Josef Albers: Interaction of Color

50th Anniversary Edition

?Text by Josef Albers. Foreword by Nicholas Fox Weber

Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color is a masterwork in art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this influential book presents Albers’s singular explanation of complex color theory principles.

Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten color studies chosen by Albers, and has remained in print ever since. With over a quarter of a million copies sold in its various editions since 1963, Interaction of Color  remains an essential resource on color, as pioneering today as when Albers first created it.
 
Fifty years after Interaction’s initial publication, this new edition presents a significantly expanded selection of close to sixty color studies alongside Albers’s original text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusion of transparency and reversed grounds. A celebration of the longevity and unique authority of Albers’s contribution, this landmark edition will find new audiences in studios and classrooms around the world.

$18.00

Publisher: Yale University Press

Artists: Josef Albers

Contributors: Josef Albers, Nicholas Fox Weber

Publication Date: 2013

Binding: Softcover

Dimensions: 6 x 9 1/4 in (15.2 x 23.5 cm)

Pages: 208

Reproductions: 64 color, 16 line drawings

ISBN: 9780300179354

Retail: $18 | £12

Status: Available

Josef Albers

Josef Albers (1888–1976) is considered one of the foremost abstract painters, as well as an important designer and educator noted for his rigorously experimental approach to spatial relationships and color theory. Born in Bottrop, Germany, Albers studied at the Weimar Bauhaus, later joining the school’s faculty in 1922. In 1933, he and Anni Albers emigrated to North Carolina, where they founded the art department at Black Mountain College. During this time, Albers began to show his work extensively within the United States. In 1950, the Alberses moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Josef was invited to direct the newly formed Department of Design at Yale University School of Art. Albers retired from teaching in 1958, just prior to the publication of his important Interaction of Color (1963), which was reissued in two volumes in 2013. Albers became the first living artist to be the subject of a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1971.

All Josef Albers books