as a foundation of creativity, information organisation and art
“Von der Kunst zur Wissenschaft und zurück : Farbenlehre und Ästhetik bei Wilhelm Ostwald (1853 – 1932) – From art to science and backward: theory of color and aesthetics by Wilhelm Ostwald (1853 – 1932)” is the title of a new doctoral thesis in German language by Albrecht Pohlmann, 1910, University of Halle. It describes […]
Ostwald’s theory of forms has been the topic of a recent entry in the blog of Joost Rekveld. In the writings of the film maker Joost Rekveld articles can be found with titles like “Symmetry and Harmonics” or “Transformations of Colour”.
Ostwald’s energetics influenced the thinking of the Russian Marxist Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928) and his color theory the art of the Russian Avantgarde after the Revolution (e.g. Kazimir Malevich). Bogdanov himself developed also a theory of organisation which he called Tektology what he viewed as a new universal science (1922). For Bogdanov knowledge had to be […]
Based on Auguste Comte, Ostwald developed within his philosophy of nature a “pyramid of science†in which a “science of order†(he called it also “Mathetik”) was the basis. Ostwald ordered the sciences within a pyramid. When working on a new topic, e.g. the color theory, he combined the new topic with every layer of […]
Wilhelm Ostwald’s color theory Ostwald’s Color Primer – Snip through a double-cone Expressed in our modern technical language, we can say that Ostwald attempted to construct a perceptual colour-system using non-empirical methods. In place of Munsell’s three parameters, he selected an alternative group of variables: namely, colour-content, white-content and black-content. […] We can thus formulate […]
Jan J. Koenderink: Colour, old age, and accepted truth What Jan Koenderink wrote below, is also true for me! 😎 Now and then I become so much interested in a person’s work that I really want to know more. I then read all I can dig up – the science, the reactions of contemporaries, and […]
In 1914 Ostwald was asked by the German Werkbund to prepare a “rational” atlas of colors (see Figure 2). His ideas to create art from a scientific viewpoint were com-bated by most contemporary artists. His imperative “order = legality = harmony” and his color theory had influence on the German Werkbund, the Bauhaus and the […]
In the first volume of the journal De Stijl a review on Ostwald’s colour theory was published. Two years later De Stijl published Ostwalds paper on the “Harmony of colors”, whose German edition had been published in the journal “Innendekoration”. De Stijl. Edited by Theo van Doesburg. Leiden, 1917-1932. 8 volumes (90 numbers). Wilhelm Ostwald, […]