Goethe's dynamic Colour Circle

Between physical determinism and aesthetical freedom

Version date 2022-12-02

VIDEO https://youtu.be/AzVFwYw7Pfc

Goethe pondered on how to create a general symbol for the varieties of colour as it appears in natural phenomena. Since Newton's times, the seven hues of the rainbow has been a cherished symbol for the manifold of colours. But it leaves out the perhaps most important part of the colour world. All the beautiful colours of flowers.

Contemplating this, Goethe set himself the task to unify the four basic colour spectra, he had found using a glass prism, into a symbolic representation of the totality of colour variations found in nature.

That turned out to be not altogether easy. Let us take a look at this drawing to find out how he speculated around it.

To the right, you see the two boundary spectra - produced at a sharp border between white and black (cp previous figure, to the left). They are strictly complementary, which means that if superimposed they give white. You must find another way of combining them. Goethe had found in his prismatic experiment that by pushing them successively into each other, letting the dark sides meet (i.e. red and blue-violet) you create spectra, dominated by a range of purple hues (top). Likewise letting the bright sides (yellow and turquois) meet and overlap you create spectra dominated by green (bottom).

Next, to the left in the drawing, Goethe considered the possibility of unifying the four spectra into a closed totality: a hue circle.

As you see he has now inverted the blue boundary spectrum, so that going upwards in the diagram represents "intensification" (Steigerung) - i.e. increasing redness of the yellow as well as the blue one. Thereby foreshadowing the possibility of unifying the two spectra, to create the purples. Likewise mixing their lower ends - yellow and turqois - to various greens.

A complete hue circle can then be obtained by connecting the upper and the lower spectra, via what remains of the yellow and blue ones. Which can lead to various looks of the hue circle, depending on how far you fuse the boundary spectra, in order to attain a desirable combination of saturation and brightness of the hues.

The possibility of this closed arrangement of hues tells us: That's all. There are no other hues than these.

*

In the introduction to his Entwurf einer Farbenlehre (1810) Goethe proposes: Colour is the lawful nature in relation to the sense of vision. Of course he admitted the impossibility of finding a satisfactory unifying symbol for all these variegated appearances of colour. The best should be to let the phenomena speak for themselves, he says.

Nevertheless the symbol, based on the prismatic spectra, expresses relations that can be found in various nature phenomena. The boundary spectra represent trübe-phenomena, such as the setting sun and blue sky (which Goethe selected as "Ur-phenomenon" of the colour world) and the "Steigerung" (increasing redness) is even typical for concentration series of diverse colorants, both on the yellow-orange and the blue side. Finally, the inverted spectrum contains most hues of the beautiful flower petals.

So, by way of introduction, he tells us a suggestive story about the creation and dynamics of colour. (In the video version I have tried to illustrate the imaginative tale with an animation, showing the gradual unveiling of the hue circle -- until it finally stands there in its full splendor.) The story goes as follows:

Light and darkness are necessary to the appearance of colour. Next to the light, a colour appears which we call yellow; another appers next to the darkness, which we name blue.
When these, in their purest state, are so mixed that they are exactly equal, they produce a third colour called green. Each of the firstnamed two colours can however of itself produce a new tint by being condensed or darkened. They thus aquire a reddish appearance which can be increased to such intense a degree that the original blue or yellow is hardly to be recognized in it; but the intensest and purest red, especially in physical cases, is produced when the two extremes of the yellow-red and blue-red are united. Here there remains no longer any trace of yellow nor blue.
This pure red is the highest level of hue. It extinguishes the opposition between yellow and blue. It potentially includes all other colours. We can descend from it along alternative paths: towards yellow, or towards blue -- recognizing all the beautiful colours of flower petals -- and finally letting yellow and blue meet again and mix to green: the most earthbound of colours.
This is a lively view on colour appearance and creation.
Only with these three -- or six -- hue qualities, which can be conveniently arranged on a circle, the elementary colour theory is concerned.

What Goethe describes with these words is an intuitive inner vision of the drama of colour in nature. The animation, I supplied, shows how the totality is successively revealed in the process of gathering knowledge and getting more comprehensive understanding.

The essential with the hue circle is that it symbolizes the closed totality of hues -- there are no other hues than these.

Moreover, each one of the six remarkable hues should have its unique character. The perfect symmetry of the geometrical symbol may be misleading, when it comes to this. Let be that yellow and blue are opponent, but still they are interchangable -why couldn't yellow be seen on the left side and blue on the right? Likwise red and green are interchangeable without breaking the order of hues around the circle. Goethe manages this by supplementing the criteria: yellow is closest to light, blue to darkness. And red is the result of intensifying the polarity yellow/blue to the point where it rather collapses to a common new quality than being even more opponent.

It is worthwhile to see how Goethe himself expresses this idea. (§793): Wer die prismatische Entstehung des Purpurs kennt, der wird nicht paradox finden, wenn wir behaupten, dass diese Farbe teils actu, teils potentia alle andern Farben enthalte.

*

As a matter of fact you find a lot of hue circles in litterature, presenting colour systems, designed for various practical purposes. Like this one, I once put together. It is nothing but a way of ordering a set of hand painted colour samples in a phenomenologically self-evident way.

