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Colour Psychology > History of Colour
Over more than two thousand years, there has been, and continues
to be, a wealth of wonderful work contributing to our understanding
of colour. This page is an outline of the best-known chapters in
the story of colour, and places the development of the Colour Affects
System in context.
There has never been a time when colour did not fascinate humanity
and it has always been regarded as one of life's greatest mysteries.
Every civilisation had (and still has today) its myths and associations
with colour, but oddly, none of them has named many colours. In
the 1960s anthropologists Berlin and Kay conducted a worldwide study
of colour naming. Many languages only contained two colour terms,
equivalent to white (light) and black (dark). Of 98 languages studied,
the highest number of basic colour terms was to be found in English
- where we have eleven: black, white, red, orange, yellow, green,
blue, purple, pink, grey and brown. The other millions of colours
have 'borrowed' names, based on examples of them, such as avocado,
grape, peach, tan, gold, etc.
The great philosopher, Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, considered
blue and yellow to be the true primary colours, relating as they
do to life's polarities: sun and moon, male and female, stimulus
and sedation, expansion and contraction, out and in. Furthermore,
he associated colours with the four elements: fire, water, earth
and air. Artists universally adopted his principles and applied
them for two thousand years, until Newton's discoveries in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries replaced them in general colour theory.
Hippocrates, the father of medical practice, was a contemporary
of Aristotle (who apparently did not have a very high opinion of
him). He used colour extensively in medicine and recognised, for
example, that the therapeutic effects of a white violet would be
quite different from those of a purple (violet) one. Another medical
man, Avicenna in the eleventh century, in what is now Iran, believed
that a person's physical colouring would indicate that person's
predisposition to various diseases and always took account of the
patient's colouring in diagnosis.
In the fifteenth century the famous Swiss doctor, von Hohenheim,
known as Paracelsus, travelled extensively and his methods were
considered highly controversial - he received more attention at
the time than Copernicus. He placed particular importance on the
role of colour in healing. Interestingly, he was a contemporary
of not just Copernicus, but Martin Luther, Leonardo da Vinci and
many other famous figures of the Renaissance - so his life and learning
were conducted in an atmosphere of great transition in thought.
The greatest contributions to our understanding of colour came
from men whose work combined science and mathematics with art, metaphysics
and theology - indeed the sum of human study. However, in the fifteenth
century, with the arrival of humanist thinking, and Martin Luther,
there was tremendous intellectual upheaval. The Church lost its
grip on education and many disciplines 'went their own way' - leading
to the virtual separation of art from science. Further study of
colour appears to have been placed in the 'Science' camp. Artists
were deemed to be born with an instinct for it.
In 1672, the great scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, published his first,
controversial paper on colour, and forty years later, his work 'Opticks'.
When Newton shone white light through a triangular prism, he found
that wavelengths of light refracted at different angles, enabling
him to see the separate components - colours. (He was able to shine
them back through a prism and achieve white light again, but unable
to see any further breakdown if he shone a single colour through
a prism.)
One of the history's greatest minds was that of Johannes Wolfgang
von Goethe - who completely disagreed with Newton's interpretations
of his own findings. Goethe's 'Theory of Colours', (translated into
English in 1840 and still in print) disputes that Newton's prism
experiments proved that light splits into its component colours.
He felt that if Newton was right, then white light should split
under all kinds of circumstances but when he himself shone white
light on to a screen in a room, he found that the centre of the
image remained white and colours appeared only at the edges. This
led him back to Aristotle's ideas; blue is the first colour to appear
out of darkness (and most visible at night) and yellow is the first
colour to appear out of light (and the most visible colour in light
conditions). Hence, for example, our perception of the sun, where
we are effectively looking at white light, as yellow and the sky,
where we are looking into the vast blackness of space, as blue.
For almost three hundred years after Newton, all further work with
colour was essentially concerned with appearance and vision - and
most of it strictly scientific. By the latter part of the nineteenth
century, the medical community had virtually put paid to the age-old
practice of colour therapy, dismissing it as 'mumbo-jumbo'.
However, there was one shining example of scientific study leading
to great strides in art - the work of Chevreul, the nineteenth century
French chemist who, in studying the chemistry of dyeing, developed
a colour system that became the heart of pointillism and neo-impressionism.
Artists such as Seurat and Signac only ever used Chevreul's fundamental
palette of colours.
In the twentieth century, however, interest in colour exploded.
The art of colour therapy was re-born and today even the most mainstream
doctors use colour as an everyday part of their work.
In the 1920s at the famous Bauhaus school, in Germany, where the
teaching staff included such luminaries as Itten, Albers, Kandinsky,
Mondrian and Klee, technology and art were completely reunited.
Johannes Itten was particularly interested in the connections between
colours and emotions, and colours and shapes. He also observed that
each of his students seemed to favour the same palette for their
work - and furthermore, the favoured palette appeared to be in some
way related to that student's own physical colouring. Itten's seminal
book 'The Art of Colour' is a 'must read' for anyone interested
in colour.
Nevertheless, when Angela Wright began to pursue deeper understanding
of the effects of colour, in the mid 1970s, she found that not much
progress had been made since the 1920s. There was no shortage of
scientific material describing experiments to establish the psychological
effects of different colours. However, the findings were often contradictory
and no firm theories had emerged, so it was considered totally subjective,
and therefore totally unpredictable.
Her first response to this was that none of these experiments appeared
to take account of the finer points of colour - nuances of shade,
tone and tint. It is not part of a psychologist's remit to study
colour, so they would, for example, describe experiments where they
had 'used blue and orange, with full spectrum lighting.' She felt
that this was relatively meaningless, as there are at least a million
blues and just as many oranges. She felt that colour harmony was
a major determining factor in the psychological effect. In simple
terms, disharmony negates.
She studied the dynamics of colour harmony in California, working
with Mrs Lorea Shearing, a member of the Kalmus family, who invented
and developed Technicolor. She formed a clear hypothesis, involving
the links between patterns of colour and personality types, that
approached colour harmony from a different perspective. Going back
to Aristotle's idea that blue and yellow were the true primary colours,
she classified all colours, first into cool and warm, then subdivided
in terms of levels of intensity and the addition of black, white
or grey. This produced four tonal families, which Angela Wright
then associated with four personality types, defined with considerable
reference to Jung's psychology theories, particularly the concept
of extraversion (yellow) and introversion (blue). She developed
a clear, rational colour system - the Colour Affects System - enabling
individual response to specific colour combinations to be predicted
with startling accuracy, and colour psychology to be practised with
much more precision and understanding.
In the last two years the Colour & Imaging Institute, at Derby
University in England, have confirmed that the colours classified
within the Colour Affects System do indeed have mathematical relationships
not previously identified.
The work continues.
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