Interaction of Color 50th Anniversary Edition by Josef Albers

Josef Albers Interaction of Color 50th Anniversary Edition is an indispensable book and tool if you are a painter or, anyway a creative. The visionary touch of the painter and scholar of Bauhaus and later, from 1933 teacher with his wife Anni Albers at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina, makes the difference. Part of the current of modernism, Albers brought to America that European touches still in grade to influence people and artists.
The beauty of art is the integrity and honesty of artists and their real desire of expressing who they are and what they want to transmit.
Albers does it with this book, suggesting how people can "manipulate" colors experiencing joy; this changes of perspective in art doesn't just involve painting but also other completely different creative projects: this book is a real invitation of seeing and thinking colors differently, mixing them together, trying contrasts, schematizing them, putting similar colors (blues or reds) close together as in a family but all the time remembering something: our reality are colors.
This color system, this geometry of colors gives a clear perception of what it meant, to me, for that historical moment color and art: an idea of order in the disorder that the world was living in; the necessity, through colors, of classifying, geometrically the reality, rationalizing the world where people were living in, schematizing the reality through colors that could not escape away from a rational project; at the same time it was vivid the creation through rational or more courageous color schemes of art, a radiant art, new, different, visionary, adapted to various artistic fields.
Not only: it's an invite to trying new experiments of colors, ideas, also when there are strong contrasts, also when it seems that two or more colors pretty opposite couldn't stay too close together.
There is not just white, red and blue in this world but black as well and also this one is important in the universal scheme of shades that reality presents.

This book when published, met a lot of oppositions and several enthusiastic voices. I remember for the enthusiastic ones a part of Mark Strand's words appeared in Saturday Review: "When color challenges the safe, enclosing geometrical properties of the pictorial surface, as it is meant to, it does so with a slowness and delicacy that are disarming and a beauty that is exhilarating."

Highly recommended to all artists of this world!

I thank Yale University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori