Teaching colour in art and design: A documented history

Abstract

The article briefly surveys what has been taught about colour from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century, primarily to students of art, design and crafts. Its selection of publications starts with Lomazzo’s manual of 1585 that appraises almost all the skills and guidance that artists of the time needed to know, including the theory of the four humours. After 1704, Newton’s investigations into optics and vision influenced such artists and authors as Le Blon, Hogarth and Harris. Newton’s findings were resisted in Germany and France but important contributions to colour theory and practice were made by Goethe, Runge and others, and by Chevreul in the 1830s. Following publications by Bezold and Rood, the inclusion of basic colour science becomes standard in most educational manuals, such as those published by Prang and Bradley in Massachusetts. Fewer than 100 instructional books on colour were published in the twentieth century; among the most comprehensive earlier examples were those by Weinberg (1918), Sargent (1923) and Guptill (1935). Innovative courses at the Bauhaus later led to the inclusion of basic-design and colour-theory modules in many educational institutions. The article concludes with a proposal of how investigation of colour in relation to form might offer a pathway for the future teaching of colour in the visual arts.