In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Wilhelm Ostwald and the Science of Art
  • Robert Root-Bernstein

Wilhelm Ostwald and the Science of Art

Latvian scientist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1909) for his foundational contributions to physical chemistry, but among artists he is known as an inventor of modern color theory, and he left posterity more than 1,000 paintings (Fig. 1 Color Plate F) and 3,000 pastels and color studies of his own [1].

Ostwald grew up in a family that made everything from crafts and poetry to art and music, and it is not surprising he became a modern Renaissance man. As an adolescent, he made fireworks and synthesized collodion film for a camera he constructed himself. He invented a new method of decalcomania, a dye transfer technique, and fabricated his own pastel crayons and oil paints for his artworks. He played viola well enough to consider a professional career and learned piano, harmonium and bassoon as well. He also composed music [2]. These interests often took precedence over course work, so that college took Ostwald several extra years to complete.

His interest in making things eventually led Ostwald to chemistry, where his crafts skills prepared him to become a prolific inventor of physicochemical techniques and equipment. Artistic experience was as important as scientific knowledge to his inventive process. He said that both science and art have the common aim of "coping with the infinite diversity of appearances through the formation of appropriate concepts. . . . [Science builds] intellectual ideas; art constructs visual ones" [3]. Both were necessary to translate a scientific idea from concept into imagined apparatus and structural plans into working inventions.


Click for larger view
View full resolution
Fig. 1.

Wilhelm Ostwald, untitled depiction of Niagara Falls, New York, oil on cardboard, 1904. (Reproduced with the permission of the Ostwald-Gesellschaft)

Chemistry finally captured most of Ostwald's imagination, but only because he reconceptualized it into a universal discipline that informed all others. Color, in particular, was a steadfast universal bridge. Among Ostwald's earliest observations was that some compounds change color when dissolved in water. The reasons for this color change were unknown until Svante Arrhenius proposed in 1887 that salts in solution dissociate into ions. Ostwald, an early ionist, reported in 1892 that compounds that change color upon dissolution are invariably ionized salts. Thus, color became a clue to physicochemical processes [4].

Understanding the science of color also became one of many ways that Ostwald believed that scientists could contribute to art. In 1903, he argued that science should provide the arts with better "methods and means" for the artist to express what he imagines [5]. "Most fields of natural science" [6] are applicable to developing such methods and means, he asserted, and in the years following this lecture he began systematically to explore the physical, chemical and physiological phenomena required to use everything from glues to sizing and from color to lacquers.

The most influential result of Ostwald's stluencing various members of the Dutch group de Stijl, including Vilmos Huszar and Piet Mondrian [8], and some members of the German Bauhaus group, including Wassily Kandinsky, Walther Gropius, Joost Schmidt and Paul Klee. Ostwald was invited to lecture to the Bauhaus members in 1927 and became a director of the Circle of Friends of the Bauhaus in 1931 [9]. In addition, two very influential American art teachers, Faber Birren and Egbert Jacobson, were converts to Ostwald's theory [10].

Art was not just an intellectual discipline for Ostwald, however. In the midst of his most important scientific work, he would refresh his mind by making art [11]. In 1903 he told an American audience, "I personally am indebted to art for many uplifting and beautiful hours. Poetry, music and painting have given me refreshment and new courage, when exhausted by scientific work I have been obliged to lay my tools aside" [12]. A few of his thousands of artworks have been published [13] and the rest reside in the Ostwald Energiehaus in Grossbothen, Germany [14], where they remind us how often Ostwald used art to refresh science and vice versa.

Robert Root-Bernstein
Michigan State University
Department of Physiology
East Lansing, MI 48824...

pdf

Share