Interaction of Color by Josef Albers (review)

272 Books which lapses occasionally into the comical, even further emphasizingthe faults of the book. To cite only one instance (p. 72): ‘There live the Jimini, a sub-tribeofthe Senufo,aswell asthe Ligbi, amongst them Roy Siebersaw such masks, and the Kulango whom B. Holas photographed wearing similar masks.’ Another example of careless production is the double inclusion of pp. 331-340, a dubious bonus. While the book might be recommended for its visual material,those expectinganother major work by Leuzinger will be disappointed. Thisbook seems to be one of those unhappy productions that publishers foist upon the public in order to cash in on a popular subject, with little regard for either the subject or the public and often with little regard for the author. It seems to this reviewer that the time has come for publishers and authors to check the outpouring of such ill-consideredbooks on African art and to begin concentratingon more detailed and concentrated studies. African art is not the exotic and diffuse subject that it was a decade ago and it seems that the literature on the subject could better reflect the depth of our knowledge and the profundity of the subject. Interaction of Color. Josef Albers. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1971. pp. 74, illus. $3.95. Reviewed by: Arthur Karp* This slim paperback includes all of the text but only ten of the 150color plates of the original 1963 edition (Yale University Press), which took eight years to prepare, weighed ten kilograms and cost $200. Its theme is not only interaction between color areasin a compositionbut interactionbetween pedagogue and students(one of whom, from among Albers’colorclassesatYale,hadthetask ofchoosing the ten most-relevantplates). Albers’ personality is abundantly apparent : his accent is audible in the text and his ideas on typographical aesthetics have yielded some four score pages of fine print and wide white margin, with his sentences broken into irregular, short segments and displayed as lines and stanzas of blank verse. He states that good teaching (Chapter XXV) is ‘a matter not of method but of heart’ and ‘more a giving of right questions than ...of right answers’. He deprecates ‘self-expression’, as opposed to ‘a basic step-by-step learning’, as a way or aim of study. Homework assignments are ‘admission tickets’ to the next class and some of the personal interaction therein might nowadays be called ‘art encounter’. Compositions, illustrating color interaction minimallydistractedby form, are to be made with cut or torn colored papers or with autumn leaves. Students are urged to use disliked colors in thehopetheymayovercometheirprejudices. Onthe technical side, the chapters on transparence, mixtures , film and volume color, ‘free studies’ and pedagogy are the most communicative. * Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA 94025, U.S.A. Whether viewing an Albers painting or one of the didactic plates in the book, one is aware that he is an amateur (complimentary connotation) of the science of color perception. Would that he were less of a dilettante (pejorative connotation)! Through literature or correspondents available at the time of his writing, could he not have learned, for example,that the temporal effect (‘after image’) and the spatial effect (referred to as ‘simultaneous contrast’ for convenience sake) are neither qualitatively nor quantitatively as close as he, repeatedly, would like them to be? The use of ‘brightness’for saturation (or chroma) is not helpful, nor is listing a theory concerned only with ‘thecolorsof the visible sunspectrum’orretainingarchaicphraseslike‘white consists of all other colors’ in an era when stimulus and perception have at last been segregated. His diatribe against color photography (p. 15) is unwarranted , even if he were to give the date and brand of the film that displeased him. On page 23, there is a reference to retinal receptors ‘tuned to ...red, yellow and blue’. Before jumpingin with a correctionto ‘red,green and blue’ (or the ultra-dilettante’s‘yellow,green and blue’, as depicted on page 49 of the December 1964issue of Scientijic American), onemust note that perceptions are delivered beyond the retina and involve crossprocessing of receptor outputs, so that color names are totally inapplicable at this level. The only reference to the retinal receptors now known to be workable is ‘long...