As you see, I have indicated a couple of places where I would like to find further samples to fit in. I have also indicated outstanding samples - such as a pure yellow, pure blue and pure red one.

This kind of colour circles deal with colour classification and specification. It is based on the idea (and experience, as the case may be) that colours can be produced, discriminated, manipulated and treated as separate entities.

Well, the point is now that Goethe's intention with a colour circle went further than that. He didn't want us to look upon the colours themselves as fixed entities. He wanted a diagram which could symbolize the natural floating interplay of colours and their sensitivity to prevailing conditions. He wanted a dynamic colour circle.

Construction of this hue circle see APPENDIX

By making the circle seemingly continuous I have given it a floating appearance, with no individual samples to rest the gaze on. This doesn't look as a well-ordered arrangement of a series of colour samples. But it is perhaps still too strict. As is also Goethes own humble scetch.

 

No, a dynamic colour circle -- as symbol -- is intended to be a representation of an idea; a flow of thought, full of lively associations, to keep the whole field of potential colour experiences present to the mind.

As Torger Holtsmark remarks: After all, it wasn't Goethe's intention to create a new Colour Atlas. He wanted to express, with his colour circle, something essential. How the individual makes its appearance in the real world.

Letzten Endes war es nicht Goethes Absicht, einen neuen Farbatlas zu schaffen. Er wollte mit seinem Farbkreis etwas Wesentliches ausdrücken. Er wollte etwas über das Erscheinen des Individuellen in der Wirklichkeit ausssagen. /Zur Didaktik der Goetheschen Farbenlehre. Elemente der Naturwissenschaft 14, p 37-43 (1971)./

The simultaneous multifarious possible shapes of Goethe's colour circle -- and the vividness in thinking or imagining it -- is probably only possible to represent graphically as a work of art. For instance as in the following picture, drawn in water colours by the Swedish artist Arne Klingborg. It looks very different, but is still a valid illustration of the tale about the creation of colour out of light and darkness, quoted above.

Since it was made with water colours it is closer to an illustration within reach for Goethe, in his time. He didn't have access to a medium such as the self-illuminant electronic screen you are probably using right now, looking at these pictures or the video. There the gamut of colours is obtained by optical mixing of luminuos primaries: orange-red, yellowish-green, blue (the RGB-system).

When you are working with pigments, pure red cannot be obtained by mixing. In addition to yellow and blue you need the support of a strong red primary (the CMY-system: cyan, magenta, yellow) to realize the full circle of hues.

Klingborg's symbolic dynamic colour circle was used for the cover of the Swedish translation of Goethes Farbenlehre (1976) as well as my own presentation of it, in 1996.

 

CONCLUDING REMARK

The considerations put forward in this essay concern the chapter in Goethe's Farbenlehre titled "Allgemeine Ansichten nach innern", which marks the transition from studies of lawful colour phenomena in nature to the study of aesthetic and psychological aspects, such as emotional experiences of colours and colour combinations, as well as the cultural use of colour as symbol or decoration and in works of art. Phenomena found in these fields are more or less freely created and need not adhere to laws of nature - let be that Goethe himself looked upon nature as exemplary.

Let me remind you of the simple but all-embracing definition of colour he gave us in the introduction: die Farbe sei die gesätzmässige Natur in bezug auf den Sinn des Auges. Which means something like: Let us think about colour as an elementary natural phenomenon, evident to the sense of the eye. As living organisms we are part of nature. The inital chapers of the Farbenlehre deal with this aspect of colour. But the final chaper, on "sinnlich-sittliche Wirkung der Farbe", deals with our creative response on what we meet and make our own. Inspired by nature but with an appreciable amount of freedom.

As to the efforts of unifying the four prismatic spectra into a consistent whole, this has been shown possible, for instance with ideal colour spectra. See my articles and videos The System of Ideal Colours and Goethe and the Boundary Colours

 

APPENDIX

How the dense hue circle was constructed

As I said, the design of a hue circle is open to free choice, since it is the visualization of an idea. Newton initially had the idea that the spectrum, he produced, might be composed of a discrete number of colours. But that turned out to be a matter of convenience, as with the traditional seven rainbow colours. The four spectra rather seem continuous. Hence also the hue circle. But one may single out a few qualitatively remarkable regions on it - namely the six Goethe mentions.

It must be noted, however, that the strict two-parts look of the boundary spectra, as observed by using a glass prism (se the figure in the very beginning of this essay: yellow/red respectively cyan/darkblue) is due to the trichromaticity of human vision, as based on three types of photoreceptors with different sensitivity spectra. So it is essentially a physiological effect. The corresponding trübe-spectra show a more continuous colour change.

I started with creating a "pixel-wheel", i.e. a digital quasi-circular shape, consisting of 180 sectors, using the function drwcirarc from the SVGACC library (Zephyr software)

Then I designed a hue wheel with 16 samples, looking like this:

Using Mathcad I interpolated from these to 180 individual (r,g,b) values, to be used as palette for the pixel-wheel.

Finally I used Irfanview's blur effect to hide the Moire-patterns.

The animation effects were nicely handled within the video editing program Avid Liquid7.

---

LIST OF TEXTS