drawn line. If we look close, like this, there are relatively thin colour borders -- in fact, if sufficiently close, you see no colours at all.

-- Of course! Because there are no paints on the surface.

You have to look from some distance. And the further away you are, the more colouration you get. Until the whole image gets blurred and confused.

So, for each picture there is an appropriate distance you have to find out, to get the best view of it.

On futher thought you find that this rule is true, whenever you look at paintings. Or any object, actually. Already Aristotle pointed out that vision needs distance.

-- Contrary to the sense of touch.

Another thing you observe is that colours appear where the line runs horisontally rather than vertically. This is clearly seen on the picture with the circular disks. It is due to the fact that the prism in your glasses is oriented horisontally.

Note also the symmetry: the black disk on white ground has blue and violet on the upper edge, while the white disk on black ground has red and yellow on the upper edge!

Next, take a look at the second picture on the wall. Funny that a checkerboard pattern can look like this. On closer scrutiny you recognize it.

You may feel a need to see it rotated. ... Since the orientation of the prism in the glasses is fixed, we have produced a device where you can study patterns rotated.

Here you have the chequerboard pattern..... Observe the funny 3D-effect you get.

Goethe advices us to look at just one single square, say a black one on white ground. You see that two spectra appear at the transitions between black and white: On the upper side turquoise+violet, on the lower side yellow+red.

If you look at the inverted picture -- a white square on black ground -- you see essentially the same boundary spectra, joining bright and dark. Now with changed positions. And note that yellow and turquoise are in any case closest to white, red and violet to black.

The next demonstration is of fundamental importance. Here we make the boundary spectra meet and partly join. It can be done in two ways.

In the first case, we make yellow and turqoise meet .... giving rise to green .... and finally darkness. In the second case, we let red and violet meet ..... giving rise to purple .... finally ending up in white. Green and purple -- two new members in our system of ideal colours!

You will find that you can get the same effect by retreating from a picture you are looking at. By close scrutiny, there are no greens and purples to be seen .. they appear first at some distance.

Rotating this figur you will see the two spectra simultaneously produced.

Note that the narrow black or white strip gives rise to spectra that are several times broader. As Goethe says: the colours seemingly radiates out from the thin strip of white or black onto the surrounding background.

Finally, take a look at the zig-zag-pattern. At a distance it is adjoining rows of purples and greens. But when we turn the pattern it opens up and shows the underlying yellow-red and blue-violet boundaries.

FOND WALL

The first pictures on the back wall illustrates the basic principle of ideal colours. It simultaneously shows the two boundary spectra and their increasing overlap, where green and purple are created.

 

In fact: colours of all possible hues, in various saturations, are found here -- this is the wounderful property of ideal colours. Each colour has its specific position between white and black, that is: a given inherent content of light and darkness. Goethe sometimes called them "absolute colours" and "original colours".

-- What is so ideal about these prismatic colours?

But, back to the exhibited pictures.

Next follows a row of more or less playful patterns. Ending with an illusory flame. For comparison, look at a real flame, as seen through prismatic glasses.

 

RIGHT WALL

On the third wall we find five pictures designed by Auguste Herbin and presented in his book from 1949: L'art non-figuratif, non-objectif.

The first two are geometrical patterns adapted to the horisontal-vertical principle of colouring.

The next two are circular, struggling aginst this principle .. and the final one is an intricate composition of esoteric look. Here you have it at close scutiny and here, perhaps, at optimal distance. Funny, isn't it?

--Yes... but is it art?

Herbin may have held that ... but in such case art as an inquiry into the essence of things .. As evident from his manifest (see below).

Herbin supplied a manifest with a number of theses on light, darkness and colour, from which I have selected six.

 

 

The first one, La couleur c'est de la lumière matérialisée par l'obscur, sounds very deep, which is typical of philosophical or poetic sentences in French language. It means something like "colour is the embodiment of light by means of darkness" which is a way of expressing what we have seen in this exhibition. The interpretation of the rest of the statements I leave to you.

-- And, as for Goethe, did he regared these pictures as works of art? ...

Well, I think Goethe rather saw it as important preliminaries for a scientific inquiry into the nature of light. (The reason why he regarded his booklet a contribution to optics.) Let us end this discussion with a famous quotation from die Farbenlehre:

Die Farben sind Taten des Lichts, Taten und Leiden

That was all. Thanks for your attention. Let me point out that the ideal colours are not possible to reproduce with any available means. They must be seen like we have done, as created out of black and white with the help of a prism.

 

 

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(C) Pehr Sällström, 2020-07-01