Hommage to Josef Albers #04
Essays on Albers by the organisers of the workshop Interaction of Colour in Space
By Inez Michiels
Interaction of Color by Josef Albers was a relatively late discovery for me. My artistic education was shaped primarily by The Art of Color by Johannes Itten. In this work, Itten combines theoretical reflections with visual demonstrations that explore colour interaction through his theory of the Seven Colour Contrasts. Yet the approaches of these two artists and colour theorists differ in important ways. Itten’s colour theory is a structured system explaining how colours are organized, how they contrast and harmonize, and how they can produce expressive and psychological effects in art. His ideas reflect the early twentieth-century belief that visual language could reveal deeper psychological or universal truths.
Neither Itten nor Albers sought to express personal emotion in the gestural sense associated with the artists of Abstract Expressionism. Their emphasis, however, differs. Itten combined perceptual study with expressive interpretation, whereas Albers concentrated almost entirely on perception itself. He was fascinated by the relativity and instability of colour, arguing that colour is fundamentally deceptive: it is almost never perceived as it physically is, but always in relation to its surroundings. In this sense, Albers’ work can be interpreted as a critique of Bauhaus colour theories associated with Itten and Wassily Kandinsky. Rather than proposing universal symbolic meanings, Albers emphasized experimental observation. For him, meaning emerges solely from context, from perceptual relationships.
While Albers successfully dismantled what he saw as the rigid or mystical aspects of earlier colour systems, his focus on contextual relativity may obscure another dimension of colour perception. Contemporary neuroscience suggests that human perception is not entirely neutral. Evolutionary biology appears to have shaped certain physical and emotional responses to particular wavelengths. From this perspective, some of Itten’s ideas, often dismissed as dogmatic or mystical, may instead reflect intuitive observations of underlying biological tendencies. A more complete understanding of colour may therefore lie in bridging these perspectives: acknowledging Albers’ insight that context profoundly alters perception, while also recognizing that biology provides a foundational emotional framework. Otherwise, the postmodern rejection of universals risks discarding genuine biological patterns along with outdated theoretical assumptions.
Albers’ major contribution lies above all in his pedagogy. He repeatedly emphasized that colour cannot truly be understood through description alone; it must be tested through observation and experiment. In this sense, his teaching remains remarkably relevant today. The workshop Interaction of Colour in Space, organized by ICA Belgium and the Deutsches Farbenzentrum and inspired by Interaction of Color, offers an opportunity to revisit these questions through practice. By working with colour in spatial and perceptual exercises, participants can experience firsthand the shifting relationships that fascinated Albers, while also considering how recent insights from neuroscience and biological psychology suggest that our perception of colour is shaped not only by context but also by deeper physiological and evolutionary responses.