Interaction of Color: 50th Anniversary Edition

Most Helpful Review

"Josef Albers was first a student, then an instructor, and finally a professor at the famous Bauhaus school of art and design in pre-war Germany. When the Nazis forced the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933, Albers emigrated to the United States where he was made head of the Black Mountain College School of Art, in North Carolina. He later joined the design faculty at Yale University.All along the way, Albers sought to extend and deepen his understanding of how people perceive color, both to use it in his own work and to teach art students about how color juxtapositions interact with human vision.With this book, he lays it all out with a set of exercises using high-quality reproductions of relatively simple color paper compositions to illustrate the effects of color interaction. The color plates are of sufficiently high quality to work quite well for anyone with normal vision. Even people with colorblindness can probably benefit from most of the illustrations and surely from Albers' lucid descriptions of the effects. What you learn will likely be useful in your work no matter whether you are a painter, printmaker, worker in stained glass, or an interior decorator.Note that this book is NOT about teaching artistic composition or technique. It is laser-focused on its subject matter -- the optical effects of color interaction. You will find no better book for this, although I would also highly recommend "The Elements of Color" by Johannes Itten (who was one of Albers' teachers and colleagues in the Bauhaus) as a fine complement to Albers' book. Get them both!There are more expensive editions of this book available, but this 50th anniversary softbound edition, which should be well within the budgets of most art students, is more than adequate for learning how colors interact."